Notes on MLS attendance (FCD fans, hide your eyes)

On an absolutely brilliant spring day in North Texas, 8,016 fans came out to Pizza Hut Park to see FC Dallas’ season opener. (OK, it was windy, but otherwise postcard perfect.)

All the elements were in place. FC Dallas was sizzling as 2009 finished – so fan excitement should have been high. It was a Saturday (i.e., not a Thursday or a Sunday or a holiday, etc.) While it’s true that there’s very little market awareness of this team right now (media, sponsors, etc.), that’s by FC Dallas’ own doing. They are paying a high price for repeated failure of leadership, strategy, attention to the market and for customer service bungling.

Here’s where the rubber meets the road: FC Dallas’ attendance Saturday was probably one of the 10 worst ever for season openers in MLS history.

That’s a little vague, but it has to be. The records I have at hand are incomplete, because I don’t have data for Tampa Bay and Miami (R.I.P.). Read on for more ...

What I can find are a few stinkers in MLS earlier in the last decade. Dallas had 7,359 for the 2004 opener. (FCD has moved back into the Cotton Bowl following the Southlake debacle, and had strategically chosen to be spendthrifts on media and marketing for a year, awaiting the move into Pizza Hut Park. So, there was some explanation for that one, at least.)

Only 7,133 showed up for the Chicago Fire’s 2003 opener. Kansas City dipped below the 8K mark in 2000 and 2007. That’s it, although San Jose did just barely creep above 8K for season openers in 2004 and 2005. (Suspiciously, the 2004 opener attracted 8,230, with the contest one year later attracting 8,730, exactly 500 more than the year before. Wow! What a coincidence, eh? I mean, what are the odds?)

In one sense, I do hate beating up on FC Dallas for ongoing attendance woes. Right now, the people in place in the office probably aren’t the problem. They might be great runners, so to speak, but they are so far behind in the relay race that they have zero chance of catching up.

Besides, at some point this is just the dog that I see limping down the street every day. I don’t want to chase it away anymore, I just kind of shake my head and feel a little sorry for it.

Then again, I’m not a sponsor that paid a bunch of money for signs and such inside the stadium. Oh, and how do you think Telefutura felt, debuting their package of Saturday matches with such a dog (attendance-wise)? A crowd like that devalues the deal for everyone.

I sometimes look at FC Dallas the same way I see the perennially mess in the Middle East: I just don’t know if I see a way out.