In a busy week of Sounders and MLS news and activity, one news story was somewhat overlooked.  On Wednesday, Sounder FC management announced that 2010 season tickets would be "capped" at 32,000 (over 31,0000 have been sold).  This, along with existing plans to set Qwest/RBP seating capacity for League matches at about 36,000 means that we can reasonably expect Sounders' average attendance figures for this upcoming season to exceed 35,000.

While this would more than double the MLS average attendance for 2009 (16,120) many cynics have hastened to point out that the MLS is a poorly-supported niche sport in the American big-time sports landscape (not necessarily true, more on that later). Added to that is the seemingly endless consternation of many in the sports community that a "sellout" is deemed such even though it only constitutes selling just more than half of Qwest's 67,000 seat capacity.

I am here to point out that these two arguments miss the point entirely. In fact, America's perception of crowd size is completely skewed by the enormous draw of college football and the NFL, and to a lesser extent Major League Baseball. The numerical mathematical facts are, that from a "global" or even "European"perspective, 35,000+ is a shit-ton of people to draw to your games 15+ times a year.

Let's start by looking at some tables -- absolutely every bit of data I am drawing from is easily found by anyone using google and Wikipedia.  First is a listing of the attendance figures at domestic professional sports leagues, listed by average attendance.  The first thing that should jump out at you is the immense popularity of the NFL, although there are always a number of mitigating circumstances with regards to attendance figures, the two biggest being number of games and also obviously the population of the nation involved.  (as an aside, it is interesting to note that far and way the most popular league in the world in terms of raw attendance is Major League Baseball, which is somewhat stunning in and of itself).

One thing this list does not provide for is the aforementioned extraordinary popularity if major-college football in America.  To begin to gain an appreciation for this, let's look at the list of largest stadiums in the world, ranked by seated capacity.    No less than 12 of the top 25 "largest" stadiums in the world are American college football stadiums, or stadiums built or used primarily for that purpose, with an additional 1 more stadium in the top 25 an NFL stadium (Fed-Ex Field, home of the Washington Redskins).  And we know from anecdotal knowledge these college teams generally sell out all their home games.

Obviously, there are a lot of people in the United States and Canada attending professional or major-college sporting events, and when you include "indoor" sports figures it all becomes more clear.  The combined population of USA and Canada is 342 million people (about 0.05% of the 6.8 billion people on the planet, compare this to Western Europe's 397 million -- 0.06%), but the region is ridiculously wealthy, the GDP of the USA alone is $14.2 Trillion, or about 20.5% of the global GDP of $69 trillion (compare to the European Union -- which includes more than just "western Europe" at $15.2 trillion)
[all figures from Wikipedia]  Obviosuly, let's skip altruism for the moment and remember that it really is about the money!

So lets revisit the MLS average attendance figures for 2009.  Many cynical or jaundiced members of the sports community would like to dismiss or laugh off this figure as a paltry and insignificant number.  It is tempting to look at the table and dismiss the average as a lie, since the Sounders' figures surely skew the average.  So lets succumb to this notion and do just this.  Its pretty simple math to eliminate the Sounders from the MLS average, and in doing so we get 14,040, which reduces the figure by about 12.9%.

Soccer is the one truly global sport.  There are those that would like to sell hockey, basketball, and baseball as global sports, but baseball, frankly falls laughably short, hockey is almost entirely a North American and European endeavor; but basketball has some merit.  Unfortunately for us, the NBA is a monolithic entity, arrogant enough to label its champion as a "World Champion" and employing different rules than the international game.  In fact, American basketball is severely inbred, something we are seeing more and more as foreigners become established in the NBA.  The global reach and significance of international basketball competitions is a fraction of that for soccer, and while soccer boasts multiple high-level domestic leagues, the same simply cannot be said of basketball.  Nice try guys, but you don't compare to soccer globally!

So lets look at European domestic soccer leagues, and, in fact, lets go right for the top.  Europe is the richest, densest, and most accomplished soccer network on the planet; South America comes in a distant second.  Going back to our domestic league attendance table, we can see the 3rd, 5th, 8th, and 11th-most popular sports leagues in the world (by average attendance) are the top-flight divisions in Germany, England, Spain, and Italy, respectively, which also happen to be widely recognized as the top four leagues (in terms of level of play) in at least Europe, if not the World.

Let's look at averages, and in the same exercise as we performed in MLS, throw out the top club and see how that affects the numbers:

England: 35650
without ManU = 31885 or -10.6%

Italy: 25324
without AC Milan = 22388 or -11.6%

Germany: 42736
without Borussia Dortmund = 38549 or -9.8%

Spain: 28491
without Barcelona = 24769 or -13.1%

You do not have to be a mathematician or statistician to come to two obvious conclusions.  Claiming Sounders' attendance figures "unfairly" skew MLS averages is stupid, and the projected attendance for the 2010 Sounders' season will be about equal to English Premier League average attendance and exceed Spanish and Italian top-flight average attendance.

I will be the first to concede that there are a ton of contingencies to the data.  Population, wealth, number of clubs, number of games are just a few of dozens.  You cannot look at the data absolutely, although numbers tend not to lie.  Anybody familiar with statistics in sports knows this well.

I would like to address the sense of the competition for butts in seats, which is to say how can we filter the data to address the options to the sports fan.  For instance, in Italy, Turin, Milan, and Rome each had two clubs in Serie A last season, so surely that must be taken into consideration somehow, as well as the litany of lower-division clubs the fan has to choose from.  This argument is all well and good, but I hasten to point out that these are the 4 leagues that supposedly "rule the roost" in Western Europe, a region the numbers shown above compares to USA/Canada in terms of population and wealth, whereas the MLS is considered a relatively lowly and unpopular "niche sport" in North America.

But lets take a quick look, specifically in Italy and specifically at Turin, the home of historic European soccer giants Juventus and lesser-renowned Torino, a lower-level club that was relegated to Serie B (Italy's second division) this past season.
Torino: 22973
Juventus: 21329
First of all, lets take a moment to appreciate that a club relegated after the 08/09 season outdrew powerhouse Juventus.  Beyond that, the combined numbers for these two teams is about 44,000, a number which would be considered an abject failure at the NFL level.  The worst-drawing NFL team, the Oakland Raiders, drew on average 44284 fans.  Detroit, a team with a dismal recent history and playing in an economically depressed region with astonishing unemployment rates, drew an average of 49,395.  Granted, Serie A teams play 19 league home games, compared to 8 for an NFL team, but I've already established that NFL and major-college football crowd sizes alter our perception of sports attendance.

Turin is a city of 909,000 people, and an urban area of between 1.7 and 2.2 million (figures from Wikipedia) and is considered a cultural and economic hub, and as the center of the Italian automotive industry (including the headquarters of Fiat, the world's 6th largest carmaker) is one of the major industrial centers of Europe.  Turin is the 4th-largest city in Italy and 78th wealthiest city in the world by GDP (58 billion).

Seattle, on the other hand, has a municipal population of 602,000, and an urban population of between 2.7 million ( as defined by the "urban area") and 3.3 million (as defined my the "metro" area).  It is the 15th-largest metro area in the US, and in the always important TV market rankings it is 13th.  Seattle is the 24th wealthiest city in the world with a GDP of $235 billion. (Remember, its about the money.  To put the enormous wealth of the US into perspective, Seattle doesn't crack the top 10 in the US, but would rank ahead of Rome and Milan, the two wealthiest cities in Italy!)

So what does this all mean?  Now that I've bored you to death with numbers, what conclusions can we draw from this?  First of all, given the population and wealth of Western Europe, it seems a shocking amount of people are not attending soccer matches.  Also, MLS attendance is surprisingly strong, despite  its lowly stature in the sports landscape -- but also perhaps not so surprising due to the astounding wealth of the US from a global perspective.

But what about the stature of the sport, and the number of teams and matches played.   For that, lets just focus on  the 4 major western European countries discussed above.
(all figures from Wikipedia)
Germany: 82.33 million, GDP = $3.67 trillion
Italy: 60.23 million, GDP = $2.31 trillion
England: 51.45 million, GDP $2.2 trillion (note, this is for England only, not all of Britain)
Spain: 46.66 million, GDP = $1.6 trillion
totals 240.67 million, GDP = $9.78 trillion
USA/Canada: 342.58 million, GDP = $15.94 trillion

The "Big four" sports in USA/Canada are NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL, which combined are 122 teams, and across our Wikipedia sample set drew a combined 133.3 million fans over 5147 games, for an average of roughly 25,800 spectators per event (keeping in mind the "indoor" nature of NHL and NBA limits attendance compared to NFL and NBA). This is .388 by factor of population and 1 person for every $119 thousand of GDP

The "Big 4" domestic leagues consist of a combined 78 teams, drew 46.9 million fans over 1446 games, for an average of roughly 32,400 spectators per event.  This is .195 by factor of population and 1 person for every $208 thousand of GDP.

There are certainly other sports in Europe of note, including rugby, basketball, and hockey, and there are lower divisions of all the domestic soccer leagues.  It is worth noting that the second division in English soccer, the Championship, averaged 17891 fans (24 teams, 552 games) making it the 18th most popular domestic league in the world, and the 10th most popular soccer league in the world, 7th in Europe!

In USA/Canada, this also leaves out the prodigious influence of major-college football and the lesser but still significant influence of the Canadian Football League (the world's 7th-most popular domestic league by average attendance).  But we can see that Americans and Canadians absolutely love attending professional sports in their major domestic leagues, at a rate nearly double the population factor and wealth factor of Italy, Germany, England, and Spain, even given the indoor limiting nature of hockey and basketball!

Seattle is a town with and NFL team, the Seahawks, that averaged 67995 for 8 homes games for 2009 (16th of 32 in NFL), a major college football team, the Washington Huskies, that averaged 64,355 for 7 homes games, a Major League Baseball team, the Mariners, which averaged 27,105 for 81 homes games (18th of 30 in MLB), as well as reasonable, relative, attendance rates for lesser sports such as college basketball, women's professional basketball, and minor league hockey.  The loss of the NBA team, the Sonics, probably helped Sounders attendance figures, but 35,000+ a game is an impressive figure, no matter how you frame it, from a local, national, global, economic, or social perspective.

In fact, the Sounders last year became one of the top 50 soccer clubs in the world with an average of 31,203, and will probably rise up the rankings this year.  It is easy for "mainstream" pundits to dismiss, or even laugh at, the Sounders' claims, and the overall MLS attendance figures, but to buy into this cynicism is a huge mistake.  The ultimate, and only proven effective, means of fans and supporters to convey what is important, on a global scale, is butts in seats (or standing in front of seats), and in that regard, the Sounders community has spoken loudly!