Which MLS Team is Giving Fans the Best Value in 2024?

RedBeard

I still don’t believe in clickbait; the answer is Real Salt Lake. RSL has, in home league matches played through July 20th, combined excellent on-field performance with great attendance and low season ticket prices. They’re not perfect, but the front office in Sandy is clearly doing right by its fans and that’s what I’m looking for in this mid-season analysis.

To find the best and worst value for MLS fans in 2024, I’m looking at several metrics, all related to the in-stadium experience at home matches. These are the games that teams have the most control over and where treating their own fans well really matters. Soccer has the largest home-field advantage among all major sports (and MLS has the largest among top leagues worldwide) but if the crowd shrivels, so does the advantage. Team executives should be striving to give their supporters a good show on the field and a good experience in the stadium all for a fair price.

Adjusted Points Per Game

Since we’re midway through the season, teams have played an uneven number of home matches, between 11 and 13, so the only fair way to compare home field performance is with average points per home game. As always, that’s 3 points for a win, 1 point for a draw, and no points for a loss. However, I have made one adjustment -- following a suggestion by the Chief on an episode of the Cincy PostCast Draws that end 0-0 subtract 1 point.

This decrement makes sense here because we’re looking at the overall fan experience for the time they spend in the stadium. Soccer is a low-scoring affair, so each goal is significant and each home-team goal sets off a small earthquake of celebration (literally). When your team wins, that’s great. When your team equalizes (or is equalized on), there’s nail-biting drama and a result. When your team loses, even in a shutout, then you still saw at least one goal and had an opportunity to pray to the Gods of Sport that your boys would claw their way back.

A 0-0 draw is categorically different. There were no goals. Neither team was ever ahead so neither team was ever behind. If there were good chances, they didn't matter; both sides failed to do the one thing they were sent onto the field to do (it’s even in the name -- their goal is to score goals). Society would have been better off if all of the fans and players volunteered at a local food pantry, picked up litter in a park, or did other acts of community service for 2-3 hours instead of playing the match. No-goal ties are not a fun show for the fans, therefore, they are worth negative one (-1) point in my Adjusted Points Per Game (APPG) metric.

Adjusted Points Per Game

Rank	Team	APPG	Home Games (through 7/20)	Home Wins	Home Draws	Home Losses	0-0 Home Draws
1	LA Galaxy	2.31	13	9	3	1	0
2	LAFC	2.15	13	9	3	1	1
3	Real Salt Lake	2.09	11	8	1	2	1
4	New York City FC	2.08	12	8	1	3	0
5	Colorado Rapids	2.08	13	8	3	2	0
6	Inter Miami	2.08	13	8	3	2	0
7	Portland Timbers	2.00	12	7	3	2	0
8	FC Dallas	1.85	13	8	2	3	1
9	New York Red Bulls	1.83	12	7	5	0	2
10	Columbus Crew	1.82	11	6	4	1	1
11	Austin FC	1.69	13	6	4	3	0
12	Toronto FC	1.50	12	6	0	6	0
13	Charlotte FC	1.50	12	6	4	2	2
14	Minnesota United	1.46	13	5	4	4	0
15	Seattle Sounders FC	1.46	13	6	5	2	2
16	Atlanta United	1.38	13	5	3	5	0
17	Vancouver Whitecaps	1.36	11	5	2	4	1
18	Houston Dynamo	1.36	11	4	5	2	1
19	FC Cincinnati	1.23	13	6	2	5	2
20	Sporting Kansas City	1.23	13	4	4	5	0
21	Nashville SC	1.15	13	4	5	4	1
22	DC United	1.15	13	4	3	6	0
23	CF Montreal	1.08	12	4	5	3	2
24	New England Revolution	1.08	13	4	2	7	0
25	St. Louis City SC	1.00	13	4	5	4	2
26	Chicago Fire	0.92	12	4	3	5	2
27	San Jose Earthquakes	0.77	13	3	1	9	0
28	Orlando City SC	0.75	12	3	4	5	2
29	Philadelphia Union	0.69	13	3	4	6	2
	Average	1.49
	Median	1.46

Attendance

The next metric of a good time at a sporting event is the other people you share the experience with. If the team is good but nobody shows up to watch them, then management is doing something wrong and the experience suffers. Conversely, as longtime FC fans know, a packed stadium with tens of thousands of your neighbors cheering for the same cause can be somewhat fun and enjoyable, even if the product on the field is utter hoseshit game after game.

I break down attendance in two ways. The first is most direct -- the total number of people at each game. This is a raw measure of the number of butts-in-seats the front office can deliver. MLS teams almost always report ticket sales for each game, rather than turnstile entrances, so these numbers don’t exactly show the number of people cheering their hearts out. But sales are the only data available and are still a reasonable proxy for actual attendance since they represent people willing to exchange money for tickets. (And when large numbers of ticket-holders don’t show up, it’s usually because of factors outside the team’s control, like bad weather.)

The second, and more important, attendance metric is how full the stadium is. 20,000 people filling a smaller stadium to capacity is a loud, raucous, intimate, and intimidating atmosphere (see, e.g. Austin or LAFC). A larger crowd of 30,000 people scattered around a cavernous NFL stadium designed for more than twice that number is diffuse and somewhat embarrassing (Chicago, Seattle); their cheers are distant and muffled by the tarps that hide tens of thousands of unsellable seats. If you have 60,000 seats and can sell them, then that’s really cool -- but if most of them sit empty, then your team needs to work on making the experience worthwhile for local sports fans (after all, those big stadiums do sell out for NFL games -- it can be done). Part of a good fan experience is putting the games in a right-size stadium for the crowd that shows up.

I express this in the Attendance Modifier, which is 1 (neutral) for teams that sell between 75 and 90% of their stadium capacity. In my opinion, that’s a passing grade for a front office in MLS. Teams that go the extra mile get a boost of .025 for each percent above 90 (for a maximum modifier of 1.25 at 100% of capacity). For teams that don’t reach 75% of capacity, the modifier gradually falls by 0.01 for each percent of attendance drop until it reaches 0.75 at a half-full stadium. Below 50% of capacity, the modifier drops twice as fast, 0.02 for each percent below 50. (If a team can’t average at least 25% of capacity, then they get a zero because they don’t belong in MLS.)

Through matches played on 7/20 for which data is available, four teams are effectively selling-out every game and 11 teams average more than 95% of capacity. On the other end is Chicago, which more than tripled its seats and boosted transit accessibility by moving from the suburbs to Soldier Field but still wouldn’t fill the 20,000 seats of its former home.

Attendance

Rank	Team	Stadium capacity	Avg attendance (through 7/20)	Attendance Percent	Attendance Modifier	Home Draws	0-0 Home Draws
1	Austin FC	20,738	20,738	100.00%	1.25	1	0
2	CF Montreal	19,619	19,619	100.00%	1.25	1	1
3	FC Dallas	19,096	19,094	99.99%	1.25	2	1
4	St. Louis City SC	22,500	22,468	99.86%	1.25	3	0
5	LAFC	22,321	22,118	99.09%	1.23	2	0
6	Columbus Crew	20,927	20,629	98.58%	1.21	2	0
7	Minnesota United	19,906	19,542	98.17%	1.20	2	0
8	Inter Miami	21,550	20,986	97.38%	1.18	3	1
9	FC Cincinnati	26,000	25,292	97.28%	1.18	0	2
10	Philadelphia Union	19,513	18,860	96.65%	1.17	1	1
11	Nashville SC	30,109	28,638	95.11%	1.13	3	0
12	Real Salt Lake	21,570	20,383	94.50%	1.11	6	0
13	Sporting Kansas City *	24,286	22,476	92.55%	1.06	2	2
14	DC United	20,000	18,115	90.58%	1.01	4	0
15	Orlando City SC	25,500	22,649	88.82%	1.00	2	2
16	Portland Timbers	25,218	22,321	88.51%	1.00	5	0
17	Colorado Rapids	18,183	14,783	81.30%	1.00	4	1
18	LA Galaxy *	32,931	26,126	79.34%	1.00	2	1
19	Houston Dynamo	22,039	17,432	79.10%	1.00	5	2
20	New York Red Bulls	25,219	19,559	77.56%	1.00	5	0
21	San Jose Earthquakes *	24,379	18,272	74.95%	1.00	4	1
22	Toronto FC	36,000	25,784	71.62%	0.97	6	0
23	Atlanta United	73,019	46,082	63.11%	0.88	3	2
24	Vancouver Whitecaps	54,313	27,696	50.99%	0.76	7	0
25	Charlotte FC	74,867	34,334	45.86%	0.42	4	2
26	New York City FC **	47,792	21,457	44.90%	0.40	5	2
27	Seattle Sounders FC	68,740	30,402	44.23%	0.38	9	0
28	New England Revolution	68,756	27,884	40.56%	0.31	5	2
29	Chicago Fire	62,500	19,045	30.47%	0.11	6	2
	Average	33,365	23,199	80.04%	0.96
	Median	24,379	21,457	88.82%	1.00

Season Ticket Price

When I set out to generate this index I picked a clearly defined problem -- I needed data on attendance, capacity, home points, home 0-0 ties, and the price that teams charge for the experience. Simple enough. For pricing, I looked for the cheapest season ticket price for a new buyer -- this is the minimum that a team charges to its most frequent attendees (who are usually its biggest fans) and is usually in the supporters section of the stadium. Many fans choose to pay more (sometimes much more) for nicer seats and other perks, but if the open bar in club seats is what brings you to a soccer match, that says more about your relationship with alcohol than the job performance of the front office.

Having clearly defined my parameters (and confidently telling Kevin I was working on an article), I set off into the research and discovered that behind my seemingly simple index calculation was the much more daunting challenge of getting popular companies to disclose the price of goods they currently sell to the public.

The majority of teams in the league made this information easy to find on their official website. They either still had their 2024 season ticket seat map posted on the Tickets page or posted it for long enough that the Wayback Machine had an archived version. But about a third of teams had nothing available on the open web. Their season ticket prices were either locked behind a Ticketmaster portal (only accessible if you pay a deposit first) or were otherwise communicated to their fans in a way that was not captured or copied to a publicly-accessible website.

On reddit, I found someone who began a similar project earlier in the year and posted in the troublesome teams’ subreddits to ask about the cheapest season tickets. Most of the replies were inexact or only said what that particular fan paid for their own tickets, which is not useful for a comparison of the cheapest tickets. This makes me think that even those teams’ fans are kept ignorant of general pricing information. (That industrious redditor either gave up on their project or never published their findings -- I press on.)

I did find a few news articles that purported to give comparative pricing information, but they all had problems: they were unreliable clickbait, didn’t cite any sources (or only cited the clickbait), were clearly wrong / outdated, or gave “average” season ticket prices (which itself is a confusing number without more context since there are wildly different numbers of seats available for each pricing tier at differently sized stadiums). At this point, I had a flashback to AP Stats and decided that garbage data wouldn’t do -- I needed official team sources or articles/posts/tweets that reliably cited official sources.

I was able to find that information online for all but six teams (a low-level “fuck you” to Austin FC, LAFC, Charlotte FC, NYCFC, and Seattle Sounders), So in the year 2024, I committed the Millenial sin of making a phone call someone I didn’t know. Multiple times. Forgive me.

(Fortunately, all of the ticket reps I talked to at those five teams were friendly and quickly gave the information I asked for. Thank you.)

What about the sixth team, you ask? I have reserved a full-throated “Go fuck yourself, Saint Louis” to the front office in that city, which does not publish even a basic phone number to talk to a live ticket seller. (Or if they do, I couldn’t find it within ten minutes of searching -- my self-imposed limit when there were 29 teams to get through.) They do provide an e-mail address so I sent a message six weeks ago asking for the information. Then I sent a follow-up message two weeks ago. And a third last week. There has been no reply. As a result, I failed to get data for the entire league as I intended. I’m sorry.

For the purposes of my index, I’m assuming that the cheapest St. Louis City FC season ticket is $870, because if this is what I had to go through for a simple “what do you charge for your product” question, I have to assume that their fans experience front-office-caused headaches regularly; for that pain, I assign an arbitrary value of $4 more than the cheapest Inter Miami ticket. (STL fans -- if you don’t like this ranking, blame your team management.) This is not the first time that the Post has had to assume the worst in team rankings for failing to respond to basic questions.

For the ticket prices I was able to obtain, I attempted an apples-to-apples comparison as much as possible. For teams that include extra guaranteed games in their season ticket price (e.g. Leagues Cup group stage), I normalized the price to just the 17 league home matches. For teams that advertised no-additional-cost US Open Cup tickets, I counted the first game as guaranteed since that was the expectation when 2024 tickets first went on sale, even if that team didn’t end up playing in the Cup. I did not make adjustments for benefits that are contingent on a specific outcome or where the value depends on the behavior/actions of the individual fan (MLS Playoffs or Leagues Cup knockout round tickets, food and merchandise discounts, discounted/free away match tickets).

LAFC is a bit of an outlier. After calling their ticket office, I learned that tickets in the supporters section are not offered for public sale. (It’s not that they are sold-out -- the team literally does not sell them to fans.) Every ticket for the North End section that The 3252 calls home is sold in blocks by LAFC to its official Supporters Groups (the team would not tell me this wholesale price) and then re-sold by the SGs to their respective dues-paying members (at nonpublic prices). A civilian LAFC fan cannot buy season tickets in the cheapest section of BMO Stadium. This is not unique in MLS -- Toronto FC also sells supporters section tickets exclusively through its SGs -- but LAFC’s next-cheapest price is much higher than TFC’s.

One LAFC supporter on reddit reports their tickets were $425, but this is not a universal price, as revealed by the fact that the /r/LAFC community maintains a Google Doc for the purpose of tracking ticket pricing at an anecdotal level. (And, as we all learned in AP Stats, “data” is not the plural of “anecdote.”) Therefore I’m using the $950 price for the South End that the LAFC ticket office told me is the cheapest season ticket sold directly by the team. Similarly, TFC’s price in the table is the cheapest offered directly by the team.

For the Canadian teams, I converted CAD prices to USD at the January 1, 2024, exchange rate. All prices in the table are USD.

Season Ticket Cost

Rank	Team	Cheapest STM Total Price	Cheapest STM (17 games)	Source	Notes	Attendance modifier	STM Price
1	Vancouver Whitecaps	$242.39	$216.87	Website	321 CAD for 19 matches	1.11	$306.00
2	Real Salt Lake	$306.00	$289.00	Website	18 matches	0.76	$242.39
3	Orlando City SC	$324.00	$289.89	Website	19 matches	1.00	$437.00
4	Houston Dynamo	$340.00	$321.11	Website	18 matches	1.00	$328.00
5	Nashville SC	$324.00	$324.00	Website		1.25	$396.00
6	Colorado Rapids	$328.00	$328.00	Website		1.13	$324.00
7	CF Montreal	$335.26	$335.26	Website	444 CAD	0.97	$443.24
8	FC Dallas	$396.00	$374.00	Website	18 matches	1.00	$340.00
9	Toronto FC	$443.24	$376.76	Website	587 CAD for 20 matches	1.18	$385.00
10	FC Cincinnati	$385.00	$385.00	Website	Website doesn’t mention extra matches.	1.00	$515.00
11	LA Galaxy	$437.00	$391.00	Website	19 matches	1.25	$335.26
12	Chicago Fire	$450.00	$425.00	Website	18 matches	1.21	$535.00
13	San Jose Earthquakes	$480.00	$429.47	Website	19 matches	1.25	$582.00
14	New England Revolution	$504.00	$450.95	Website	19 matches	1.00	$451.00
15	New York Red Bulls	$451.00	$451.00	Website		1.20	$462.00
16	Minnesota United	$462.00	$462.00	Website		0.88	$605.00
17	Sporting Kansas City	$560.00	$476.00	Website	20 matches	1.00	$324.00
18	Portland Timbers	$515.00	$486.39	Website	18 matches	1.23	$950.00
19	Seattle Sounders FC	$540.00	$510.00	Phone call	18 matches	1.18	$867.00
20	Austin FC	$582.00	$520.74	Phone call	19 matches	1.06	$560.00
21	Columbus Crew	$535.00	$535.00	Website		0.40	$570.00
22	New York City FC	$570.00	$538.33	Phone call	18 matches	1.01	$580.00
23	Philadelphia Union	$640.00	$544.00	Website	20 matches	1.00	$480.00
24	Atlanta United	$605.00	$571.39	Website	18 matches	1.25	$870.00
25	DC United	$580.00	$580.00	Website		1.17	$640.00
26	Charlotte FC	$625.00	$590.28	Phone call	18 matches	0.38	$540.00
27	Inter Miami	$867.00	$867.00	Website		0.42	$625.00
28	St. Louis City SC	$870.00	$870.00	No data	(No phone number -- no response to emails)	0.31	$504.00
29	LAFC	$950.00	$950.00	Phone call		0.11	$450.00
	Average	$505.07	$478.91			0.96	$478.91
	Median	$480.00	$451.00			1.00	$451.00

Fan Value Index

With data finally in hand, we get to Redbeard’s The Post Cincy Fan Value Index, which looks at how many fans show up, how much they have to pay to see each home point, and how crowded the in-stadium experience is. Importantly, this is not solely a metric of team performance at home -- a lower-table team team can still provide good value by drawing large crowds (Nashville, Montreal) or keeping prices low (Vancouver). Conversely, on-field success doesn’t make up for lackluster attendance (NYCFC) or high prices (LAFC, Miami). The management groups at DC United and Philadelphia are doing something extra to create value -- they still manage to fill 90+% of their seats despite high ticket prices and losing records. Teams that score poorly on all three metrics (Seattle) need significant improvements.

At the top of the list, as promised, Real Salt Lake has the second-lowest ticket price in the league, third-highest adjusted points per game, and sells a respectable 95% of its seats. The RSL ownership group and executives are doing many things right and have earned a commanding 16-point lead over second place.

Although its attendance modifier and on-field performance are both below average, Vancouver Whitecaps snags the #2 position with the league’s lowest ticket prices and turning out 6,239 more fans than the median team.

LA Galaxy gets the #3 spot in a similar way as RSL, with the league’s best home APPG, below-average ticket prices, and 79% attendance. Colorado follows the same path to #4.

FC Dallas makes the top 5 by averaging a sell-out of the second-smallest stadium in the league (hot Texas summer has not deterred the faithful) and keeping prices low. 

Nashville takes a different path to #6, turning out the league’s 4th-highest attendance to a stadium designed for that size of crowd. Below-average ticket prices balance out their below-average play.

The Post’s Fan Value Index

Rank	Team	Fan index	APPG	Attendance	Attendance Percent	Attendance modifier	STM Price
1	Real Salt Lake	164.01	2.09	20,383	94.50%	1.11	$306.00
2	Vancouver Whitecaps	148.00	1.36	27,696	50.99%	0.76	$242.39
3	LA Galaxy	143.80	2.31	26,126	79.34%	1.00	$437.00
4	Colorado Rapids	139.36	2.08	14,783	81.30%	1.00	$328.00
5	FC Dallas	135.53	1.85	19,094	99.99%	1.25	$396.00
6	Nashville SC	123.07	1.15	28,638	95.11%	1.13	$324.00
7	Toronto FC	115.42	1.50	25,784	71.62%	0.97	$443.24
8	Houston Dynamo	114.68	1.36	17,432	79.10%	1.00	$340.00
9	FC Cincinnati	114.20	1.23	25,292	97.28%	1.18	$385.00
10	Portland Timbers	114.00	2.00	22,321	88.51%	1.00	$515.00
11	CF Montreal	112.71	1.08	19,619	100.00%	1.25	$335.26
12	Columbus Crew	111.95	1.82	20,629	98.58%	1.21	$535.00
13	Austin FC	111.28	1.69	20,738	100.00%	1.25	$582.00
14	New York Red Bulls	110.72	1.83	19,559	77.56%	1.00	$451.00
15	Minnesota United	106.46	1.46	19,542	98.17%	1.20	$462.00
16	Atlanta United	103.35	1.38	46,082	63.11%	0.88	$605.00
17	Orlando City SC	100.52	0.75	22,649	88.82%	1.00	$324.00
18	LAFC	99.05	2.15	22,118	99.09%	1.23	$950.00
19	Inter Miami	96.80	2.08	20,986	97.38%	1.18	$867.00
20	Sporting Kansas City	94.50	1.23	22,476	92.55%	1.06	$560.00
21	New York City FC	78.08	2.08	21,457	44.90%	0.40	$570.00
22	DC United	77.36	1.15	18,115	90.58%	1.01	$580.00
23	San Jose Earthquakes	77.14	0.77	18,272	74.95%	1.00	$480.00
24	St. Louis City SC	75.92	1.00	22,468	99.86%	1.25	$870.00
25	Philadelphia Union	72.84	0.69	18,860	96.65%	1.17	$640.00
26	Seattle Sounders FC	69.42	1.46	30,402	44.23%	0.38	$540.00
27	Charlotte FC	67.11	1.50	34,334	45.86%	0.42	$625.00
28	New England Revolution	61.19	1.08	27,884	40.56%	0.31	$504.00
29	Chicago Fire	49.28	0.92	19,045	30.47%	0.11	$450.00
	Average	103.03	1.49	23,199	80.04%	0.96	$478.91
	Median	106.46	1.46	21,457	88.82%	1.00	$451.00

And finally, here is the specific formula for the index. If you have any criticisms of this formula, please send them to the St. Louis ticket office.