Colorado Rapids attendance numbers update

Colorado's attendance in 2010 was one of the lower points for the team. Averaging 13,329 fans, they were the 5th lowest draw in the league ahead only of New England, Dallas, Kansas City and San Jose, with the latter two both teams with stadiums so small that it would be almost impossible for them to outdraw Colorado. The attendance had actually improved significantly from 2009 when Colorado had just a hair over 12k at every game, an increase of about 8%. Unfortunately, going from worse to bad rarely gets you headlines in this league and Colorado still remained one of the laughing-stocks of the league by year's end when they couldn't even come close to a sell out of their first round playoff match against Columbus. The addition of the supporters terraces to the pitch helped bump up attendance as well as the Rapids would see 500-1000 people crowding the two sides each and every game.

Check out what we've seen this year so far after the jump…

In fact, if we stack those by weather, the attendances look like this:

Beautiful mid-70's day that also happened to be the home opener: 17,139

Beautiful mid-70's day: 14,185

40's and windy: 11,789

Low 30's and snowing: 9,857

Something that will undoubtedly help the Rapids out is the fact that there is a complete plethora of games in July and June, a time when only mid-season Rockies baseball is around to distract Coloradan sports fans and the weather is almost guaranteed to be good – let's just forget about that Hurricane that hit Colorado last season on the 4th of July – so an attendance statistic that tends to work in streaks will be helped by this a good chunk. 

Another fantastic thing that the Rapids have been doing quite a bit more this season compared to seasons prior – I don't recall seeing them do much of anything like this back in 2007 when I was a season ticket holder the year that the beautiful new stadium first opened – is marketing the team to the casual fan. Not only was the advertisement that they put out for television a lovely thing to behold, if not resembling a David Lynch film a bit too much for my taste, but the promotions that the Rapids have been pushing on the fanbase and casual fans around Colorado have been plentiful and fantastic.

Not ideal, but 13,000 really isn't a terrible number for four games considering the conditions. If we were at 11,000 or even 12,000 right now there might be cause for concern, but there should be no worries right now. Call me optimistic for taking this current attendance in stride, but there should be shinier days ahead for the Rapids and my 14,000 prediction for the end of the season is still very easily in sight.