Redbeard’s MLS Fan Value Index - 2025 Edition
Redbeard
Congratulations to the ticket sellers and executives in Music City because Nashville SC is giving its fans the best value in Major League Soccer this season, through August 31. This is the second year I’ve run these numbers, which incorporates the team’s home performance, attendance, and season ticket prices. For more on the specific methodology, see the 2024 article. The key bits of data for this index are: home wins-loss-draw record (and how many draws end scoreless), attendance at home matches, home stadium capacity, and the price charged by the team for its cheapest season ticket.
Apologia
As all good sequel articles do, I begin with responses to the haters and losers. Last time around, the biggest criticisms related to the attendance and ticket pricing information. Several commenters on reddit and lesser venues for discourse complained that their team’s attendance modifier included the actual capacity of their home stadium, rather than the (fewer) seats which their team normally offers for sale -- this is a significant issue for Seattle Sounders, Chicago Fire, New England Revolution, Charlotte FC, and Atlanta United, which all play in NFL stadiums. (There is also skew in the stadium capacity numbers -- which I adjusted to account for when teams play one-offs away from their home stadium -- though those games are usually well-attended and help the team’s overall attendance metrics.)
One Atlanta fan complained that this system overemphasized the empty seats in Mercedes-Benz Stadium:
This excuse is, of course, bullshit. Let’s start with the pool of potential customers; according to US Census estimates for 2024, the Atlanta metro area (Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA MSA) contained 6,411,149 people. Only seven MLS cities have more (New York/NJ, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Washington DC, and Miami). The smallest MLS market is Salt Lake City, population 1,300,762, one-fifth of Atlanta’s.
If 73,000 people were willing to regularly buy tickets for Atlanta United matches, the team would open up all 73,000 seats. We know this is the case because the team opened the upper level and sold more than 46,000 tickets for five regular season games in 2018, when Atlanta hosted and won the MLS Cup Final, and for six regular season games the next year. But as excitement for the team has waned, so has the number of upper-deck-available games, three in 2023, another three so far this year (none of which exceeded 66K attendance). The point of this fan value index is not to judge the denizens of MLS cities when they lack enthusiasm for the local team, rather it’s to see which front offices are doing a good job of stoking that enthusiasm.
Residents of the greater Atlanta area are willing to pay money to watch sports at MBS. Even when the NFL’s Falcons had a down year and were likely embellishing their attendance numbers, they still brought in more than 56K actual fans every game. In 2024, the Falcons’ least-attended match (a Week 18 loss to Carolina) outdrew United’s best-attended match (a Round 1 playoff win against Miami-with-Messi) by nearly a thousand (69,581 to 68,455). Seventy thousand Georgians will watch Atlanta’s teams when there is good value in the experience. I give United’s front office no pass for being unable to bring them out regularly. That’s a failure to provide good value and this index weights that accordingly. Indeed, the Attendance Modifier is the single most significant data point in the revised formula because filling a stadium well is proof that locals percieve value.
I also caught flak for penalizing St. Louis City on account of their ticket pricing being a mystery and they didn’t respond to multiple attempts at contact. I’ll preface this section with a general statement -- I am not an idiot. I am aware that many teams are not actually selling new season ticket packages because few season ticket members (STMs) relinquish theirs and those vacancies are filled by existing waitlists. I am also aware that some teams use dynamic pricing because capitalism is ruthlessly efficient at extracting wealth from commoners and the team owners expect that you won’t mind paying twice as much as the person in the seat next to you because a computer determined that you were likely to buy at that price.
All of that out of the way … season ticket prices are NOT state secrets. Many teams publish their pricing in easy-to-follow graphics, like these from Austin, Cincinnati, Columbus, and Nashville, all of whom have STM waitlists. Others make it a little harder, like Houston where the pricing was only available on an order form, but it’s there. There is no good reason to keep this information secret -- tens of thousands of fans in each city already know the prices and making prices public helps every fan easily decide if the price is affordable. (Making your fans spend time on the phone just to learn prices is another cost in itself.) And this isn’t a market where you need to keep your competitors in the dark about pricing because we’re talking about prospective season ticket buyers -- people who live in the local areas and are already such big fans of the team that they are planning to attend most of the games long before the season kicks off. Even in NY or LA, where it would be feasible to, these fans are not going to jump ship and buy season tickets for another MLS team merely because prices were kept secret.
The only excuses for secret pricing I’ve heard are all anti-fan -- done to ensure that ticket buyers have extreme difficulty in knowing the true value of the product they’ve bought and to make it hard to recoup that value on the resale market when they can’t attend a match. (It doesn’t even make sense as an anti-scapling device because scalpers CAN figure out the true value, by having multiple data points. This puts scalpers in a position to exploit that knowledge against fans, whom the team keeps in the dark. And there are more effective anti-scalping techniques teams in MLS already employ, like cancelling season tickets if they are resold too often in a season, giving extra scrutiny to suspicious accounts, and undercutting STMs by selling box office tickets cheaper for unpopular matches … which causes different problems but does deter scalping.)
(Finally, there were some complaints that some of the tables were mixed up. Sorry. I fixed them within a few hours and Kevin quickly republished; refunds will be made available upon request.)
The point of the above is that I’m sticking to my guns here -- percent-of-capacity is a valid and important metric for determining fan value and the index will penalize teams that refuse to provide a STM price upon request.
The 2025 Fan Index
Having put many hours into the 2024 index, I decided to make even more work for myself and adjust the index calculation further. This was inspired by an error I made, misquoting The Chief’s thoughts on how many points to assign to 0-0 draws. (Nobody cared to mention this error, presumably because nobody cared to go back into the Post’s archives to find the original statement. I did.)
It was in the episode from May 26, 2023, beginning at 1:28:25. Chief opines that scoreless draws should be zero points, not (as I misremembered) minus one point. After ruminating on this, I am inclined to agree that subtracting a point is too harsh and that pretending the game didn’t even happen is better. The Adjusted Points Per Game (APPG) formula now awards three points for a win, zero points for scoreless ties, and 1 point for all other ties.
I also increased the penalty assigned to teams who, despite reasonable efforts, I could not get pricing information from. Last year, I pegged this “secret price” at just a little higher than Miami’s price, because that seemed funny. This year, I’m more annoyed and will just assume their price is a flat $1000. Two teams are assigned that penalty this year -- Inter Miami (who didn’t answer my calls or reply to my email) and LAFC (who did pick up the phone but then explicitly refused to provide any information about the lowest price it was currently charging its fans, not even an approximate number, despite amiably doing so for last year’s index). LAFC’s ticket office gave two inconsistent excuses for this refusal, first stating that they “don’t make that information public” and that “they don’t have that information.”
It would not have been hard, recall that I was just looking for a single number: the cheapest season ticket for the season sold directly by the team. Based on the rep’s reaction, I might as well have been asking for Will Ferrell’s phone number (which that office also definitely has, but understandably doesn't give out.).
Whatever, 28 other teams did make their pricing reasonably available, including last year’s holdout, St. Louis City. (I still had to call three teams, Chicago, Charlotte, and St. Louis, but they were at least polite and quick to answer my questions.)
I also reworked the formula itself to smooth out the steep curve of the attendance modifier and to include a ratio for a team’s price difference from the league average price, in addition to the pure dollar value. As a result of these changes, the 2025 index should not be compared to the 2024 index numbers; the formulas are not sufficiently similar. Relative rankings of the teams could be compared within a modest range.
Are these decisions by me, the indexmaker, arbitrary? Yes.
Can you copy my raw data to make your own index formula instead? Also yes.
Attendance Down Almost Everywhere
An advantage of doing this project for a second year in a row is that I can easily look at changes from year to year. The most obvious one is that attendance at MLS matches is down compared to 2024, by a lot. When I generated the fan index in 2024, the average MLS match had hosted 23,199 fans. In 2025, the average is only 21,740.
There are a few innocuous explanations for this drop -- FC Dallas’s stadium has temporarily lost about 40% of its capacity due to long-term renovation work and fewer teams have boosted attendance by moving to NFL stadiums when playing Miami. There is also the saga of Vancouver; despite an excellent season on the field, the Whitecaps are bringing 28% fewer fans into BC Place, a reduction of more than 7,500 per game. That’s not great, of course, but a problem with one team isn’t necessarily a leaguewide issue.
Buuuuut, there are also more alarming details -- total attendance is down leaguewide, even though there is another team (San Diego), and attendance is down by 4.2% compared to 2024 on a percent-of-capacity basis (which adjusts for Dallas’s stadium and teams’ games in larger venues).
If attendance trends until the Leagues Cup break in 2024 had continued, leaguewide total attendance would have been 11,437,328. If 2025 continues as it has so far, the number will only be 11,087,604. (Things did pick up in 2024, the actual regular season number ended at 12,180,840 but I still expect 2025 to fall quite a bit short of that.)
So far in 2025, attendance is down for 21 MLS teams; steady (within 1%) for the three Texas teams and Seattle; and higher only for NYCFC (2.63%), Colorado (6.22%), San Jose (11.24%), and Chicago (31.88%). Seven of the 21 teams with lower attendance are seeing drops greater than 10% year-over-year and the three Canadian teams lead the pack with attendance changes of -16.40% (Montreal), -19.75% (Toronto), and -27.66% (Vancouver).
Is MLS losing ground to the Canadian Premier League? Is soccer losing support generally? Are away fans less willing to travel because something is different about travelling across the US border in 2025? Is this because Toronto and Montreal are tied for the third-worst home APPG in the league (0.71)? I don’t know but please tell me if you find out. Also, congrats to Chicago Fire for adding nearly a third more spectators to Soldier Field this year! (Now averaging 25,116) Though that kind of growth can’t be sustained since the proposed new stadium will hold only 22,000.
Costs Up, But Not Everywhere
This year, I didn’t attempt to compare the per-game value of season tickets or their additional benefits because the perks that come with an STM vary significantly from team-to-team. Some offer food or merchandise discounts, some offer free or discounted away tickets, some offer free parking, many offer tickets to additional home matches (e.g. Open Cup or Leagues Cup) in varying number, and some teams offer none of those. The value of these varied add-ons is subjective and hard to compare, so I’m looking only at the bottom-line price of the STM package (unfortunately, teams are inconsistent about whether they show taxes and fees in the sticker price, so my numbers aren’t perfect) for the 17 games of the MLS regular season. (Or 16, for Columbus Crew fans, where the Miami game is excluded from their package. But I didn’t adjust for that because it’s very stupid.)
Comparing just the 2024 average price ($492.03) against the 2025 average price ($484.03) it would look like MLS tickets are getting cheaper. But the 2024 data includes actual prices for LAFC and Miami, which were--by far--the two most expensive I could get data for. Since I couldn’t get their information for 2025, the average is skewed lower. Removing them, the 2024 average was $460, making 2025 tickets 5.2% higher league-wide.
But that average hides several interesting data points. Excluding the teams for which I don’t have either ‘24 or ‘25 pricing (St. Louis, Miami, LAFC, and San Diego), eight MLS teams increased their STM price by more than 10% -- Colorado led the way with a 34% increase! (Though it is still cheaper than the league average.) Columbus was next with a 23% price increase -- made even worse by their reduction to 16 games noted above.)
Two MLS teams increased their prices by less than 1% (Toronto and Minnesota) and four (DC, Portland, San Jose, and Chicago) did not increase prices at all. Finally, three teams reduced the price of their cheapest season ticket (Charlotte, New England, and Montreal) -- though it should be noted that favorable-to-the-US exchange rates played a role there. All three Canadian teams increased their prices in Canadian Dollars, but I convert to USD for the index based on the exchange rate on January 1st. Thanks to that exchange rate difference, Montreal led the league by lowering its STM price (in USD) by almost 5%.
The 2025 Index
There were issues with tables displaying incorrectly last year, so you can instead view the full index, its data sources, and sort to your heart’s content on this Google Sheet. Briefly, here are the top finishers.
In first place, Nashville SC (120.9 points). (Again, not comparable to 2024 point totals.) This was a well-rounded performance by the NSC organization. Last year, when Nashville ranked 6th in the index, I noted that “Below-average ticket prices balance out their below-average play.” Well, they kept the first and fixed the second. At Geodis Park, NSC has earned 2.07 APPG (6th best in MLS), losing only twice, and brought in an average of 25,862 fans (5th) to see it. Although the price for a supporter’s ticket rose by 21% compared to 2024, at $391 it is still well below league average (7th cheapest).
Second place goes to FC Cincinnati (113.4 points). Below-average ticket prices (9th cheapest) and a 95%-full stadium boost an 11th best (tied) APPG at home to help the Orange and Blue jump seven spots, from 9th in 2024..
In third place, jumping out to immediate success in the league and this index is San Diego FC (112.7 points). Although their home record is middling (and marred by three 0-0 draws), the Chomiums are filling Snapdragon to about 80% full with 28K fans (4th highest) and charging supporters even less than Nashville ($378, 6th cheapest).
Behind San Diego by just 13 one-thousands of a point is Orlando City SC (112.7 points). The teams have similar home records with seven wins apiece and they fill their stadiums to about the same level. Orlando has the MLS’s cheapest non-Canadian season tickets ($335) but San Diego edged them out by bringing 8,100 more people to each match in its larger stadium.
Rounding out the top five is last year’s #1, Real Salt Lake (107.5 points). In 2024, I noted that RSL “has the second-lowest ticket price in the league, third-highest adjusted points per game, and sells a respectable 95% of its seats.” The ticket price fact remains true among US teams (Montreal and Vancouver are cheapest this year due to the exchange rate changes) and RSL’s attendance is a still-respectable 91%. However, with a home record of 6-6-1 (and that one was a 0-0 tie), its APPG has fallen to below league average and the front office will need to try other ways to keep fans coming in the door until performance improves.
