With precisely twenty-seven home games now played at the newly constructed Trail at Multnomah (Portland's home stadium), the Lumberjacks have played 1/3 of their regular season home games for the 2040 season. Being a new team full of excitement, there was cloud of mystery over how the attendance would be for the inaugural season. Some experts predicted high numbers thanks to a high fan interest for a new ball club. Some predicted lower than expected totals due to the lack of winning and unfamiliar faces.
When ticket sales opened, the latter of the experts appeared to be in the right. Opening with $17.50 ticket prices, Portland watched as fewer than 10,000 fans bought season tickets which generated a league low $9 million in season ticket revenue. David Wallace, the Lumberjacks majority owner, quickly dropped the ticket prices by $5 in order to encourage more fans to come to the games. So far, it has been a roller coaster attendance ride. Trying to decipher why things have been so up and down, Wallace compiled all of the attendance data. Here is the April information on attendance.
Opponent | Attendance | Roof Open | Day of Week |
Hawaii | 24,862 | No | Wednesday |
Hawaii | 9,379 | No | Thursday |
Hawaii | 12,506 | Yes | Friday |
Valencia | 23,008 | No | Saturday |
Valencia | 25,112 | Yes | Sunday |
Valencia | 13,947 | No | Monday |
Chicago | 13,630 | No | Wednesday |
Chicago | 12,611 | No | Thursday |
Yellow Springs | 20,470 | Yes | Friday |
Yellow Springs | 21,206 | Yes | Saturday |
Yellow Springs | 18,084 | No | Sunday |
Yellow Springs | 10,868 | No | Monday |
Long Beach | 23,623 | Yes | Friday |
Long Beach | 23,269 | Yes | Saturday |
Long Beach | 20,333 | No | Sunday |
Long Beach | 13,020 | No | Monday |
For the month of May thus far, here is the breakdown....
Opponent | Attendance | Roof Open | Day of Week |
Twin Cities | 9,979 | No | Tuesday |
Twin Cities | 8,637 | Yes | Wednesday |
Seattle | 37,259 | No | Wednesday |
Seattle | 36,914 | Yes | Thursday |
Seattle | 39,938 | No | Friday |
Vancouver | 39,665 | Yes | Saturday |
Vancouver | 37,706 | Yes | Sunday |
Vancouver | 29,396 | No | Monday |
Nashville | 27,301 | No | Wednesday |
Nasvhille | 28,024 | Yes | Thursday |
Des Moines | 34,445 | Yes | Friday |
After compiling all of this information into separate charts, Wallace is yet to find much of a correlation between anything and attendance thus far in Portland. The roof being opened or closed doesn't seem to illustrate much. When broken down separately, that information shows:
Roof | Number of Times | Avg. Attendance |
Open | 12 | 25,965 |
Closed | 15 | 20,241 |
That chart would indicate there is a correlation between the roof being open and attendence. I mean, 5,000+ fans is a pretty big margin. Is it all a coincidence? Most likely. I say that only because the lowest attended game this season saw the roof open. Granted, that Twin Cities series is an outlier in nearly all facets of how you look at it. And of course, the highest attended game this season saw the roof closed. So what about the day of the week. Does that matter in attendance? Wallace presented that information.
Day of the Week | Number of Games | Avg Attendance |
Monday | 4 | 16,808 |
Tuesday | 1 | 9,979 |
Wednesday | 5 | 22,338 |
Thursday | 4 | 21,732 |
Friday | 5 | 26,196 |
Saturday | 4 | 26,787 |
Sunday | 4 | 25,309 |
So based on this information, it's rather clear that fans prefer their weekend games. You can throw Tuesday out right now due to the sample size of just 1 game against Twin Cities. In the end, David Wallace had this to say.
"Clearly it is still a very small sample size and perhaps there is no real correlation in anything. Perhaps the games with higher attendance are teams people want to see. Perhaps they do prefer the roof opened to the roof being closed. I do think, as of right now, fans do like games on the weekend based on how we've had a few series overlap into Monday and we're typically drawing less fans on the Monday games compared to the ones over the weekend. But one thing we are excited about is that the attendance is increasing going into May. And that's something to be excited for in Portland."
Month | Average Attendence |
April | 16,871 |
May | 29,933 |