College Soccer Arenas, Explored

Hello and thank you for taking time to read NILnomics.

As I mentioned in the last issue, I was on vacation all last week. That didn’t leave much time for data analysis, writing, and coding. But I won’t leave you with nothing!

I’m going to do one last data exploration in the college soccer space given that community has given me such a boost lately. We’ll go back to general athletic department revenue/expense analysis next week. Today there’ll be:

• Soccer Arena Capacity - I dig into what the internet says is the seating capacity at all FBS conference soccer arenas

Pour a drink. Get comfortable. Let’s get into it.

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Before We Get Started, a Milestone

I just wanted to note that last week, while I was away, the NILnomics newsletter hit 100 subscribers!

I wanted to thank all of you for hitting that subscribe button and finding time in your life to read through my little corner of the college athletics space. Hope I’m providing you an interesting perspective, data you can’t get anywhere else, and unique analysis that makes the most of your time.

As I mentioned in that tweet, I’m going to do a thank-you livestream to celebrate. On Tuesday, July 29th, I will be streaming from 9pm - 12am EST on a Youtube channel I will be scrambling to set up. What will I be doing? If anyone logs on, I’ll be chatting. Interacting with you, my audience. If you have a topic to discuss, email me. And if no one shows up, I’ll just start manually entering all the data from the annual financial reports that schools send me that I my code can’t scrape because the image quality is so bad. So - it’ll be captivating one way or another. Hope you’ll join me one way or another!

College Soccer Arenas

For anyone new to NILnomics, you may not realize just how much I love sports venues. I have a life goal/bucket list of going to every major North American sports venue. I’ve already looked at the venue sizes in football and hockey so why not do the same for soccer?

Quick Takeaways:

• It has to be said that the major capacity arenas are all almost universally a circumstance where the school lets the soccer team share space with their football team. Nevada’s Mackay Stadium is of course the extreme example of this, but Kent and Buffalo have the same policy. Credit to Cal’s Edwards Stadium (22k) and Texas’ Myers Stadium (20k) for being the largest non-football soccer stadiums. Although even they both share space with their track and field teams.

• The overall average capacity is 3,223 which is clearly a right skewed distribution as the median is 2,000.

• I didn’t come into this analysis with any expectations, but am I the only one surprised to see 35 FBS level institutions with only 1,000 seats for their soccer venues?

• By my count, 62 of the 132 soccer arenas have the word “Soccer” in their name. I was struck by how many had generic names like “Appalachian Soccer Stadium” or “Ute Soccer Field.” If I’m a rich alumni, there can’t be a cheaper way to get a field named after you than donating to soccer.

Analyst’s Desk

To get this data, I went to each school’s athletics department website and Wikipedia. It was surprisingly difficult to get a capacity figure for many of these schools. It should be noted that this is the official capacity and not how many people can actually be at the venue. I noticed in many of the picture of these arenas, there were designated areas for fans to sit, bring chairs, set up picnics, etc. Many of the schools reported record attendances well above their listed fan capacity. So take this data with a grain of salt. I’ll also note I didn’t differentiate between mens/womens soccer arenas as it was universally the case that they share arenas. The data for this is available on my Kaggle website if you want to see a bit more information that this graphic shares (I gathered the address, name, cost, and grand opening of all venues if I could find it).

📖 What I’m Reading/Listening To 🔉 

No time for podcasts on vacation. I’ll have more for you next week!

Final Thoughts

Thanks for reading this week’s issue.

I’ll be back next week with a full issue for you. I had a whole week to think of where to go next. Here’s what you’ll find in next week’s issue:

1. My first book review!

2. Scraping athletic department staff directories

3. Looking at hockey alumni donations

Until next time,

Greg Chick, PhD

Data Analyst

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