Winning games can sell more tickets. Selling more tickets can help a team increase payroll. Increasing payroll can lead to more wins. A virtuous cycle that I would like to see the Royals pull off for years to come, so I wanted to take a look at the early season attendance and whether the fans are showing up now that the team has been competitive for all of last season and the beginning of this one.
Looking at attendance is difficult on a game by game basis since lots of factors affect how many people show up. The opponent, day of the week, weather, if school is out, who is pitching, and several other things bump the number of tickets sold up and down creating a fairly volatile statistic. Last year’s team winning moved the average attendance from 16,136 in 2023 to 20,473 in 2024. That’s an increase of over 4,000 per game and almost 27%, which as a percentage increase is pretty large. In the early going this season, it looked like attendance was up a little, but again, with all the factors not enough to think it was significant. The average over the first 19 games this year was 17,862 versus 16,130 a year ago.
The last two weekend series have bumped the averages up a lot. For both the series Boston and St. Louis, almost 30,000 per game was reached with totals of 85,593 and 89,933 respectively for the two weekends. Those numbers would have made them the 2nd and 3rd largest weekend series in 2024. The only 2024 weekend that drew more than that was the Cubs at the end of July. Unfortunately, it is hard to compare the Cards and Red Sox to the same teams last season. The Red Sox were in Kansas City on a Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday in August and those nights just do not draw as much. The Cardinals are always a weekend, but last year it was that weird Friday and Saturday with an off Sunday, so they drew slightly more per game which is probably just due to Cards fans having less opportunities to pick their day at the K for the year.
I think that those last two series have big enough numbers to think that people are starting to vote a little more aggressively with their wallets. There is some other evidence in the opening weekend. For the home opening series, always a Thursday instead of Friday, the 2024 Royals played the Twins and drew 71,241 over the three games. This year, they played the Guardians and drew 76,826. The Twins are historically a better draw, so having more show up this year probably is indicative of increased season ticket sales, which would not be surprising for a team coming off of the playoffs versus the previous year’s team coming off of 106 losses.
It’s hard to say this early how many more fans they will draw in 2025, especially since staying in contention for the next 4 months is no guarantee. Jac Caglianone could help spike attendance a bit, at least in the short-term, when he is called up and that is looking more likely by the day. Again, many factors play into this including macro factors like the possibility of tariff based inflation and other things that are far outside the control of Royals. So far, I would say that they are trending to increase by a couple thousand per game partly because who they had in town for weekends last year just were not very good draws. This year they have a Dodgers series that I am sure is going to draw a ton along with a Mets series and two Tigers series that are starting to look more enticing based on the AL Central race.
For now, the arrows seem to be pointing up modestly. Maybe something like 2 to 3 thousand more per game looks achievable without significant deviation from the current path. That’s a 10-15% increase the year after a large increase, so if that does not sound like much, I would tell you it is significant. It would put them on track to draw close to 2014 levels and that team went to the World Series. I will start looking at Monday through Thursday now that school starts letting out and the weather should get better, but there is at least some hope that the city is buying into this team a bit more now.