Fun Late-Night Activities: Factchecking Deadspin

I would post this in the comments on Deadspin but, well, I can't.

We have here a weekend post about crazy footysoccer. A little bit of the Google would've revealed that it's not Bayern Munich, but Cologne v. Dulsberg. And the video is from 2005. The best response I've got is that it makes me thankful that Lingering Bursitis had the good sense to bring all of us loons together to create UF.

Anyway, don't forget that our liveblog action of the Confederations Cup starts on Sunday. The NY Kid has South Africa v. Iraq (9:55 am EST) and I've got Spain v. New Zealand (2:25 pm EST). We'll be liveblogging the rest of the matches as well.

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Ten Facts that Might Be Wrong: Part 4 (and last)

Last one people. Promise because, well, fish barrel shoot.

If you missed the scintillating pre-quels, click here (links to the two posts prior are up top in that post). And set aside some time as they got a little wordy. The original article is here.

Again, I am reluctant to reward shoddy journalism with more clicks, but eh, if it leads to Ric being more thorough in the future, then maybe some good might come from it.

Anyway, "fact" number seven has buried in its 204 words—and that's one long ass fact—this little bit of tid (emphasis his).

Do you know that the TWO most-attended sporting events EVER HELD at Reliant Stadium in Houston are USA-MEXICO friendly matches - matches held in the middle of the week (Wednesdays) with no official importance of any kind ?

Why no, I didn't know that. And there's probably a good reason for that.

It's because they aren't the two most attended events at Reliant Stadium. The stadium hosted a Super Bowl. Number XXXVIII to be exact. That was the one where Panther's coach John Fox went chasing after a missed extra point by continually going for two. But by failing continually, he gave the Patriots a chance to kick a game-winning field goal and the whistle.

And let me give all "throwball" coaches some free advice. Never even consider, bother, worry, or think about going for 2 until there are less than 4 minutes to go in the game. There, I just saved someone's job.

Back to the issue at hand. The attendance for the Super Bowl at Reliant was 71,525.

The attendance for the February 6, 2008 US v Mexico friendly was 70,103. And the attendance for the May 8, 2003 friendly was 69,582.

So for those that might need a little help:

71,525 > 70,103 > 69,582 OR Super Bowl > US v. Mexico II > US v. Mexico I

Now the 70,103 was the 2nd largest soccer crowd in US history. That's pretty good, although I imagine that's for a US soccer match, not just any soccer match as the US hosted a World Cup back in 1994 and pretty much every match at Stanford Stadium and Giants Stadium outdrew 70,000.

But really of all the errors with the original post, this is the least explicable or excusable. It took about 90 seconds to find the three attendance numbers here. Just proclaiming something it bold doesn't make it true. It makes you seem like Skip Bayless. Honest mistakes are sometimes excusable, being Bayless-esque isn't.

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Ten Facts That Might Be Wrong: Part 3

Well, we're probably only going to squeeze two more posts out of this (and this).

And it's actually not because of laziness (at least not on our part) but moreso because of what looks to be laziness on their part.

All of the old skool journalists out there—the WIlbons and the Mariottis—cry about bloggers and how any idiot with a net connection can now start publishing like it's a bad thing. In reality they are probably just scared of the competition and maybe a little upset because many of barriers to entering the field of sportswriting they suffered to get over have gone 'poof.'

Well, not to get all preachy here, but a) most bloggers understand that they are not journalists and b) the market tends to sort these things out. Bloggers that are smart, funny, informative, and accurate should survive. Bloggers who are too lazy to use a shift key or check their facts probably will not.

So I feel like I'm subverting this very belief by continuing to reward these guys with more traffic. But in the interest of completion, we'll do it reluctantly maybe a couple of more times.

Fortunately, the claims made in that post get easier to combine as they become a little more qualitative. So this post will take on claims 3-6, which basically say that the media is under-serving the soccer market.

Really? The media's job is to deliver an audience to advertisers. If that audience were there—specifically in this instance a soccer audience large enough to earn a profit from—the media would find it and serve it.

The fact that the soccer ratings in this country are not that great (see post number two) is pretty much an indication that the media is giving soccer about the right amount of coverage. That is "not much." Yes, there is a channel dedicated just to soccer (Fox Soccer Channel) but that is subsidized across all cable subscribers.

The same way you probably don't watch Lifetime, your cable bill helps keep it on the air, just as your 30-something single female neighbor whose life revolves around Rachel Ray and food porn keeps Max Bretos on your TV.

Has soccer grown in the US as a spectator sport? Maybe. The attendance numbers for MLS have been trending up over the last few years. But if you look at average attendance for every year of the league it's taken a decade to get back to where it started, meaning that after ten years the league is not quite back to where it was attendance-wise for it inaugural season.

Is that the only measure of "spectator"? No. And I'm pretty sure that when I go to my local bars to watch EPL matches on Saturday and Sunday mornings there are generally more people there now than there were two years ago. Do I have a reliable measure for this? No. Does that mean there has been an explosion? No. Am I encouraged by this? Yes. But it shouldn't lead to wild claims about soccer's popularity in the U.S.

Claim 4 is kind of silly on its face. Again, if there is a huge market there, it will get served. Media companies are in the business of business. And if you believe in efficient markets then the Latino market is not being underserved. Again, look at the Univision numbers (again in post number two) for the US v Mexico friendlies. They know how big the market is and they are giving it what they want. It's not just big matches. There is plenty of Primera División fútbol on Spanish-language TV in the US.

Some of the remaining claims are just plain stupid, the best being maybe this (and not just for the obfuscating grammar):

"I have seen stories about the most popular NFL jerseys in sales. These reports never mention that MLS Galaxy jerseys (and for an individual player, David Beckham), and USA national team jerseys are big sellers, and in the case of the former, they sell MORE THAN ANY NFL team or player name."

You know why? Because David Beckham doesn't play in the fucking NFL! He plays in the MLS. Perhaps you'd like to also complain that his stats don't show up in MLB box scores.

Maybe the author meant to compare Beckham to all sports jerseys. And he makes this claim:

"Beckham’s Galaxy jersey has also been the biggest-selling of ALL adidas jerseys of ALL sports in the ENTIRE WORLD since it was first released."

Really? Okay. Data please, source it. Oh, that's right, there is no sourced data for any claim in this entire fucking piece.

Still, the one about adidas sales figures I might believe. But I looked, and couldn't find anything to support it. But I did find out that Becks can't even beat himself. Yes, he sold a very impressive 250,000 Galaxy jerseys through July of 07, but that is dwarfed by the million he sold at his first six months at Real Madrid.

Really, this isn't even fun or interesting anymore.

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Ten Facts That Might Be Wrong: Part 2

Ugh, am I going to have to come up with a snazzy intro every time I do this?

I hope not. Instead maybe just look here.

Basically, that author of that post, Ric, made 10 claims, claims which on the surface seemed a little counter to what the average person—whoever that is—might think. I'm all for bucking conventional wisdom, but without any data to back it up, the facts were kind of hard to believe on face value. And apparently with good reason.

So I stupidly decided to do the work. Part 1 is here.

This is Part 2.

Welcome.

And it deals with the following claim (again, his emphasis and italics):

Soccer is watched on TV by more Americans than any other sport outside of the Big 3 major league sports, yet it is treated by most mainstream media as though it is of less interest than sports like golf, auto racing, tennis, ice hockey, etc. Again, pro soccer is watched on TV by FAR more people here in the U.S. than any of those.

Getting an apples-to-apples comparison between sports might be a little difficult here. Specifically, what is "soccer"? Is that the MLS? Is it the US Men's National Team? Is it Mexican soccer on Univision? Is it the EPL (suck it, Barclay's) on FSC?

We'll tackle each of these to some extent, except maybe FSC because I'm lazy and I know those weekly numbers are relatively tiny.

To start let's look at good soccer numbers. By all accounts (and here "all" means "Disney") the ratings for the 2006 World Cup were exceptional. The USA v. Ghana match pulled a 2.6 rating for ESPN, making it, at the time, the second most watched soccer match in the network's history, behind only the 2002 US v. Germany quarterfinal in the 2002 World Cup.

So soccer, when it does a dynamite number in the US, it pulls a 2.6. Let's compare that 2.6 to golf, auto racing, tennis, and ice hockey—the sports Ric singled out.

So picking just a random week—Feb. 4-Feb. 10 of this year—here are the numbers (and all of these are for Sunday ratings). Yes, I understand that there's over 18 months between the two, but I'm trying to give soccer a chance here, so I'm looking for a relatively recent but strong showing for soccer.

Auto Racing: Daytona 500 Pole Qualifying. It drew a 2.9. That's obviously higher than the US v. Ghana 2.6 from '06. And that's not the actual race, just the qualifying for it. The actual Daytona 500 on the following Sunday pulled a massive 10.2 rating.

Golf: AT&T Pebble Beach. Final Round. It earned a 2.5 rating. This is just slightly below the 2.6 being used here. But, it's worth noting that this was not a major and, more importantly, had no Tiger Woods. Tiger Woods is golf right now. And when he doesn't play, people don't watch. So when nobody is watching golf, it still draws just below the second highest rated soccer broadcast ever on ESPN (at the time).

Tennis: No tennis that week. And I'm feeling too lazy to go look up ratings for tennis (hey, I'm already doing someone else's work, and I'm not getting paid, so sue me).

NHL: Ducks v Red Wings. On NBC this got a .8. Ugh. That's bad. But again we're comparing it to a highly watched soccer broadcast. How does it compare to a random MLS match?

For the 14 MLS games on ESPN prior to Beckham's arrival, the average rating was a .2 (and that was flat compared to the previous year, which also drew a .2)

So a random regular season game for MLS draws a .2 and a random regular season game for NHL a .8 number.

How is .2 > .8?

It's not. It's four times smaller.

But what about Spanish-speaking people in the US? What are their numbers like? Good question. The US v. Mexico friendly played February 9, 2007 in Glendale, AZ., was at the time the number 2 most watched Spanish-language sports broadcast ever, beating every Super Bowl ever among Hispanics.

And in L.A., nearly 1.2 million people watched the local Spanish-language broadcast, beating out American Idol and Lost.

That's good, yeah? Actually it is. It's very good. But that's the US and Mexican national teams. It's the most heated rivalry in CONCACAF. And frankly, the longer the American dominance of Mexico on our home soil continues, the more interest the rivalry draws. As for plain old Mexican Primera División, the New York Univision affiliate attracts about 29,000 viewers for weekly Sunday matches. And unlike a US v. Mexico friendly, that is not an impressive number. Hell, tennis might beat that (again, too lazy to look).

Basically, I can't even really construct an argument using the best case for soccer and the worst case for other sports that would support a statement like "pro soccer is watched on TV by FAR more people here in the U.S. than [other sports]."

I'm not trying to bash soccer. Hell, I love it. This is a soccer blog, but really even the biggest fanboys don't do the sport any favors in the US when they make claims that simply aren't supported by the numbers.

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Ten Facts That Might Be Wrong: Part 1

We here at UF really scour every corner of the Internet—it has corners, doesn't it—to bring you the best of gay iconic managers embroiled in sex tape scandals, ugly uniforms, and bitching about shit performances by either Arsenal or Liverpool.

Occasionally we stumble across something of actual interest.

Then we promptly ignore it.

Until someone dug up this. It's a list of "10 Important Facts About Soccer's U.S. Popularity." And it's full of interesting little tidbits.

Unfortunately, there is almost no data to support the facts. They are just thrown out there by someone calling himself Ric. And I'm not badmouthing Ric for a lack of a surname. Hell, I go by Precious Roy.

Anyway, in response to Ric's lack of disclosure, one particularly sharp UF'er piped up on an email and said, "I'd love to see some data backing those up."

Done and done. Sort of. It's in the process of being done.

I was originally going to write one post addressing all ten items, but, after poking around the Net for data to discuss just the first, I realized this could easily be an enormously time-consuming pain in the ass and I'd like to sleep before, say, Tuesday.

Plus it would be far too long for anyone to want to read.

So, I'm going to do it in pieces. The pieces might get shorter as I get lazier and the claims get easier to deal with—specifically, I might start combining more than one of "Ric's" items into one of "Precious Roy's" posts—but installment number one deals only with claim number one. And claim number one reads as follows (emphasis and italics his):

1. Major League Soccer has a league-wide attendance average similar to the NBA and the NHL. The LA Galaxy - for many years the most popular MLS team by attendance - has had an attendance average higher than the NBA’s LA Lakers 3 out of the last 4 years, and higher than the LA Kings every year in this decade.

The average attendance for MLS in 2006 (I went with pre-Beckham numbers so as not to allow one Brit to skew everything) was 15,354. For the same year, average NBA attendance was 17,558; and NHL attendance was 16,550. Those numbers represent an increase over MLS of 14.3% and 7.8% respectively.

So are those numbers "similar"? The NHL, maybe. The NBA, a little less so, as 15% is fairly substantial.

But there is a problem with this analysis. Well actually there are two problems, but we'll take the obvious one first.

Think about the second claim, that the Galaxy had a higher average than the Lakers for three of the last four years. First, I didn't bother to confirm this. It is true for 2006, but I didn't feel like looking it up for the other 3 years. Why? Because it doesn't really mean much as a statistic.

Capacity for Staples Center in L.A. (where the Lakers play its home games) is only 19,079. The Lakers pretty much sell out every home game as they average over 99% of capacity—or 18,882 per game.

Capacity for the Home Depot Center, on the other hand, is about 50% greater than Staples Center at 27,000.

So yeah, the Galaxy outdraw the Lakers on average, but that's more a function of where they play than a function of popularity. The Lakers aren't less popular than the Galaxy they just play in a smaller venue. Their constraint is the size of their arena.

But the Lakers along with every other NBA team (and every other NHL team for that matter) also play 41 home games, compared to 16 home games for an MLS team.

Look at the 2006 Lakers' home total for the season of 774,189, and it dwarfs the Galaxy's total of 333,024 for the same year (from the average of 20,814 multiplied by 16 home games). So the Lakers, the 7th-highest drawing NBA team, pull in 2.34 times more fans in a season than MLS' top-drawing L.A. Galaxy.

The other problem with this analysis is that all attendance numbers are lies. Consider this. It's an About blogger relaying a non-scientific account of a beat writer questioning the attendance numbers of a Detroit Red Wings hockey game. The announced attendance was over 20,000 and the reporter claimed there couldn't have been more than 13,000.

So it's an anecdotal account. Big deal, right? It's not reliable.

Well, there's also this from the San Diego Union Tribune.

Yeah, it's kind of long. The gist is that everyone is inflating their numbers.

Maybe read this instead. It's much shorter and gives you the basic idea of how leagues report their attendance figures.

It might be most troubling for MLS though. What good are the MLS attendance numbers when a turnstile crowd of a Red Bull New York match is 3,719 but the announced crowd is 12,657?

Even worse, there is evidence that MLS is inflating beyond using "announced" instead of "turnstile" numbers.

This isn't to slam MLS. Hell, drawing around 10,000 for a soccer game in a non-soccer specific stadium in the US? That seems pretty good. Especially for a mid-week game.

Anyway, everyone is lying about their attendance numbers, MLS might be lying more than anyone else (or they might be getting out-lied by the NHL), but by any reasonable measure (and that probably doesn't include per-game average) the NHL and the NBA easily out-draw the MLS.

Although, if you believe ESPN literally nobody attends soccer matches in the US.

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