Question About City Population

[Klew1986]

So I am setting up a fictional game and I was wondering if a teams stadium holds more fans than the actual city population, will that affect attendance?

For example, my Aspen team has a stadium that can hold 53,100, but their population in real life is only 6,600.

[Cryomaniac]

I don't think it makes a difference. If the stadium has a certain capacity, I would assume the attendance is based on that. i could be wrong though.

[Mr. Baseball]

Nope, doesn't make a difference. I've had cities in other leagues even smaller than that, and I've never had a problem with attendance figures.

[Klew1986]

I feel like in future versions it should matter. But I guess since its fictional, it doesn't matter.

[DreamTeams]

Keep in mind that market size can exceeed the city limits so actual population of a city is not very important.

[The Game]

Market Size, Fan Loyalty & Fan interest is what makes capacity not population. I was in an online league where my city was only 12,000-15,000 yet I was #2 in attendance over 2 seasons at around 2.5 million.
Also in one of my defunct fictional league I had a team in the town I live in now at around 7,000 and was 4 of 16 in the league in attendance. Fan interest was only 3 after some odd trades I did.

[statfreak]

Originally Posted by Klew1986

I feel like in future versions it should matter. But I guess since its fictional, it doesn't matter.

Why should it matter? Not everyone that attends a game is from the city the stadium is located in. On any given day, the crowd is probably half city residents / half neighboring cities and/or people visiting from other parts of the state / country.

The only way I'd even think of supporting such an inclusion would be if OOTP took into account the entire population within an hour drive of the stadium and then added a certain amount of the visiting team's fans that traveled to watch the team.

Besides, you can accomplish this on your own by changing the stadium capacity to match the small city population, though in the instance mentioned in first post, I'd still have the Aspen stadium with at least 20,000.

[Cinnamon J. Scudworth]

Originally Posted by statfreak

The only way I'd even think of supporting such an inclusion would be if OOTP took into account the entire population within an hour drive of the stadium and then added a certain amount of the visiting team's fans that traveled to watch the team.

Right. To use a football analogy, there would have to be some way for OOTP to recognize that East Rutherford, NJ (population 8,913), is really part of the New York City market.

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by statfreak

Why should it matter? Not everyone that attends a game is from the city the stadium is located in. On any given day, the crowd is probably half city residents / half neighboring cities and/or people visiting from other parts of the state / country.

As far as I'm aware there is no data that would support such a supposition.

Originally Posted by statfreak

The only way I'd even think of supporting such an inclusion would be if OOTP took into account the entire population within an hour drive of the stadium and then added a certain amount of the visiting team's fans that traveled to watch the team.

The former part is reasonable (though an hour's drive is an arbitrary figure); the latter part is likely insignificant to overall attendance, at least at the major league level.

Using a purely geographic radius figure to determine city/market population is something I've looked into, but it has some issues. You can get a lot of overlapping areas that way depending on the target location - so how does one go about assigning the population in those overlaps? Getting the necessary data to do such calculations for historical population counts would be difficult at best.

I think a variant of the metropolitan statistical area used by the Census Bureau offers a better way of establishing city/market populations which serve as the basis for attendance. The data for those is ample and easily accessible, both for current and past years. I've been researching the topic and am (finally) getting close to a system I think will work reasonably well. (Then it's a matter of writing it up as a proposal and submitting it...)

[Muzamba]

Not only do we need to consider cities with smaller populations within large metro areas, we also need to keep in mind that there are some relatively small towns that attract a significant number of tourists at various times of the year. For instance, it's not uncommon for certain resort towns to have a permanent population that's only a tenth of what it is in the summer vacation season. These towns are often more logical locations, especially for short-season minor league teams, than many cities with much larger populations.

Another example would be Doubleday Field at the Baseball Hall of Fame, which has a capacity of just under 10,000, despite the city of Cooperstown having a population of under 2,000. Of course, the stadium capacity in this case has more to do with a single game/event than it does an entire season.

Point is, whether it's an entire season or a single game, there are plenty of examples in real life of small towns whose populations temporarily grow much larger than their listed ("off-season") population. Therefore, it's reasonable to think a town like Aspen could support a stadium with a capacity that's much larger than its population, although Aspen is obviously more of a winter tourist mecca than a summer destination, so I doubt it would be ideal baseball weather when it's at its peak population. (Perhaps it should be a dome! ) Plus I doubt, in reality, that it could support a capacity of over 20,000, even in the middle of ski season... but I'm being overly nitpicky here.

But regardless of whether we're talking about suburbs of a major city or small towns whose populations swell during certain seasons or events, there should definitely be a way for OOTP to recognize these instances and reflect them when choosing appropriate locations for teams and their respective stadium capacities. Hopefully, we'll be able to incorporate a more robust database in the next version -- or at least in future versions --of the game, that takes these factors into account.

[Le Grande Orange]

Hey Muzamba! How have you been? Haven't seen you post 'round here in awhile.

Originally Posted by Muzamba

But regardless of whether we're talking about suburbs of a major city or small towns whose populations swell during certain seasons or events, there should definitely be a way for OOTP to recognize these instances and reflect them when choosing appropriate locations for teams and their respective stadium capacities.

In regards to the bolded, based on the data I've looked at, stadium capacity is much more a function of the level of ball played by the club rather than the city population size. A Triple-A team will not have a 30,000 seat park even if it's located in a huge city simply because Triple-A baseball won't draw that size of crowd over the season regardless of the size of the host city.*

Of course, the lower the level of ball, the smaller the host city tends to be, so there is some synergy taking place.


* There have only been seven instances in all of minor league history where a club has drawn more than one million fans during a season. These were Louisville in 1983 and Buffalo from 1988 through 1993. The all-time record is 1,188,972 set by Buffalo in 1991, an average of just over 16,500 per game.

[Muzamba]

Doing well, LGO..... finally!

Moved into a new house this summer and it's a bit of a fixer-upper (not to mention the fact that we've had incredibly unreliable internet service until just recently.) So that's taken up the bulk of my time over the past few months. However, I should gradually have more time to focus on the game/forums over the next few weeks.

And yes, one of the first things I'm going to get onto Markus and Andreas about is improving the database, which -- let's hope -- will include more realistic data for league/team creation. So let's definitely try to get a proposal prepared to present to M&A that includes criteria for utilizing metro areas for team locations.

I'd be interested to see your most recent thoughts on this subject, so shoot me a PM when you get the chance.

[EvilGenius]

Expanding a little bit on the original question, this is more than just about attendance, Market Size is also very closely related to this question. Clearly, the bulk of the attendance is from people who live within a reasonable distance to the stadium. If you live in Flagstaff, you're not likely going to be getting season tickets to the Diamondbacks playing in Pheonix. However, no doubt the games are televised out there contributing to Market Size. That's a significant revenue source that can't be ignored.

This has always been a tricky issue from a programming standpoint. There are a lot of variables interacting with each other.

Not only is the question about the population of the metro area, but you can't ignore where the next nearest team plays. So the "metro area" can be quite fluid. Fan distribution doesn't necessarily follow expected paths.

Sometimes it follows state lines, sometimes it doesn't. If you live in northeastern PA (an hour's drive to Yankee Stadium) do you root for the Yankees, or do you stay loyal to the Phillies (2 1/2 hours away) because they play in your state? Staying with the Yankees, how far upstate do you have to go before residents feel no connection the closest team?

On top of which, what happens when Metro Areas overlap? New York, Chicago, and LA have more than one team playing in the same city. Baltimore and Washington are practically on top of each other. Are fans split evenly between the two teams, thus essentially halving the market size in that area?

I don't know the answer to any of these. It would be amazingly difficult from a programming standpoint to define all the parameters into a neat algorithm to calculate them accurately. It is clearly not as simple as "draw a circle around your city, sum up the population, and that's your Market Size".

Though as a side note, I'm not opposed to using that as a better solution than simply assigning random market sizes.

I would also propose that if a team's Market Size increases for whatever reason, one of the neighboring teams should have a corresponding decrease in Market Size.

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by EvilGenius

Expanding a little bit on the original question, this is more than just about attendance, Market Size is also very closely related to this question. Clearly, the bulk of the attendance is from people who live within a reasonable distance to the stadium. If you live in Flagstaff, you're not likely going to be getting season tickets to the Diamondbacks playing in Pheonix. However, no doubt the games are televised out there contributing to Market Size. That's a significant revenue source that can't be ignored.

That raises the question of perhaps having separate markets ratings, one for attendance considerations and another for media purposes. Nielsen does break down the U.S. into distinct media markets (based roughly on the reach of television and radio broadcasting signals). Of course, the defined media markets (DMAs) do sometimes contain several cities that otherwise might be individualized for non-media market rankings.

Originally Posted by EvilGenius

This has always been a tricky issue from a programming standpoint. There are a lot of variables interacting with each other.

Not only is the question about the population of the metro area, but you can't ignore where the next nearest team plays. So the "metro area" can be quite fluid. Fan distribution doesn't necessarily follow expected paths.

Sometimes it follows state lines, sometimes it doesn't. If you live in northeastern PA (an hour's drive to Yankee Stadium) do you root for the Yankees, or do you stay loyal to the Phillies (2 1/2 hours away) because they play in your state? Staying with the Yankees, how far upstate do you have to go before residents feel no connection the closest team?

All of which speaks to the nuances of actual market size considerations for real-world sports. For OOTP's purposes I think a more simplified and streamlined system is satisfactory, especially one which allows for both current and past ratings of market sizes. (Some data, such as personal income, is simply not available for earlier years because it wasn't tracked. The one bit of data that is available in every census regardless of the year are population totals.)

Originally Posted by EvilGenius

On top of which, what happens when Metro Areas overlap? New York, Chicago, and LA have more than one team playing in the same city ... Are fans split evenly between the two teams, thus essentially halving the market size in that area?

The conventional wisdom is to cut two-team cities in half when it comes to determining their market size. But based on some econometric studies (such as the ones in Andrew Zimbalist's Baseball and Billions) indicate that no adjustment to two-team cities need be made at all. Instead, the presence of a second team in a city increases overall interest in the sport, and attendance is higher than it would be if there was only one club. Also, the two teams are typically not in direct competition with each other due to the fact schedules are arranged such that when one club is at home the other is on the road—thus only one of the two clubs' games can be attended at any given time. (This might be why two-team cities do better on a per game attendance basis than single team cities: fans in a two-team city can attend games all season long while in a one-team city they only attend games for half the season, since for the other half of the time the club is on the road. You can see this sort of attendance boost even in minor league cities when a city has hosted two minor league clubs in the same season.)

Originally Posted by EvilGenius

It is clearly not as simple as "draw a circle around your city, sum up the population, and that's your Market Size".

Not in the real world, certainly, but for OOTP's purposes a simplified system such as that is probably sufficient. I personally think market size should be a factor of both population size and the per capita income of that population, but per capita income data only goes back to about 1960 (at least in U.S. census data; there is income data for the two prior censuses, but those used median family income, which is an entirely different measure).

I'm not sure about separate media market listings. I see some justification for including them but the media markets would be different definitions than markets based on city metro populations.

[Cryomaniac]

And to complicate this discussion further, a lot of this only really applies to the US. Things seem to work differently in Europe.

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by Cryomaniac

And to complicate this discussion further, a lot of this only really applies to the US. Things seem to work differently in Europe.

I'd say that's due more to the particulars of the open league model typically used elsewhere in the world and the financial arrangements of those leagues. Even in North America you can see differences—there's an NFL team in Green Bay, WI* but it'd never host an MLB club. The reason is because the NFL has a high proportion of equally shared revenue, allowing even a nominally small place like Green Bay to support a club, whereas baseball is much more dependent on locally generated revenue.

Teams located in small population cities in a league with low national revenue and/or little or no revenue sharing will have a much more difficult time financially.


*BEA-estimated 2010 metropolitan statistical area population: 307,096. In comparison, the smallest MSA population in MLB is that of Milwaukee at 1,556,953. The Green Bay area is thus just one-fifth the size of Milwaukee.

[Le Grande Orange]

The following link might be of interest. It's a series of online articles by The Conference Board of Canada looking at the matter of sports economics. Granted, it's examining the subject mostly as it relates to Canadian locations, but the material is still relevant. You can find the first article here. The links to the other articles can be found on the right side of the page.


(I found something mentioned in the second article interesting. It laid out a simple formula to make a quick estimate of the necessary size of a market to support a sports club: an area population equal to the league average per game attendance times the number of home games played. So for an MLB club, for instance, a league average of about 30,000 fans per game times 81 home games equals 2.43 million. So a prospective location for an MLB club should have a metropolitan area population of about 2.4 million. Interestingly, of the 29 U.S.-based MLB clubs, 24 of them match or exceed this total. Only Pittsburgh [2.36 million], Cincinnati [2.13 million], Cleveland [2.08 million], Kansas City [2.04 million], and Milwaukee [1.56 million] fall below the threshold.

Of course other factors would come into play in any more detailed analysis [as the article itself acknowledges] but as a rough estimate I found the formula intriguing. I think a variation of it—especially if connected to a more refined definition of market size—could be used to good effect in OOTP to better determine the new home of any franchise that relocates due to league evolution.)

[Cryomaniac]

Originally Posted by Le Grande Orange

I'd say that's due more to the particulars of the open league model typically used elsewhere in the world and the financial arrangements of those leagues. Even in North America you can see differences—there's an NFL team in Green Bay, WI* but it'd never host an MLB club. The reason is because the NFL has a high proportion of equally shared revenue, allowing even a nominally small place like Green Bay to support a club, whereas baseball is much more dependent on locally generated revenue.

Teams located in small population cities in a league with low national revenue and/or little or no revenue sharing will have a much more difficult time financially.


*BEA-estimated 2010 metropolitan statistical area population: 307,096. In comparison, the smallest MSA population in MLB is that of Milwaukee at 1,556,953. The Green Bay area is thus just one-fifth the size of Milwaukee.

That makes sense. I mean, London has 6 teams in the Premier League in soccer, but I have doubts it could support more that many franchises in a baseball league, assuming baseball was as popular in the UK as in the US.

[TheWrightWay]

I am sure people who are not from the town of Aspen would come to see the game. I'm not from Queens, but I go to a bunch of Mets games.

[Muzamba]

Originally Posted by EvilGenius

Expanding a little bit on the original question, this is more than just about attendance, Market Size is also very closely related to this question. Clearly, the bulk of the attendance is from people who live within a reasonable distance to the stadium. If you live in Flagstaff, you're not likely going to be getting season tickets to the Diamondbacks playing in Pheonix. However, no doubt the games are televised out there contributing to Market Size. That's a significant revenue source that can't be ignored.

This has always been a tricky issue from a programming standpoint. There are a lot of variables interacting with each other.

Not only is the question about the population of the metro area, but you can't ignore where the next nearest team plays. So the "metro area" can be quite fluid. Fan distribution doesn't necessarily follow expected paths.

Sometimes it follows state lines, sometimes it doesn't. If you live in northeastern PA (an hour's drive to Yankee Stadium) do you root for the Yankees, or do you stay loyal to the Phillies (2 1/2 hours away) because they play in your state? Staying with the Yankees, how far upstate do you have to go before residents feel no connection the closest team?

On top of which, what happens when Metro Areas overlap? New York, Chicago, and LA have more than one team playing in the same city. Baltimore and Washington are practically on top of each other. Are fans split evenly between the two teams, thus essentially halving the market size in that area?

I don't know the answer to any of these. It would be amazingly difficult from a programming standpoint to define all the parameters into a neat algorithm to calculate them accurately. It is clearly not as simple as "draw a circle around your city, sum up the population, and that's your Market Size".

Though as a side note, I'm not opposed to using that as a better solution than simply assigning random market sizes.

I would also propose that if a team's Market Size increases for whatever reason, one of the neighboring teams should have a corresponding decrease in Market Size.

Here's something I stumbled onto just the other day that's relevant to what you're talking about. I'm not sure how accurate it is, as it was posted on a blog and takes a somewhat whimsical view of the subject. However, it could at least serve as a reference point for determining the parameters of each team's core fanbase.

MLB Fanbase Map