AUDL Attendance 2015 Season

In a Silicon Valley Business Journal (August 7) article profiling Rob Lloyd, the owner of American Ultimate Disc League, attendance figures were tossed around.

Attendance numbers have been known from only a few teams - Madison Radicals (2013, 2014), Salt Lake Lions (2014), Montreal Royal (2015). This SVBJ article cites total attendance for the entire league in the last 2 seasons - 80,000 (2014) and 130,000 (2015), which averages to ~672 per game per team in 2014 and ~743 per game per team in the most recent season. The attendance total of the 2015 season - which added 9 new teams - is a 62.5% increase from 2014.

Attendance
2014: 80,000 total, 17 teams; 119 regular season games; 672.3 AVG/game/team
2015: 130,000 total, 25 teams; 175 regular season games; 742.9 AVG/game/team

NOTE: Cited numbers did not indicate whether post-seasons games were included in total. Graphed data assumes only regular season games.

Using the average ticket price in 2015 and the total attendance in the 2015 regular season, the grand total of AUDL ticket sales would be over $1 million; $1,350,700 to be exact.

NOTE: This assumes attendance total was all "paid" attendees.

Article text: AUDL attendance hit 130,000 this year, up from 80,000 the year before — largely due to the addition of eight new teams. But Lloyd said game attendance is growing, too. "We are doing really well on the West Coast and in the Southeast," Lloyd said. "Wherever we see high densities of universities and Millennials, the sport is really, really engaging with them."

Silicon Valley has a long history of influential tech and venture Ultimate players including Google's Sergey Brin, Draper Fisher Jurvetson's Steve Jurvetson, 500 Startups co-founder Dave McClure, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin and Pebble smartwatch founder Eric Migicovsky.

...

Lloyd said the league decided to rent the San Jose stadium, "not because we needed 18,000 seats but because it is perfect for this experience with the fans very close to the action." Avaya Stadium was chosen because it has festival space, which will be used for a $1 million charity challenge in which 26 teams of local technology, venture and sports personalities will compete in various events over the weekend. Some of the charity competitors are Lightspeed Venture Partners, Cisco, EMC, SAP, SolarCity and Salesforce.

"We think it would be great if we could get 5,000 to 7,000 people at this weekend's games but you just never know with these things," Lloyd told me. The biggest crowd to date has been 3,000 at a tourney [sic] in Montreal.

According to Mark Lloyd, a total of 3800 attended the three weekend games.

@sludgebrown @livelaughlime @theAUDL im pretty sure we were at 1600 Saturday and 2200 roughly on Sunday

— Mark Lloyd (@89ultimate) August 11, 2015