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The other day I received a copy of the new Jerry Lee Lewis album in the mail. Yep, the killer is still alive. Barely though. He sounds terrible. Somebody should have stopped this travesty from reaching store shelves in order to protect the man's dignity.

When you spend as much time watching and thinking about soccer as I do your mind becomes horribly warped. You can't believe that the overwhelming majority of people you meet have no idea who Jeff Cunningham is, let alone that he became the first player in MLS history to lead the league in scoring despite playing for a team that did not make the playoffs.

So it was this psychological dislocation--coupled with the knowledge that the Bears were on a bye week--that led me to believe that the Chicago Fire would pack Toyota Park for Sunday's playoff opener against New England. After all I (and three of my similarly afflicted compatriots) was willing to spend 15 hours cramped in a car over two days simply to take in this grand spectacle. And the team's last two regular season home games had attracted upwards of 38,000 fans. Surely the Fire faithful would be out in force.

How wrong I was. A piddly 10,217 was the announced attendance, but I'm guessing the actual count was closer to 8,000. Whole swaths of the beautiful new stadium went untainted by butt prints. Of course it didn't help that it was a bone-chilling 39 degrees at kickoff, with a stiff wind making it feel much colder.

But after checking out the attendance statistics at the other three playoff venues this weekend, it seems that weather isn't the primary issue. In fact, Chicago had the second best attendance of the four games. Chivas (sunny and 85 degrees) drew a lackluster 15,110, while New York (sunny and 57 degrees) attracted a paltry 8,630 (half of them undoubtedly D.C. fans), and Colorado (cloudy and 35 degrees) sold a monumentally pathetic 4,176 tickets.

What's completely bewildering about this paucity of tickets sales is that MLS had ended the season on a high note attendance-wise. The last two weeks of the season saw an average of roughly 20,000 tickets sold per game--or 5,000 more than the average for the entire season. Perhaps wrongly, I attributed this uptick to late-season drama. After all, with just two games left in the season only one team (Columbus) had been eliminated from the playoffs.

But why would casual fans show up to see if their local squad makes the playoffs, but not for the post-season games themselves? It makes no sense.

Posted by Paul Demko at October 23, 2006 2:35 PM

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