When U.S. Soccer chose to host U.S. men’s national team friendlies in Kansas City, Kansas and Cincinnati, Ohio during the September international window, it seemed like a safe enough bet.

Kansas City sits in America’s soccer heartland and is home to Sporting Kansas City, among MLS’ most consistently supported sides, and the NWSL’s Kansas City Current, who have become an instant smash with fans of the women’s game with the return of professional women’s soccer to the area.

Cincinnati, too, has its own history and love affair with soccer. FC Cincinnati, its MLS club, is among the league’s most competitive sides and the club has resonated with locals, who turn out in droves for matches.

The USMNT wouldn’t exactly be facing any elite opponents — last month’s matches were against Canada and New Zealand — and nobody was expecting a pair of sellouts. But the wide swaths of empty seats visible on the broadcasts of both matches caught some off guard. The crowd in Kansas City barely broke five figures. The 15,000 or so U.S. faithful in Cincy was about 7,500 short of the average for an MLS match in the city.

This is not for lack of love for soccer. pic.twitter.com/F73hClk356

— Pat Brennan (@PBrennanENQ) September 10, 2024

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In the moments after both matches, fans took to social media with their theories as to why nobody was turning out: in the days leading up to Mauricio Pochettino’s appointment as the side’s new manager, nobody wanted to watch a B team being led by an interim manager, some said. Others pointed to the USMNTs dreadful performance at this summer’s Copa America, or blamed ticket prices, scheduling congestion and competition with other sports — college, high school and NFL football, for example.

Others were less kind: fans hadn’t turned out, they said, because the USMNT isn’t doing much to be compelling these days, and is sometimes downright bad.

Just a month later, a near-sellout crowd turned out in Austin, Texas to watch the USMNT take on Panama. And just like that, the attendance heartburn got shelved — for now.

Yet the reality of the USMNT’s intermittent struggles to resonate with fans is much more complicated and won’t be solved on any social media platform or message board.

Examining home attendance data over the last 30 years makes things clearer in some regards and more complicated in others. The data paints a picture of a federation that continues to raise ticket prices, often choosing to play matches in smaller venues and in front of fewer fans who pay a much larger sum to get in. It disproves common tropes, like the assumption that attendance might be higher in a World Cup year or is largely based on strength and profile of opponent.

The raw data also paints a bleaker picture of the USMNT’s long-term popularity. Despite the talk of a “golden generation” and despite having multiple players playing regularly for some of the biggest clubs in global soccer, the U.S. isn’t drawing significantly more fans nowadays than it has in the last three decades. In recent years, the team has often drawn fewer total fans than it has in the past, all of whom are paying more money than ever to see a sometimes-lackluster product.

At U.S. Soccer, executives frequently speak about growing the game and exposing the widest possible audience to their teams. And though attendance is on an upswing as the U.S. prepares to co-host the World Cup in 2026, crowds like the ones seen in Kansas City and Cincinnati are still all too common.

Record profits, but at what cost?

By almost all accounts, it has been a good year at the gate for the USMNT.

Despite their struggles at Copa America and those low-key friendlies in October, the USMNT are drawing an average of 39,459 fans to their matches this year, a number padded not only by Copa America but by large crowds to see them in friendlies against Colombia in the D.C. suburbs and Brazil in Orlando.

Some of those crowds have been made up largely of fans in attendance to support the visiting side, but that will always remain the reality in a country like the U.S. where nearly every foreign nation, particularly those from Latin America, is represented by a large immigrant population.

Colombia fans make their presence felt at Commanders Field in Landover, Maryland in June (Stephen Nadler/ISI Photos/Getty Images)

“In terms of attendance, we’re very bullish on where we sit today when we think of the balance of 2024,” U.S. Soccer chief commercial officer David Wright tells The Athletic. “I think we have a ton of optimism.

“We have a brand new coach who comes from an incredible background. We have a dynamic player pool that play both domestically in MLS and for some of the largest clubs around the world. And the level of sophistication amongst our fans is incredibly high. It has evolved tremendously. (They have a deep) appreciation for the sport and a high level of sophistication, which is also really important. It’s a great thing for the sport.”

It’s Wright’s job, within U.S. Soccer at least, to sell the game of soccer: to fans, who have had a sometimes tenuous relationship with the men’s team (while simultaneously falling in love with the women’s side) and to sponsors and donors, who’ve helped transform the federation from a small, volunteer-run organization into a giant, money-making entity over the last four decades.

He has his own answers to questions regarding the USMNT’s struggles (and successes) in terms of attendance.

From a purely financial standpoint, the federation is doing well these days. U.S. Soccer recently did a media blitz, offering up executives to tout record profits and donations, even as it laid off dozens of staff as the federation itself prepared to leave its long-time home in Chicago for a new facility in Atlanta. Its financial reality is surely a net positive for the game in this country — even if, undoubtedly, the federation has its problems.

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Still, record profits do very little for fans who have been faced with rising ticket prices over the years. By U.S. Soccer’s own account, they’ve grown their revenue base by being calculated in terms of how they price tickets, the scale of the venues they host matches in and the way they sell the tickets themselves.

U.S. Soccer examined the 1998-2018 World Cup cycles and presented their findings at a meeting in 2017, painting a stark picture of this price increase. In that 1998 cycle, a ticket to a home qualifier had an average cost of $19.81. That price went up about $10 in the three cycles that followed, another $20 in the 2014 cycle and over $30 between 2014 and 2018.

In that final cycle, U.S. fans paid an average of $97.06 to watch the USMNT miss out on their first World Cup in a quarter-century.

A frustrated Christian Pulisic reacts to defeat by Trinidad and the USMNT’s failure to reach the 2018 World Cup (Ashley Allen/Getty Images)

All the while, profits skyrocketed while average attendance fell.

As smaller, soccer-specific venues continued to pop up across the U.S., the federation more frequently chose to host matches there, raising prices in the process. That 489 percent price increase over three decades grossly outpaced inflation and priced many fans out permanently. It also made the federation plenty of money: they made some $7 million off the 2002 cycle from an average of 31,158 fans per match.

Three decades later, they made nearly three times as much money off the 2018 cycle, despite playing in front of 70,000 fewer fans and averaging nearly 10,000 fewer fans per match.

“When we think about how we price our events, first of all, we’re a private (non-profit 501C3), so we have to run a business that’s sustainable,” said Wright. “It’s expensive to stage a senior national team match regardless of the market, but obviously the larger the venue, the more expensive the hard costs are. In a stadium that has turf, for example, there are incremental expenses related to laying down a grass field.

“It’s about finding that balance. It’s all about providing as much access as we can and optimizing that fan engagement part while also managing the business in a fiscally responsible way.”

Fans of the men’s and women’s national teams understand the federation’s need to be financially sustainable. Many, though, are understandably concerned that pricing many fans out of seeing matches in person will ultimately do more harm than good to the game’s popularity in the U.S. Dynamic pricing, at this point, is the industry standard, making matches even more cost-prohibitive at times if demand increases.

“We lean on a lot of data and insights,” Wright said. “We work very closely with the host venue, our great partners at Ticketmaster, we lean heavily on fan insights and we have a lot of great historical information. And there’s also supply and demand — I think our fans do a really good job of securing their tickets early. In a high-demand market, obviously, those prices can increase over time just based on dynamic pricing.

“We’ve done a very good job of finding that balance. At the end of the day, we are 100 percent focused on growing the game and we know that someone’s experience at a U.S. national team game, or an MLS game, or an NWSL game, is critically important to the fan journey. We play an important role in that.”

Slim pickings

Attendance is up this year, largely due to the U.S. playing in a Copa America on home soil and squaring off against a pair of elite, well-supported opponents — Brazil and Colombia.

Looking back over 30 years, the average Elo ranking of the USMNT’s home opponents in 2024, 31, is higher than all but one year, 1999. Common sense would dictate that higher-quality opponents make for higher average attendance.

Not so fast.

Yes, the U.S. has drawn well this year and drew similarly well in 2011, for example, when that Elo ranking was 34. But it has also drawn nearly as many fans, on average, to see them in years when that number was as low as 59. In the end, that average strength has little bearing on attendance, certainly not enough to qualify as a trend.

That’s probably good news for U.S. Soccer, who may continue to struggle to find high-quality opponents, especially during World Cup qualifying — the USMNT are already in as co-hosts. In a fall 2023 window, the U.S. faced 60th-ranked Uzbekistan and 78th-ranked Oman, hardly the sort of opponents that move the needle in the U.S., even among immigrant communities.

“I would say first we’re very fortunate to be in what is the most commercially viable market in the world,” Wright said. “There’s a reason why there’s a lot of demand and a lot of interest for some of the most high-profile teams to want to play in the U.S.

“But you’re right: when you think about the international calendar, the number of competitions, and just the landscape from a sporting perspective, it continues to evolve.”

The U.S.’ participation in the CONCACAF Nations League also has implications for the USMNT, as the region has its fair share of minnows. All of this is laid out if you look at upcoming windows as they stretch into 2025 and beyond. Nations League and Gold Cup aside, the U.S. may struggle to find truly competitive matches as nearly every other confederation will be involved in World Cup qualification in one form or another.

Take the September 2025 window. Many CONCACAF, CONMEBOL and CAF teams — or, at least, the highly competitive ones — will be busy playing qualifiers. Only AFC teams will be free, greatly narrowing the U.S.’s pool of potential opponents.

Opponents are so difficult to find that Mexico, which like the U.S. has qualified for 2026 as a host nation, played La Liga side Valencia in the last international window.

Mexico’s Orbelin Pineda during the side’s friendly against Valencia in Puebla this month (Manuel Velasquez/Getty Images)

“It’s certainly getting complicated,” FMF executive president Ivar Sisniega told reporters this month in Guadalajara. “We’ve even talked with the U.S. to do the doubleheaders we sometimes do, where we both play the same two teams. That means it’s more attractive for those teams to come and play us because they’re playing against both of our teams.

“We’re going to continue looking at clubs. Some people maybe didn’t believe in the Valencia option. In the end, it turned out to be a very solid team that is playing in La Liga, and they play together. So, there’s different conditions.”

The official team of Central Standard Time

Since the 2018 World Cup, the USMNT has played more matches in the Midwest, 28, than they’ve played on the coasts combined. They’ve also made a habit of playing in a few markets — Orlando, Austin, Kansas City and Cincinnati — with much more frequency than they play elsewhere.

This is a newer trend, but it didn’t happen overnight.

In many ways, U.S. Soccer chooses these cities because it favors the venues and training facilities available in them. But there are many, many other factors. Some of them don’t matter to fans in places like New York and Seattle, where the MNT rarely plays.

“We often talk about the many pieces to the events puzzle, and it is a puzzle,” said Wright. “There’s opponent availability. We are laser-focused on finding opponents and always want to play the best. How you navigate that international calendar is an argument in and of itself.

“Factor number two is the availability of the venue. You mentioned New York, but a) it’s expensive and b) if you think about the other folks that play in a New York venue, finding dates that coincide with an international calendar, those don’t often align — really honing in on markets that are the right markets for the opponent, and are available based on all the other events and then, quite frankly, markets that economically make sense based on the opponent and the venue.”

The USMNT and New Zealand teams line up in Cincinnati (Joe Robbins/ISI Photos/Getty Images)

The federation deals with geographic considerations, of course, in terms of the distance that players — its own and those of the opponent — will travel for a match. In windows where the club plays multiple matches, the federation will cluster those matches in cities that are easily accessible to each other (Cincinnati and Kansas City, for example), attempting to keep travel times to 2.5 hours or less, according to Wright.

And opponents, particularly high-profile ones, sometimes get a say. When the USMNT played a sold-out match against Germany in Hartford, Connecticut a year ago, it did so in part because of demands from their counterparts at the German federation.

“They were very adamant that they wanted to be on the East Coast,” said Wright. “Now, you layer that over all the other considerations that I already mentioned, and Hartford was the only market that was available. It ended up working out beautifully because we sold out Hartford. It happened to be grass, we hadn’t played there in a while and it ended up being an incredible outcome, but you can very quickly see that it’s not easy.”

From a business and exposure perspective, there is another crucial component to venue selection, from the federation’s perspective: what will work for its broadcast partners.

“Time zones matter when we think about broadcasts,” Wright said. “How do we optimize our national viewers? Having a kickoff time in the right time zone so that it’s primetime is really important.

“Weather — an example, probably, would be that we tend to not play in Florida during certain times of the year, during storm or rain season. Taking a close look at weather patterns, and from a temperature perspective as well. And then, lastly, working with the markets and the other events. When we work in a market that has an NWSL or MLS team, they too have their own calendar and schedule, so making sure that we are complementary in that market, not competitive.

“When you take all those factors and you start to use them as filters, you see that it’s more than: ‘I want to go play here.’ It’s so much more complicated than that. I give our team a ton of credit for navigating through this web of factors to ultimately produce 20 to 25 matches between the men’s and women’s teams.”

U.S. fans at the game against Germany in East Hartford (Doug Zimmerman/ISI Photos/Getty Images)

The rest

There are other common misconceptions in terms of attendance.

Average USMNT attendance does not go up, typically, in a World Cup year, when interest in the team is typically at its highest.

There’s also the idea that hiring a high-profile coach like Pochettino will drive interest. That certainly feels true on social media and in coverage of the team, but it remains to be seen whether there will be any effect at the gate. Looking back at every full-time coaching change the USMNT made between 1994 and 2024, there has never been any measurable effect on attendance.

None of those coaches, of course, had the international notoriety and pedigree that Pochettino does, something that’s probably increasingly important to a fanbase that grows more interested in the international game by the day.

Pochettino watches his new team succumb in Guadalajara (John Dorton/ISI Photos/USSF/Getty Images for USSF)

In the end, Wright feels unconcerned with bumps in the road like those poorly attended matches in Cincinnati and Kansas City. In the near term, as a home World Cup approaches, increased interest in the U.S. may be enough to sustain attendance through 2026. The effects of other variables, like rapidly increasing ticket prices and a narrowing list of cities that get matches, might take longer to reveal themselves.

“We tend to look at things holistically throughout the calendar year,” Wright said. “There are ebbs and flows. Sometimes there is no rhyme or reason to it. As an organization, we’ve become incredibly sophisticated in terms of how we select markets, how we price each match and ultimately how we market the game.

“It’s all about providing as much access as we can and optimizing fan engagement while also managing the business in a fiscally responsible way.”

(Top photos: Getty Images; Design by Meech Robinson)