With the recent news that downtown Albany may see a new soccer stadium, with a men’s minor league team and potentially a women’s professional team, an acquaintance asked the question: “do you think that Albany can support a women’s team?”
I don’t want to talk about the sexism implied by the question, which asked about the women’s team, and not whether the area can support the men’s team (for which the plans seem more real and less aspirational). There’s no denying it was there, and people asking similar questions should consider why.
But the question of whether Albany can support an arbitrary sports franchise is a legitimate one, certainly. In my time here, I’ve watched two minor league hockey franchises leave, and one minor league (single-A at that) baseball franchise leave1. Arena football came and went (and is back). It seems that we struggle to maintain connections to major league sports of any kind.
Albany does have several existing professional sports teams. My favorite is the Tri-City Valleycats, an independent baseball team that plays as part of the Frontier League. The Albany Patroons are a professional basketball team that’s been around for quite some time. The FireWolves play indoor lacrosse. Arena football is back this spring.
The Valleycats and the Patroons are both part of leagues where player pay is very limited. “The Basketball League” teams apparently operate on season budgets of less than $250,000; Frontier League teams have a salary cap of $85,000; National Lacrosse League salary caps were $415,000 in 2018. Recent numbers aren’t available for arena league football, but it’s probably a safe assumption that player pay at least is in the same ballpark (see what I did there 🙄).
I don’t know enough about the business operations (ticket sales, merchandising agreements, other staff costs, facilities costs, etc.) to know whether these franchises are financially sustainable, or if they’re just something some rich guy does for fun. Without that, it’s difficult to answer the question of whether Albany can support a given sports franchise. Clearly though, there’s plenty of interest in maintaining sports franchises in the area.
That brings us back to the original question. The question (I think) assumes that Albany can support a men’s minor league soccer franchise. I’m doubtful about that, but for the sake of argument, I’ll stipulate. So the question is whether it can support a women’s franchise.
Despite the apparent opinions of some (especially the painfully obtuse executives at the televesion networks), women’s sports in the US are wildly popular right now. I’ll go out on a limb (with no evidence whatsoever to back me up) and suggest that they’re likely to be very well received in smaller markets that the “major leagues” won’t touch, even with their farm teams but where sports are still culturally important. The Albany area very much fits that bill.
Indeed, Albany already does “support” a women’s soccer team: the New York Shockers (I don’t know who signed off on the name 🙉). The women’s team have been active members of the Women’s Premier Soccer League since 2021, and they play at Afrim’s Sports here in Colonie. The WPSL (and their men’s counterpart in the National Premier Soccer League) are amateur (or some “semi-professional”) teams, and the leagues are pretty big (several dozen teams across the country). I haven’t been to a game yet, and the organization does seem to be very amateur (their website doesn’t even provide information about getting tickets to their games), but they do exist.
And when the NCAA women’s basketball tournament has regionals here, attendance is always solid. This year of course, there was the draw of Caitlin Clark, and she generated sell-out crowds. But the event was very popular even five years ago without the presence of an international sports star.
So I think it’s a reasonable bet that our area can support a women’s professional sports franchise, at least to the extent we can support a men’s franchise. That being said, I think it’s unlikely we can fill an 8,000 seat stadium consistently.
In Downtown Albany, average attendance at the Albany Devils games hovered around 3,300, with a high of 3860 and a low (their final year) of 2,949. It felt quite empty in an arena that can seat 15,500. The opening game for the Albany Empire (arena football) sold out in 2018, but attendance for most home games that year were around 10,000. It may be worth noting that all their games were on Saturday—not true for minor league hockey.
Over at UAlbany, the men’s basketball team manages only 2,100 fans per game, in an arena that can seat 3,800.
Up the river a bit, the hockey games at RPI, despite their decades of mediocrity, drew an average of 2,200 fans per game this past season. And cross-town rival Union drew more than 1,700 fans per game (despite having an arena well under half the size—they’re actually building a new one on the river front, so it’ll be interesting to see how their attendance increases). The ValleyCats averaged just 2,750 fans per game in 2023, in a ballpark that seats 4,500 (with a good deal of additional standing-room only capacity).
Much of the attendance issue may come down to how the actual operation is run. I don’t have any real insight into the business operations of a large venue, but I’ve always wondered why tickets to things like minor league hockey games are so expensive. Presumably, there are a number of fixed costs to holding the game at all: pay for refs and emergency medical staff and scorekeepers and the announcer, maintenance of the playing surface and equipment, etc. Also presumably there are some variable costs that rise with increasing attendance: ushers, cleaning staff, security.
But given that the cost of a hotdog at a venue like that is around $5 and a 20oz beer costs $10 (or more), it would seem that a stadium full of people buying concessions would generate more profit than a mostly empty stadium requiring fewer cleaning and security staff. Sporting events are always more fun with a big crowd. I would think they would be better off giving away tickets and filling the venue than trying to make an extra $10 or $20 per ticket but only reaching a fraction of your capacity (which was routinely the case for the Albany Devils hockey team a decade ago).
If the developers of a soccer stadium want to see success, it seems they should look to the Albany Empire for inspiration. Is football uniquely popular here? Can soccer follow in its footsteps? What made hockey such a failure? Is this stadium destined for a couple seasons of greatness followed by decades of stagnation and eventual decay?
I’ll leave it at that. Others will write more (and indeed already have).
- As I discuss later, the team is still there: it was its affiliation with MLB that ended—a great improvement in my opinion, as it lead to a longer season with more home games for the team that plays there now, still with the same name. ↩︎