This is only for 2007, but the correlation is pretty strong. It’s also curious that there are so many teams at the lower end of the price range. Do expansion clubs have an advantage over the older clubs because they aren’t locked in to a pricing model that potentially devalues the product? Looking at attendence of expansion versus non-expansion clubs, it looks like expansion teams are at a definite advantage. In fact, excluding the LA Galaxy, the attendance of the non-expansion clubs is actually declining.

So what’s going on here? One possible explanation is that originally MLS set prices too low. In attempting to provide an affordable option for good, family entertainment, the low price signalled to the consumer that the product wasn’t very good. Any attempts to raise the price were met with resistance. In 1996, the average ticket price was $18. Using the 3% growth rate, by 2007 the average price should have been around $27, but instead was hovering around $22, showing that teams have not been able to increase prices very much. Meanwhile, expansion teams don’t have a baseline price and therefore can set their price to whatever they want.