When your team is cruising towards a cup berth, you can expect the entire city and surrounding area to be buzzing. Just about everyone is supporting their team with jerseys, car flags, T-shirts, etc.
The team is buzzing, the fans are buzzing, the city is electric ,and the owners are just beaming with padded wallets. What happens when the franchise isn't doing so well?
When you ask people in cities with not-so-good franchises, it is hard to find someone with intimate knowledge of the team, or people walking around with team jerseys—no one really cares about how well or bad the team is doing.
No one knows the position of the team in the standings. No one knows who is leading the team in goals or PIMs. However, there are still those die-hard fans that show up for every game, know everything there is to know about the team, and can hold their own in a discussion about what the team needs.
The problem is that there are very few of those die-hard fans. Not every city has fans like Toronto, where no matter how good or how bad the team is, the entire city is beaming with Maple Leaf envy.
Of course, the NHL will let everyone know that attendance is up from a couple years ago. Then again, if you think about it, with the parity of the league these days and teams still heavy in the hunt for a playoff spot until the final week, it is no doubt as to why the league has more fans in the seats.
Still, in many markets you find a plethora of empty seats, as, simply put, no one cares for a losing team!
When I was growing up in Calgary, I saw the rise and fall of sports in terms of attendance and revenue. Simply put, no matter how crazy things are now with the "Red Mile" in Calgary, the city's fans, just like any other, are only as good as the team's performance.
In the late '80s when the Flames were a Cup contender, including their '89 Cup-winning season, the city was burning with Flames fever. However, it couldn't last forever!
Players started to slowly leave, and the team became a perennial golfing team come the postseason. From 1995 to 2003, no one was cheering for the Flames. They became an afterthought, long-since removed from the late '80s.
The team was on the verge of leaving the city and no one seemed to care. There were no fans in the seats, and very few sales of merchandise.
The team owners set a deadline for a minimum amount of season tickets to be sold, one that was eventually pushed back a couple of weeks to meet the deadline. So the team wasn't going anywhere, at least not yet. There were still very little fans in the seats and the team wasn't doing much better in the standings.
No one in the city knew who anyone on the team was. For the die-hard fans, times were not great, but tickets were cheap and easy to get. It was very rare to see Flames fans in the city.
Enter the 2003-04 season, and it was time for the team to make a great run. Once the team was in the playoff hunt, the fans were still hesitant to purchase tickets or merchandise. They had seen something similar a few seasons earlier—agreat first half of the season, only to drop out of the playoffs by the end of the season.
Once it became apparent that the Flames would make the playoffs, out came the bandwagoneers, much to the despise of the die-hard fans who started to have problems trying to get tickets.
We're going to send you the most entertaining Calgary Flames articles, videos, and podcasts from around the web.
14 Comments
Loading more comments...
This comment and all replies have been deleted This comment has been deleted Undo delete