Euro clubs attendances and factors that influence it

[Billy Bounce]

• Club: Maccabi
• Arena: Yad Eliyahu ( 11k)
• EL average attendance: 10k-11k
• Population : Tel Aviv Metropolitan Area ( Gush Dan)= 3,206,400 , but keep in mind all other Israeli big cities are within 1-2 hours of travel by car
• Public Transportation : there are plenty of buses , both from rail-station & central bus station
• Parking nearby: ~ 4k places , see here
• Traffic , nearby roads: rather heavy as in all Tel Aviv , many traffic jams after MTA games. That the reason why many Yad visitors don't wait till the end of games & rush to the parking lot
• Other Euro level popular sport clubs in the area : football ( Hapoel TA, Maccabi TA/Haifa) those clubs appeared from time to time in Champions Group stage , handball and others isn't popular enough to compete
• Season tickets : totally accessible ( the only restriction VIP places close to the floor), price = 1300-6300 NIS ( 270-1300 Euro ) , about average monthly wage
• Food chains, other shops within arena: 5-8 ( Mc Donalds, Aroma Cafe, Sushi bar, etc)
• Violence: generally no violence , insulting chants of fans ( to players, owners, league officials) from time to time
• Best day for the games: Thursday . Majority of Israelis finish they week, there is extra day to prepare to Sabbath

Notes: Contrary to open football stadiums , Yad is air conditioned - important in our hot climate. Many families come with small children . Generally speaking MTA is the only consistent Top Europe sport club in Israel, consequently EL games are best sport event in Israel , so no wonder it draws a lot of people.

[Joško Poljak Fan]

• Club: Olimpija Ljubljana
• Arena: Stožice ( 13k)
• EL average attendance: I believe 10k is viable whenever the team won't fall apart in the middle of the season, 13k in case of top16
• Population : Ljubljana's metropolitan area should be a bit more than 500.000, otherwise officialy 280.000 inhabitants
• Public Transportation : a bus line going to the arena
• Parking nearby: 1,5 places
• Traffic , nearby roads: highway 100 m away, jet traffic jams in case of games are something completely normal
• Other Euro level popular sport clubs in the area : Ice-hockey Olimpija (participating in a joint austrian-slovenian-hungarian-croatian league), football Olimpija, ACH Volley (volleyball euroleague)
• Season tickets : 195-710 €
• Food chains, other shops within arena: still in progress
• Violence: basicaly none
• Best day for the games: probably wednesday, thursday due to masses of students in the city at that time along with the fact everybody want to get out somewhere for a weeked and wouldn't change that for a bball game played in saturday f.e.

Normaly all three Olimpija's football, hockey and basketball one all have a common base of fans that attend most of their games, not bothering that much to attend other sports than theirs, bball fans might be a bit more numerous due to euroleague.
Due to the attitude towards them in the past few years and general confusion with the club, the organised supporters, Green Dragons are setting bball Olimpija a bit aside.

Of course the results influence the attendance the most. One of the top10 clubs being beaten would though be enough to fill out the next few games in euroleague.
The second criteria is the number of the players staying in the club - might sound odd, but changing 90% of the team every season did happen in the past and leaves noone for the crowd to identify with and the third one, due to Sagadin's golden era in the 90ies, number of home-grown talents. Even if the results would be far from perfect, a hipotetical team made of Omić, Prepelič, Rupnik, Pajič as well as Murič, Blažič even foreigners as Salin (given they receive some playing time) would improve attendance quite a bit.

10 years ago, Olimpija had a pretty good strategy. They were giving away tickets for adriatic league games to various high schools, to vhoomever was interested. Basicaly as i believe it's all about getting people to get used to attending games, they managed to do it by that and practicaly they've raised themselves quite some regular season ticket buyers with that move, that probably repaid for them numerous times.

Even if a normal season (for Olimpija that became basicaly only fighting for top16) would mean a 10k attendance, beating Maccabi, CSKA, Barca, Pao or some comparable giant means a 25k seated arena would became to small in an instance - but I guess it's basicaly the same for all mid-level european clubs