Geeks Not Exactly Inheriting Earth, But

[st_rev]

Take a look at Wikipedia's list of attendance figures at domestic professional sports leagues. Top average attendance is for American football at about 67,000. Baseball averages about 31,000, basketball 17,000

Comments

[merlinofchaos]

There are, however, 256 regular season NFL games every year, plus another handful of pre-season and post-season games. And whatever 162 * 30 comes out to for the MLB, which is somewhere in the vicinity of 5,000.

That said, if you count the mom & pop cons in cities all across the country you actually do start getting into sizable numbers. But if you do that you probably also have to start counting minor league play in your comparison and who really wants to count attendance for the Modesto Nuts? I mean, you didn't even want to know Modesto has a minor league team, let alone what it's named.

But even so, add up Origins, GenCon, the various PAX incarnations, the various SDCC incarnations, DragonCon and WorldCon and you do start seeing some respectable numbers.

[st_rev]

Yeah, I'm not saying geek culture is bigger than sports, but it seems to be, excuse the pun, in the same ballpark.

[merlinofchaos]

The similarity between many of the crunchier RPGs and Fantasy football is actually quite high. Of course, this fact is often scorned by sports and RPG fans alike when pointed out by those who inhabit both fandoms.

[lhn]

The numbers for individual college teams is also pretty scary-- while NCAA-wide it's in the 40000ish range, the top four teams all average more than 100k per game.

[st_rev]

Weird. Did you know Soldier Field only seats 61,500?

[bryant]

Yeah. FedEx Field is the biggest professional football stadium and it's 15th on the list of the largest football stadiums in the US.

[fengi]

I know! I was looking at similar stats, though ESPN is a better source and trying to work out the metrics for an honest comparison between the Hockey Season and ticket sales for The Avengers. I couldn't make it work, so then I tried comparing attendance at Zombie walks and other such marches and the Blackhawks rally, but geeks are terrible at keeping numbers on turnout.

[fengi]

Also - good point, I will update my post.

[sealwhiskers]

Hey, Denver ComicCon had over 60.000 ppl this year.