Which Teams Really Have the Best Fans in Sports?

fa·nat·ic /fe-natik/ Marked by excessive enthusiasm and often intense uncritical devotion

Sports fans are some of the most passionate people on the planet. You live and die by each game, minute, and second. Athletes often say that their home town fans are the best in the world. As you know, not every team can have the “best” fans. In this series, we attempt to actually prove which teams have the best fans.

Fandom can be measured in two ways:

Fans buying tickets to and showing up to every game. The quality of the opponent and the quality of their team should be irrelevant
Having loud crowds at games, thus giving the home team an advantage

We will use the following framework to identify the teams that truly have the best fans.

Part 1 – Attendance Numbers

Here we will look at attendance numbers for each game over the past 3 seasons. Because we are looking at it on a game by game basis, we will be able to tell which teams have fans showing up to games that aren’t marquee games.

We will combine these numbers with Sagarin ratings. This will give us a general idea of how good each team was so we can identify which games we would expect to have low attendance.

Attendance numbers can be doctored a bit, but we will work with the data we have available. As noted in the article, attendance is usually reported as the number of tickets sold to a game rather than the actual number of people in the seats at a given game. We will work with this definition of attendance for the remainder of the series.

A team’s success in the previous season may have an effect on “attendance” for the following season due to advance season ticket sales, etc.

Part 2 – Home Court/Field/Ice Advantage

Home court/field/ice advantage will be determined by comparing a team’s home win % vs. away win %. This is a little more straight forward than the attendance analysis.

Remember that external factors that may play a part in home field advantage such as location, days of rest, and altitude (think Utah/Denver).

For more info on home field advantage in general, watch this video from the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.

So there it is, the framework for the analysis of the best fans in sports. Keep an eye out for the upcoming posts! What team do you think has the best fans in sports?