Stadium Capacities and Attendance in Professional Sports

Abstract

Over the past fifteen years, professional team sports has become an increasingly important part of our social and economic life. While in 1959there were just forty-two major league teams in five monopolistic leagues (AL, NL; NBA; NHL; NFL), by 1974 this had grown to 117 teams in eight major leagues (AL, NL; NBA, ABA; NHL, WHA; NFL, WFL). Accompanying this growth in professional team sports has been a wave of stadium construction, with new stadiums appearing in essentially every medium to large size city in the U.S. In contrast to stadiums in use in professional sports fifteen years ago, these new stadiums have two distinguishing features--with rare exceptions, they are publicly owned and they are multiple-use facilities, designed to accommodate several sports.