It's tough being a lacrosse fan. Your sport isn't one of the "Big 4" American sports leagues and so most people's only cultural basis of the sport is either American Pie or Teen Wolf.
Oh and also
the professional teams won't stop dying.
In this past offseason alone - as I was putting together this tool - two teams announced they'd be hanging up their hats and not competing in the 2025 National Lacrosse League (NLL) season. This is by no means ahistoric as well, as lacrosse writer Graeme put it, "There have been 50 different teams in NLL history. 24 of them lasted less than five years before vanishing or being moved, while only 7 have lasted 15 or more years."
So I wanted to put together a tool to help piece together why teams have decided to move. Have low ticket sales forced teams to shutter their doors? Or do teams go extinct despite the demand for professional lacrosse being strong enough? That's why I put together the below tool to help visualize. Feel free to play around with it, and then join me below for some analysis.
All data was sourced from NLLStats.com.
Note: The NLL reports tickets sold, rather than tickets scanned at the front of the arena.
Something that immediately jumped out to me as I was working on this tool was that for every dud team that could only scrape 2 to 4 thousand people per home game, there were a handful of teams that went belly-side-up despite netting
a cool 7 to 9 thousand attendees per home game.
This does track with my prior assumptions though, as if you look online, you'll still be able to find the occasional Portland Lumberjax fan, or the scorned Orlando Titans season ticketholder, both of which averaged above 7,000 attendees in their final season. But that does imply that demand for professional lacrosse is out there, but so far, franchises (and franchise owners) have done a poor job meeting that demand. This is especially poignant with the current crop of teams who have seen both financial stability and on-field success while averaging a lean 5,000 attendees per home game (see: the San Diego Seals, Albany FireWolves, and Georgia Swarm).
Of course now the question remains , if teams don't go the way of the dodo because of a lack of attendance then why do they? Sure, we could talk all day
about the abysmal advertising of the now-defunct Panther City Lacrosse Club, or the venue troubles of the New York Riptide, but those are issues almost unique to their respective teams. None of the busted New York teams have ever had to answer the question, "Where the hell is New York" in the same way the Panther City Lacrosse Club has, to say the least.
I don't want to get too far off the topic of attendance, so I'll summarize my qualitative analysis by paraphrasing economist John A. List: "Every successful business is the same, but each ​unsuccessful business is ​unsuccessful in its own way." I'm sure he was talking about professional lacrosse teams there.
This was definitely an interesting project, and I learned a lot, both handling specific data types in R-Shiny, and about the business of professional lacrosse. I'm sure I'll be back to look at similar topics in the future to pick apart the next failed lacrosse team. There certainly won't be a lack of them, that's for sure.