Getty Image / Jane Tyska/Digital First Media/East Bay Times
The Oakland Athletics are playing their final season in the Bay Area this year and will move to Sacramento for the 2025, 2026, and 2027 seasons before moving to Las Vegas where, if recent polls are to be believed, the locals don’t even want the team.
Meanwhile as the Athletics play out their final season in Oakland nobody is there to watch and attendance has reached such atrocious levels they are averaging less than half the attendance of the second-worst attendance in the league.
Oakland’s current attendance is just 6,126 fans per game which is HISTORICALLY bad to the point that Lev Akabas of Sportico ran the numbers and shared a new chart on X (formerly Twitter) illustrating how there are 553 sports teams in the United States with better attendance at the moment including a professional women’s volleyball team, two college wrestling teams, and a whole lot more that should not be drawing in more fans than an MLB team.
There are 553 sports teams in U.S.-based leagues averaging more fans per home game than the Oakland Athletics right now
On that list are three Indoor Football League franchises, two college wrestling teams, a professional women’s volleyball team, and a whole lot more 👇 pic.twitter.com/dyYiGcBP74
— Lev Akabas (@LevAkabas) May 7, 2024
Breaking down how bad things are in Oakland, there are 13 minor league baseball teams that currently attract more fans to games than the Athletics. There are also 11 minor league hockey teams, 12 NWSL teams, 7 WNBA teams, and the and the Omaha Supernovas of the Professional Volleyball Federation, a women’s volleyball team in Omaha, has better attendance than the Oakland Athletics.
Unsurprisingly, nearly 200 college football teams have better attendance than the Oakland Athletics but we’re a football nation so that makes perfect sense. What is surprising is there are 2 women’s collegiate volleyball teams, 8 women’s gymnastics teams, and 6 men’s ice hockey teams that draw in more fans than the A’s in Oakland.
Surely attendance will get better after the Oakland Athletics leave for Sacramento and Las Vegas, right? Well, a recent poll on X by Las Vegas Locally suggests nobody in the desert wants the Athletics:
How excited are you about the Oakland Athletics moving to Las Vegas? ⚾
— Las Vegas Locally 🌴 (@LasVegasLocally) May 2, 2024
The Chicago White Sox currently have the worst record in MLB and it’s not even close. Chicago is 8-28 (.222) on the season but they are still averaging over 10,000 more fans per game than Oakland. Yikes.