Forbes Fan Rankings Follies

Recently, Forbes magazine published an article titled "America's Best Sports Fans" in which the magazine ranked the fans from the teams in the NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL. Any list like this is bound to cause controversy - especially one in which the Boston Red Sox are proclaimed to have the best fans. The author, Monte Burke, clearly understand this to be the case as demonstrated by the introduction to the article.

The main problem with these rankings, however, is not the idea of creating controversy by publishing this type of list. Who doesn't want to be able to compare the relative awesomeness of each fan base? Unfortunately, Forbes uses more questionable metric techniques than the BCS. This article seems to want readers to believe that, because Forbes used some quantifiable benchmarks, its list is more accurate than something the average fan could create. As ESPN's Lee Corso would say, "Not so fast my friends!"

Lets look at the Forbes' methodology. I have slightly modified the original paragraph to better fit into a list format (how very meta of me to list things in an article about lists).

1. Measure the team's home and away game attendance, which indicates a team’s drawing power in its home market and nationwide.
2. Determine merchandise sales (Numbers for the NFL, NBA and MLB were provided to us by Sportsonesource, a sporting goods industry analyst, and the NHL gave Forbes its own data).
3. Rank each team’s in-market popularity, based on surveys of American sports teams by Turnkey Sports and Entertainment. Forbes ranked all of the teams, then took the top four from each of the four leagues.
   

For the each of the first two metrics, I will list the confounding explanations that show the difficulty using these measures . Without knowing the methodology of the Turnkey in-market popularity surveys, it is difficult to determine the validity of this metric.

Metric One - Home and Away Attendance

1. Using attendance as a metric at all significantly favors baseball teams. Baseball teams have 81 regular season games per year. If the average attendance is only 10,000 per game that means teams draw 810,000 fans. That is more fans than every NFL, NBA, and NHL team can possibly draw to their stadiums / arenas.
   
2. The idea that a team's away attendance would show a team's strength is suspect on many different levels. How did Forbes determine that a team's fans were attending away games? The Red Sox play over 20 games a year against the Yankees. That means at least 10 games at Yankee Stadium - which has as average attendance of over 40,000 fans. Is it likely that those 40,000 fans at Yankee Stadium demonstrate the Red Sox drawing power?
3. For many teams, attendance is driven by wins and losses. All of the teams listed in the top 10 have won championships in the last decade. Most teams ranked in the top ten have been perennial powerhouses in their leagues (Red Sox, Steelers, and Red Wings to name a few). Fans could simply be coming to stadiums because teams are performing well and not because they have a special interest in the team. The Miami Heat this season should prove this point.

Metric Two - Merchandise Sales

1. When a fan buys a jersey, is he/she buying it because she supports the team or because she supports the individual player? For example, Tim Tebow has the number one selling jersey in the NFL right now. Are there suddenly a bunch of new Denver Broncos fans or is more likely that these people are Tim Tebow fans. I am willing to bet the latter is the case.
2. Jersey sales are not the only item that contribute to merchandise sales (although it is probably the most significant driver of merchandise revenue). However, Forbes provides no evidence that they examined whether people who buy other merchandise are fans of the teams or the players.
   

Forbes Fan Follies makes it difficult to take these rankings seriously.