As part of the CEA’s ongoing effort to educate Americans on the true economic impact of professional sports in their communities, we often draw analogies between different professional sports leagues’ attendance figures and the customer counts of various kinds of common businesses.

The methods we used to come at these analogies are, as you can see below, often somewhat complex and difficult to explain in an interview quote or social media post.

In a spirit of transparency and in response to some requests we have received for the details behind our analogies, we’ve laid out some details the way we arrived at those conclusions.

Please feel free to contact us with any questions, criticisms, suggestions or (especially) better data that you may have.

National Football League:

“The average NFL team serves about as many customers in a year as a single American grocery store does.”

Grocery stores don’t generally track a “customers per year” statistic, but in 2022 representatives of FMI – The Food Industry Association answered our question regarding these metrics by providing us with data saying that American grocery stores averaged about 13,336 transactions per week, or roughly 693,000 per year.

According to ESPN’s NFL attendance tracker, only three NFL teams reported more than 693,000 in home attendance during the 2024 season.

Major League Baseball

“The traditional bar for excellent attendance in an MLB season is three million fans. That’s about as many customers as a busy Walmart Superstore serves in a year.”

MLB’s own press releases cite the three million figure when talking about excellent attendance.

We had seen the “3 million” figure for Walmart Supercenters previously asserted in the media without attribution, so we did some research.

Those stores’ customer traffic are difficult to determine exactly, as the company does not publicly report such information and does not seem to have broken out other data from which we could derive customer count with any degree of rigor. (It’s worth noting that three million customers a year would average out to 8,219 customers per day, which is anecdotally consistent with numbers shared online by Walmart employees and some retail industry analysts.)

One rigorous data set available to us is the vehicle traffic such stores generate according to the Institute for Transportation Engineers’ Trip Generation Manual, which is the gold-standard database used by state and local governments to predict traffic volumes generated by different kinds of land use.

The math here gets complex, as the traffic figures are presented in trips generated per hour at different times of day and different days of the week per thousand square feet of store. But there are various places where that math has been done for us, in municipalities that have posted traffic studies for actual Walmart Supercenters online. In Ontario, California, for instance, city engineers determined that a proposed 190,803 ft² Walmart Supercenter would generate an average of 7,981 daily trips, or roughly 2.9 million per year. (That store is slightly larger than the average 178,000 ft² Walmart Supercenter but far from the maximum 260,000 ft² size, which is why we say “busy” Supercenter.)

Similarly, a 2017 study by the Wisconsin Department of Transportation found 9,237 daily weekday trips and 11,661 Saturday trips for a 182,000 ft² Supercenter in Delavan, Wisc. Even the weekday trips alone, without the Saturday traffic, would average out to more than 3.2 million customers a year at that store.

These are obviously inexact figures, but absent evidence to the contrary we’re comfortable making this general claim. We would be happy to consider any evidence to the contrary – especially from Walmart itself.

“The average strip mall pop-up Spirit Halloween store is open for business and serving customers more days a year than an MLB team is.”

MLB regular seasons are 162 games long, with 81 home games.

Most Spirit Halloween stores open in early to mid-August, closing a few days after Halloween. A store opening on August 12 and closing on November 2 would be open 82 days, assuming a standard 7 days a week schedule.

National Basketball Association and National Hockey League

“NBA or NHL teams might serve as many customers as two decent-sized gas station convenience stores do in a year.”

In the 2023-24 season, NBA attendance ranged between 674,000 and 845,620 per team.

That same season, NHL attendance ranged between 456,371 and 865,305 per team.

According to the National Association of Convenience Stores, “An average store selling fuel has around 1,100 customers per day, or more than 400,000 per year.”

Note: Due to an unintentional error on our part, there have been times in the past where we made the incorrect assertion that NBA or NHL team attendance was equivalent to the customer traffic of a single convenience store, rather than two such stores. We deeply regret the error and apologize for unintentionally disseminating incorrect information.

Major League Soccer

“MLS teams average as many customers a year as a single gas station convenience store does.”

MLS teams reported between 260,720 and 796,120 in attendance in 2024. The 29-team league’s total attendance that season was 11,509,475, for an average of 396,878.

According to the National Association of Convenience Stores, “An average store selling fuel has around 1,100 customers per day, or more than 400,000 per year.”