ST. LOUIS — When the St. Louis Blues announced in September their Covid-19 protocols for the 2021-22 season, team executive Nick Wierciak said there was uncertainty about how it might impact attendance at the team's home games.
Some fans, the Blues figured, would be unsure about returning to events with large crowds. Others, they anticipated, would be turned off by the NHL franchise’s requirement that attendees show proof of Covid-19 vaccination or a negative Covid-19 test to enter Enterprise Center.
However, roughly midway through the 2021-22 season, the pandemic’s impact on attendance hasn’t been as sharp as predicted, said Wierciak, vice president of ticketing, premium and suite sales.
“We surpassed what we originally had forecasted,” he said of the team’s home attendance.
The Blues started the second half of their season Thursday following a break around the NHL’s All-Star Game, which was played this past weekend. Thursday’s game, a 7-4 loss at Enterprise Center against the New Jersey Devils, had a sold-out crowd of 18,096 fans.
For the season, the Blues are averaging 17,511 fans per home game, ranking the team seventh in the NHL for total home attendance, according to ESPN. Eight of the Blues' last nine home games — including the last five — have been sellouts.
This season marks the first year since the 2019-2020 season in which the Blues have operated with a full house at Enterprise Center. The team last year staged its home games with limited fan capacity because of the pandemic. The team’s attendance is down about 3% from 2019-2020. Each game in the 2019-2020 season was a sellout, following the Blues' Stanley Cup championship in 2019.
The Blues have had better success drawing fans than other local prominent sports teams. The St. Louis Cardinals' attendance for the 2021 baseball season was down 40%. While the Major League Baseball club started the season with limited capacity at Busch Stadium, it struggled to draw crowds typical of past seasons after fully reopening. Saint Louis University’s Billikens men’s basketball team last Saturday attracted its largest crowd this season, 9,411 fans, at Chaifetz Arena. However, the Billikens' average attendance this season currently sits at 5,367, down 22% from 6,880 in 2019-2020, the team's most recent season with full capacity at its Midtown arena.
The Blues’ Wierciak declined to provide specifics regarding how much the franchise has surpassed original attendance projections. He said the club’s season ticket holder base has remained steady, though he declined to provide specific numbers. He noted several factors have helped keep season ticket holders on board, including last year’s limited capacity, which gave those fans opportunities to attend games.
After the Blues won the Stanley Cup in 2019, the team said it added about 1,000 new season ticket accounts and created a waitlist to keep up with demand. Wierciak said the Blues have been able to continue using the wait list to add new season ticket holders as others have dropped their packages. Additionally, prior to the pandemic, the Blues started letting fans renew their season tickets for three years at a time, providing stability to its roster of season ticket holders.
Click here to read the full story on the St. Louis Business Journal.
