The Kansas City Royals once again ranked near the bottom of Major League Baseball this season for home attendance.
The Royals finished 21st in attendance among MLB’s 30 franchises, and the club’s attendance was down significantly from prior years. They weren’t alone in that regard.
More than 45 million baseball fans went to MLB games this season, a huge bounce back from 2020, when the only games that allowed general attendance were the National League Championship Series and the World Series. But largely because many stadiums still had some form of capacity restriction for at least part of the 2021 season, no team reported an increase in attendance from 2019, the most recent season with no coronavirus-related attendance restrictions, according to data from ESPN.
For the Royals, this season’s 2021 total home attendance came to 1.2 million, an average of 14,316 fans a game. Total attendance declined 22% from 1.48 million in 2019, when the Royals ranked 27th.