SEATTLE — When a city gets a professional sports team, it makes sense that local interest in that sport will increase. That’s certainly what happened when Seattle landed a major-league hockey team, the Kraken.
The National Hockey League in 2018 officially granted an expansion franchise to Seattle, which began play in the 2021-22 season — nearly 100 years after the Metropolitans (Seattle’s 1917 Stanley Cup winner) folded in 1924. But how much did the Kraken increase local interest in pro hockey?
Market research can help answer that question.
Survey data collected by market-research firm Nielsen from September 2016 to August 2017 — shortly before a Seattle expansion hockey team was announced — shows around 85,000 adults in the Seattle metro area said they were “very interested” in the NHL. That pencils out to a little less than 3% of the Seattle-area adult population.
Let’s turn to the most recent data, collected from July 2021 to July 2022. Nielsen surveyed more than 3,500 adults in the Seattle metro area, which includes King, Pierce and Snohomish counties. The number of Seattle-area adults who were “very interested” in the NHL ballooned to 211,000, or more than 6% of the adult population.
Granted, that’s a small share of the total population. But it does represent a tremendous increase in die-hard fans.
The numbers also increased among those who expressed a lesser degree of interest in pro hockey. Nine percent of adults said they were “somewhat interested” in the league, up from around 5% in the 2016-17 period. And about 16% said they were “a little bit interested” in the NHL, up from 15%.
The most popular pro sport in the Seattle area by far was — no surprise — football. Around 800,000 adults expressed the highest level of interest in the NFL. Among leagues that have a Seattle team, the MLB ranked second, with 328,00 hardcore baseball fans. The NHL ranked third, with 211,000 highly interested fans. Men’s soccer and women’s basketball each had fewer fans than the NHL. Nielsen does not collect data on interest in the National Women’s Soccer League.
Of course, whenever a pro sports team does very well, interest increases, with what some might call “fair-weather fans.” With the Kraken competing against the Colorado Avalanche in the playoffs, up-to-the-minute data would probably show an even higher level of interest in the NHL than the most recent Nielsen survey. With playoff games broadcast nationally, more people are surely tuning in.
