Five Ways the Sirens Can Improve Attendance

Much has been made of the Sirens' lackluster attendance at home games over the first two seasons of their existence. The average attendance for Sirens home games during the 2024-25 season was just 2,764, by far the lowest in the league. That has been the cause for much concern among fans and media, who have even started speculating that the franchise could ultimately end up being relocated. Premature as that may be, the lack of fan attendance at games is a problem. It's not a lost cause, though. Here are some ideas the PWHL and the Sirens should consider to help grow crowds in Newark.

Marketing

Admittedly, this is obvious. You need marketing to have success! But the biggest obstacle New York faces is simply that sports fans in the area don't know they exist. Even when speaking to people who are women's sports fans, most of the time when I mention the Sirens, the reaction I get is, "New York has a women's hockey team?!" The league and the team have not done enough to spread the word. Much of the marketing has been designed for Canadian markets and has not translated successfully in American markets with less of a pervasive hockey culture like New York and Boston.

The only place I've seen the Sirens advertised locally is on local broadcasts of NHL games. That's great, but it limits the scope of people an ad is going to reach. Something like an ad on the subway – while surely cost-intensive – would reach thousands of people who might not know about the Sirens already. It doesn't limit the potential pool of new fans to only those already interested in hockey but casts a wider net. If the Sirens want to increase attendance, they'll have to think seriously about their marketing, who their audience is, and how to access them.

Transportation

One of the biggest obstacles the Sirens face is their location. While the Prudential Center is certainly the best of the variety of venues the team has played at (none of us miss the days of spending an hour and a half on the Metro-North out to Bridgeport on a weeknight), it's still a distance outside of New York City proper.

The Sirens aren't the only women's sports team a commute away from NYC, though. Gotham FC, New York & New Jersey's women's soccer team, play in Harrison, New Jersey, right next door to Newark. This past year, they started their own bus service to take fans from the city to the stadium and back. You can buy your bus ticket and ticket to the game at the same time, hop on the bus in Brooklyn or Manhattan, and make friends with fellow fans on the way to the game.

This would be a (relatively) easy way for the Sirens to make the commute to games less of an obstacle than it is now. It also cultivates a sense of community among fans, which will pay dividends when it comes to inspiring people to come out for another game, and then another.

Collaborations

New York is a women's sports hub. Gotham and the New York Liberty have both won championships in recent years, and the Liberty especially have exploded in popularity. While the Sirens have engaged with these teams occasionally, building more robust relationships would get the word out about the team to people in the area who are already women's sports fans.

There's many ways this could look: offering a package deal where you can buy tickets to Gotham, the Liberty, and the Sirens all at once; making official appearances at other teams' games; hosting fan events together; the possibilities are endless. Establishing the Sirens as a part of the women's sports landscape in the New York metro area would go a long way towards increasing attendance and fan engagement at large.

It's Not Just NYC

Guilty as charged: I'm a bit of an elitist New Yorker. A lot of my suggestions are based on around spreading the word among New Yorkers and making it easier for New Yorkers to get to games, because it's the largest pool of potential fans to draw from. Despite the name of the team, though, the Sirens are in New Jersey, and should be doing work to reach out to the fans who are closest to home for them as well.

Advertising throughout New Jersey, and even potentially as far south as Philadelphia – which does not have a PWHL team of its own yet – could further expand that pool of potential fans. Doing fan events and outreach in those areas would engage fans and encourage them to come to games. Philadelphia is only an hour and a half from Newark, after all. The Sirens are in a prime location, and they have the opportunity not to be just New York's team but to embrace the entire region.

Fan Engagement

Attendance is always going to be better when you have a good team that's winning games. But you can't necessarily rely on that--the Sirens seem poised to do better this season than they have for their lackluster first two, but they've finished in the bottom of the league two years running despite looking good on paper. If you can't promise a winning product, find another way to make games fun for fans.

The New York Liberty, admittedly, have the best of both worlds: they're one of the best teams in the WNBA, and people flock to games for the atmosphere alone. But even if the Liberty didn't have their winning record, fans would still show up in droves just to see Big Ellie, who is a phenomenon unto herself. Don't get me wrong: no other mascot can be Ellie. But she's an example of a team using something that isn't directly related to play to draw in fans.

Despite low attendance at games, the Sirens do have a passionate fanbase, especially online. It was online that the running joke of calling them the Pizza Rats developed before they had an official name. Cashing in on the existing fan engagement and finding ways to use it to get butts in seats is something the Sirens should absolutely be focusing on. Even small things like giveaways could be a way to motivate fans to come out for games.

New York's attendance woes are a solvable problem. Perhaps it will be some time before the Sirens are drawing Montreal-sized crowds at games, but all of these are things they can do to bring more fans to the Prudential Center in the near future.