At the end of the 2020 regular season, the National Football League just barely broke 1.1 million fans attending games, less than a tenth of the number that attended games in the prior year.
With 40% of football stadiums around the league hosting only cardboard cutouts, Kansas City’s Arrowhead Stadium was a rare exception even among the 19 stadiums that allowed in-person attendance. The Kansas City Chiefs attracted almost 9% of the league’s total attendance, clocking in with the third-highest home game attendance.
On an average game day, about 13,150 socially distanced Chiefs fans were spread throughout the normally raucous venue’s 76,416 seats. Last year, the stadium had more than 73,000 attendees per game, according to figures from ESPN.
In a normal year after a Super Bowl win, Arrowhead could have easily surpassed its 96.1% attendance rate from 2019. Instead, the stadium saw only 17.9% of the prior year’s overall home game attendance.
In August, the team in consultation with the Kansas City Health Department capped attendance at 22% of capacity. In the end, only about 17.2% of Arrowhead’s normal capacity was utilized during the regular season.
