The Hamilton Tiger-Cats are playing in a 6,500 seat stadium that they can’t even fill

One of the big concerns when the Hamilton Tiger-Cats announced they'd have to play their first two home games (later expanded to three) at McMaster's Ron Joyce Stadium was how the lessened numbers of seats would affect them, off and on the field. From a business standpoint, going from the planned capacity of 24,000 at the new Tim Hortons Field to the 6,500 seats at Ron Joyce seems problematic (the team announced they'd offer full refunds or exchanges for whoever bought tickets for Tim Hortons Field and didn't want them, which seems like the right approach but is definitely going to hurt their bottom line), to say nothing of the other issues involved with playing games at McMaster (from the TV setup to the press box to concessions and more.) From an in-game standpoint, the smaller number of fans makes home field less of an advantage. However, while a 6,500 capacity is bad enough to begin with, what's since happened is even worse. In Saturday's loss to Calgary, the Tiger-Cats didn't even seem able to fill the smaller stadium:

There are a few factors that might help explain the dismal crowd. For one, there was plenty of rain Saturday in Hamilton, which is never great for attendance at an outdoor game. For another, the team has reportedly priced seats at Ron Joyce very high; it's easy to see why fans wouldn't want to pay top-dollar for a subpar experience at a tiny CIS field. The Tiger-Cats' 1-5 record heading into Saturday probably didn't help any either; while this team's been competitive in many of their losses, they haven't found a way to pull off wins, and it's tough to get excited about a struggling team. Some might say that people didn't know there were spaces left, but that seems dubious; reports of tickets being available surfaced as early as Tuesday. What appears to be the bigger issue is what looks like growing resentment from Tiger-Cats' fans over the stadium situation. That may wind up being something that haunts the team long after they move into Tim Hortons Field.

Update: The Ticats say all tickets were sold and the low attendance was thanks to fans in the beer garden:

That's good news on the attendance front. Still, the stadium situation at Mac isn't one a lot of Tiger-Cats' fans are happy with.