Bob Mackin
Major League Soccer’s 2025 runner-up fell just shy of 500,000 in total attendance.
The Vancouver Whitecaps drew 491,635 to B.C. Place Stadium, according to data released by B.C. Pavilion Corporation (PavCo) to theBreaker.news under freedom of information.
The MLS Cup Western Conference semifinal was the Whitecaps’ second-biggest attendance of 2025. (Whitecaps FC)
The club hosted 17 MLS regular season matches, four in the CONCACAF Champions Cup, three Telus Canadian Championship meetings and two in the MLS Cup playoffs.
The Whitecaps averaged 18,909 across all competitions, slightly more than the 18,813 average in 2024.
By comparison, the club averaged 14,095 per match in 2023.
The total attendance in 2025 was 8.8% better than 2024’s 451,502, which featured 24 match days.
The Whitecaps only release the amount of tickets they say were allotted for distribution at home matches. In 2025, that total was 590,255 — 98,620 (or 20%) more than the actual total.
In 2016, an Information and Privacy Commissioner adjudicator dismissed the club’s claim that actual attendance data was proprietary and ruled that publication would not harm relationships with sponsors or broadcasters.
The biggest crowd in 2025 was for Lionel Messi and Inter Miami in the CONCACAF Champions Cup semifinal match on April 24 at 51,482.
Messi was a no-show for a league match on May 25, 2024 when the Whitecaps drew a season-high 48,161. That also broke the club’s previous high turnout of 25,832 when the Seattle Sounders visited on Sept. 15, 2018.
In second place for 2025, the Nov. 22 Western Conference semifinal win over LAFC at 51,325.
The Oct. 26 playoff opener against FC Dallas was third at 28,446.
Houston Dynamo’s Aug. 17 visit was significant for another reason. The fourth-best crowd of the season, 23, 474, witnessed the debut of German star Thomas Muller in a Whitecaps kit.
On the other end of the scale, the March 5 match against CF Monterrey in CONCACAF Champions Cup was the bottom of the 2025 list at 8,184 — one of three sub-9,000 matches. The five lowest, in fact, were non-MLS matches: three in CONCACAF Champions Cup and two in the Telus Canadian Championship.
The Whitecaps’ first match of 2026 is a CONCACAF Champions Cup meeting with C.S. Cartagines in Costa Rica on Feb. 18. Three days later, the home MLS opener against Real Salt Lake.
Early in 2026, the club’s campaign to become MLS Cup champions is overshadowed by MLS’s threat to leave the market next year without a new stadium deal. theBreaker.news exclusively obtained a copy of the Whitecaps’ contract with taxpayer-owned B.C. Place manager B.C. Pavilion Corp.
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