I was going through the TourneyCentral traffic for the end of the year, making some recaps for the year and some predictions for the next. This is a typical cycle for the soccer tournament market.

With some minor adjustments and some traffic increases, it looks remarkably like the 2010 cycle. And the 2009 cycle. And the 2008… you get the idea. The soccer tournament cycle for attention and activity has not changed in a very long time, even as soccer tournaments strive to be top of mind, 365/24/7 for the participants.

Here is a typical traffic pattern for a Labor Day soccer tournament. It looks like every other soccer tournament. Just plug your date in and you will typically see two traffic spikes — one when your schedule is published and the other the weekend of your event — with the rest of the traffic being flat or edging upwards slighting as your day approaches and then dropping precipitously when your event is over. It is what we’ve come to call the 90-Minute Attention Span.

Again, we could go back years and see this has not changed vey much. There are only two major shifts we have seen in recent history. The first is a flattening of the traffic to include the day after, but when everyone got broadband, the day-after-traffic has gone away. It is likely we will see higher spikes during the event with smartphones and QR Codes, but the pattern will stay the same. The second is with online applications. We have seen more applications being submitted the last two weeks running up to the deadline. No amount of incentives have encouraged early registration.

Our Advice: Manage your soccer tournament with data you know, not the gut feel or common wisdom you think you know. Knowing the attention cycle of an event allows us to say things like “pricing incentives for early registration does not work” or “multiple-team incentives don’t work.” We’ve seen the traffic and registration patterns for tournaments with and without incentives. There is no variation.

But just because the cycle has not changed for a long time doesn’t mean it can’t. While the large trending cycle will probably stick around a long time, you may want to think about how you can engage your audience one more day longer or one more day sooner. Think about what you and your sponsors can do to grab just one more day of attention and what that would mean for your soccer tournament and your sponsor’s business.

The 90-Minute Attention Span is a very powerful force. Even grabbing one more minute of attention can move the needle for your soccer tournament. The trick, however, is to add real value to your participant’s lives, not gimmicks like Facebook likes or raffles.

And learn to use the different phases of your tournament wisely. Here are some publications that might help you get started.