Flawed Attendance issues

[ThePretender]

I want to start off by saying that I don't want this to sound like a complaint. Rather, I hope that maybe this can lead to a change in either this version or future versions of OOTP.

I'm playing in a league where I've been a winning team for several years. I've made the playoffs in 4/5 years, made the WS over that time, have 100 FI, and my market has even grown this year. Attendance has been maxed, and despite this I did not raise my ticket prices.

This year the team ahead of me is historically good, and has a 15-20 game lead on me. Despite this, I lead the Wild Card by several games, and it's pretty likely that I'm making the playoffs. So it surprised me that over the course of the season, my attendance dropped by an average attendance of nearly 15,000 per year.

I think the problem exists that if I'm not a first place team, the fans lose interest. But I'm trying to figure out why that's the case. If I'm leading the Wild Card, or at least in the playoff hunt (ie within 2-3 games), my attendance should stay near the max capacity. It definitely shouldn't drop by 30%.

Like I said before, this isn't a complaint. If a team is in the playoff hunt, the attendance shouldn't go down. I'm just trying to figure out why this is the case, and if so if it should be fixed in the future so that successful playoff calibre teams don't lose nearly 30% of their attendance simply because they're not in first place.