: Fri Feb 27, 2009 9:07 am
king of the shed wrote:
:lol: Compared to 90% of RL teams in the 70's they were massive.
It's all relative to the era the games were played, during Salford's best era the 30's (which were ended by Hitler!
) I would guarantee that average attendances would eclipse those many of today's top teams and I'd suspect that's the case for many other clubs.
In fact I've just found an old mag (not that sort
) from 1987 and it has all the average attendances from the previous year listed.
1 Wigan - 12,732
2 St Helens - 7341
3 Warrington - 4172
4 Castleford - 4758
5 Halifax - 4891
6 Hull Kingston Rovers - 4651
7 Bradford Northern - 4312
8 Widnes - 3840
9 Salford - 2826
10 Leigh - 4232
11 Hull - 5538
12 Leeds - 6393
------------------------------------------------------
13 Oldham - 3915
14 Featherstone Rovers - 2606
15 Barrow - 2664
16 Wakefield Trinity - 2637
And a few others of note
Fulham - 684
Huddersfield Barracudas - 524
Oh and just to add Salford were at the 70's height in the mid 70's not the early 70's cockles.
If you look at those figures for 1986 --- at a time when Wigan was the only professional club, the changes in spectator support by 2009 are interesting.
Wigan has improved by about 20-25% roughly, St Helens the same.
All the Yorkshire clubs who have been in Super League for a long time (Leeds, Bradford, Hull, Hull KR, Wakefield), have more than doubled their average attendances, as has Warrington.
But the biggest improvement has obviously been in the London club, formerly Fulham, now Harlequins RL, which has seen its average attendance more than quadruple since 1986. This would seem to justify fully the RFL support for the existence of a London franchise. If this improvement can be replicated gradually over the next 22 years, we might well see an average Harlequins RL crowd of 6,000 in 2019 and 12,000 by 2030. Of course all genuine fans of the game will hope for even greater improvement than that, especially if Richard Lewis's plans for a second London club, thereby creating a local derby, reach fruition by 2013-2015.
Not so for the clubs outside Super League. Leigh has stood still, and clubs like Oldham and Barrow have declined massively.
But Salford has not doubled its average attendance, based upon the first home game this year. Its chances of so doing depend upon Barton becoming a reality by 2012, and the construction beginning in 2011.
The decisions of the RFL regarding the next round of franchises will probably hinge on that as much as anything else.
Compared to 90% of RL teams in the 70's they were massive. 
