2017 Round 1 Crowds - Headline looks bad, context looks better

If you take a quick glance at the crowd figures for Round 1 of Super League they look bad. Really bad in fact. The worst opening round average gate since 2003!

The headline figure is an average gate of: 7,981.

That is the third lowest opening round average since Super League began in 1996, and compares to 11,421 for Round 1 last year.

The 7,981 is made up from:
12,208 at St Helens v Leeds
5,031 at Widnes v Huddersfield
8,522 at Castleford v Leigh
6,253 at Salford v Wigan
8,842 at Catalans v Warrington
7,027 at Wakefield v Hull FC

Whilst I'm not suggesting figures like this shouldn't cause the clubs and the governing body pause for thought - we all want higher crowds if we love the game - but I'm here to add a dose of perspective and context to 2017's poor early showing.

The first thing to highlight is that last year's four best attended Super League sides - Leeds, Wigan, Hull FC and Warrington - were all away from home to kick off 2017.

Compare that to 2016, when 2015's best 4 attended sides - Leeds, Wigan, St Helens and Hull FC - all began the season at home, and we already start to get context.

I'll now put things in to more context by sharing the average attendance for all Round 1 Super League fixtures each club has hosted, plus the details of the corresponding fixture in 2016's regular season and their 2016 league average:

*notes on the above: Green indicates figure is lower than 2017 Round 1 attendance, Red indicates figure is higher than 2017 Round 1 attendance. Figures taken from the start of Super League in 1996. All figures are correct to the best of our knowledge, Catalans only have two previous Round 1 figures available, one of which was their first ever fixture. The Round 1 Magic Weekend of 2011 is excluded from all figures. 

Addressing each match/home side in turn:

St Helens
Thursday's crowd represented a 3% increase on average Round 1 gates for them. It was 8% higher than their corresponding match-up with Leeds last year, despite this one being on a Thursday and last year being on the more popular Friday night slot. They also start 2017 off with a 14% hike from the 2016 average attendance for all their league games last year. All in all, a relatively positive start for St Helens.

Widnes
Probably the biggest disappointment of the round, but given the doom and gloom around predictions for both sides in 2017, not entirely surprising. Even so, there's still some green on the board as the corresponding match in Round 16 last year had a lower crowd than this one, a 7% increase was seen. The 36% drop on previous Round 1 Super League home game average and the 8% drop from last year's average crowd figure are both disappointments that Widnes will be working hard to address I'm sure.

Castleford
With no corresponding fixture to compare to, we can still see that Friday night's crowd was marginally up on the all-time Round 1 hosting average, albeit less than 0.5% up, but more promisingly 14% up on the 2016 home average for the Tigers. A start they'll surely look to build on as bigger clubs come to town.

Salford
Clearly a bright start to 2017 for the Red Devils off the field, helped it has to be acknowledged by a large travelling Wigan contingent. That contributed to a 6% bump on historic Round 1 crowds for Salford and a massive 94% uplift compared to 2016's home league figures. Still, 53% up on last year's match-up between these sides isn't to be sniffed at.

Catalans
2017 starts with a bit of a downer crowds-wise for Catalans, with the chart above showing all red. Worth noting though that the difference between this game and the 2016 regular season fixture between the two sides was only 17, so not really a difference at all. Perspective should be added around the Round 1 average figures for Catalan too. This was only their third Round 1 home opener since they joined the league. In their first, against Wigan, their first ever game, they had 11,000 watching. In 2009 they hosted Huddersfield in front of only 7,520, so its not a great sample size to draw from. Of course, the 5% drop at this game from their 2016 average isn't great and something they'll hope turns around as the summer months come along.

Wakefield
After a few years of disappointing crowds, three green lights for Wakefield is a big plus. A 5% increase on what was their second best 2016 home crowd is a great start. It's also a 5% increase on their longer-term Round 1 average. Even better, it's 41% up on their 2016 average crowd. Hopefully we'll see more of the same from the Trin faithful this year.

So, should we be happy with 2017's Round 1 crowd figures? No, not even in context, but that's because we should be striving for more and not settling for where we're at, and not because the figures for each of the games we saw were bad.

Thanks for reading, hope you found it interesting. Make sure you look out for our shows each week for more of this kind of stuff!

Mark
SLP

*Edit: I've now seen an alternative crowd figure for Salford v Wigan of 6,527, that takes the average crowds for Round 1 up to 8,026. My original figure was taken from the Salford Twitter feed. As this doesn't change the overall theme of this piece a full revisit isn't planned.