Home Attendances : Sat Mar 14, 2015 5:52 pm
In pre-season, I watched Ian Lenegan's presentation at the fans' forum, during which he stated that our turnover was down and quite a bit of this could be accounted for due to a drop in our average home attendance. He went on to say he wasn't worried by this because the new structure will mean more competitive games and, in turn, an increased attendance at home games.Since then, we have played two SL games at the DW. The Hudds game drew a crowd of 12,488 - our lowest against them since 2009. Last night's 11,718 was our lowest home attendance against Hull FC since 2003. This obviously isn't a great start to growing our home averages, which have steadily been on the decline since 2012 and Lenegan's statement at the fans' forum seems naive to say the least. To emphasise just how the crowds have been falling, in 2011 we had only one SL game with less than 13,000 in attendance whereas in 2014 we had 8 (including 5 under 12,000 and 1 under 11,000). In that time the average dropped from just over 16k to just over 14k.
Is there anything the club can do to get the 2000 or so regular fans who seem to have turned their back on attending week-in, week-out? There are numerous reasons why the attendances are tumbling (e.g. Thursday games, lack of a "superstar" such as Sam, no free parking on site anymore, overall standard of SL, ticket prices etc) and whilst I agree with the sentiment behind Lenegan's presentation (the new structure is better than the previous one), have they really done enough to get more bums on seats? I've seen a lot of people complaining about the atmosphere but it's no surprise it's so poor with such a low crowd.