Opening SL weekend sees attendances tumbling by 12.66%

William, Re Saints Crowd last night:

13k last year for this fixture was exceptional and 3k higher than the next highest attendance since 2000.
The crowd last night was higher than any equivalent crowd for this fixture bar 2010 and 2012 and I would bet the third highest ever attendance for this league fixture.

Looking back, neglecting last years exceptional attendance and the attendance for 2011 when Saints were playing at Widnes, the decrease is 4.5%. 2010 was an exceptional season as it was the last season at Knowsley road, plus Saints had a much more competitive season. Looking back at the corresponding fixture in 2009, we see a rise of 6% on the corresponding fixture in 2013.

The point I'm trying to make is that in order to analyse a trend you need to look at the longterm moving average, not an isolated case. Statistically you can't make sweeping statements about trends and only back your point up by one isolated case 2012 - 2013, you need to look at the longterm trend to smooth out statistical blips, like teams moving into a new ground, stockmarket crashes, whatever. Taking a 3 point moving average, which is a pretty common statistical technique, the trend is inexorably to rise.

The only way that you're going to put your argument to bed is to look at the complete aggregate attendances for rugby league, IE the total no. of people in each given season that went through a turnstile. I would suggest taking a period from 1980 to 2013, that way you have a good snapshot (a similar length of time) from prior to Superleague. You could break aggregates down per competition to back up the points on Cup attendances. It might be worth hiving off Lancashire and Yorkshire cup comps as well as they'll distort the statistics. It would be worth recording them for comparison though.

My prediction is that if you just take aggregates for regular league, premiership and challenge cup to roughly compare like with like, the total no. of individual turnstile clicks for RL matches will be to slowly rise since 1996. The data will probably show that the attendance at second and third tier matches has declined as has that for the challenge cup, but the rise in SL attendances will make up with that. I would love to be proven wrong though! I would do this myself, but I don't have the data, but I bet some statto has all the required Rothams books to do the calcs. Once someone has put together the spreadsheet, as a service to RL I'm happy to use my software engineering skills to put this data up online in a queryable database for the general public to peruse!