Mail on sunday reporting only 280k total sales according to nigel wiskar on twitter

flew with Jet2 the other day and was impressed to see a 4-5 page spread about the World Cup, with full fixture list and details of where to buy tickets. Appreciate they are a Northern airline (based at Leeds-Bradford) but its yet another different audience being made aware of the World Cup.

Let's just cancel it and not bother.

So the real story is that in 2013 before the thing even starts they have already sold 18% more tickets than the cumulative attendance at the 2000 version? And that the average attendance for all games is already guaranteed to be in excess of 10,000?

This seems good to me - unless one takes the Gutterfax approach to things and prefer to drag Rugby League popularity totally away from its historical context?

I complete agree, especially considering very few tickets will have been sold so far for the QFs and many 'traditional fans' will not have bought tickets for games within their local area. So to be 3wks out and have strong ticket sales so far is very encouraging. That said, we shouldn't rest on our laurels and should continue to push the competition as much as possible with Cardiff being the key for mine. Push that as much as possible and severely ramp up promotion in the South Wales area itself (hardly been any of note so far!), and we'll have a mega crowd, not just the good one already attending...

But the plus point for mine is this will be the most successful competition to date, which is important as we wholeheartedly should not judge ourselves against other sports but against our own performances of the past. We are not a mega popular sport so everybody involved within the sport should get behind the competition if they can. Looking forward to it immensely!

You must really hate rugby league for mentioning that here.

If you are going to cite historical context, why didn't you include a comparison with the pre-SL era 1995 World Cup when the average attendance was 17,707?

or..

Mail on Sunday reporting that 280,000 tickets have been sold already, with 3 weeks still to go. That's 18% up on the total attendance for all games played in 2000 (when it was last held in the UK) and many more are expected to sell now the GF is out of the way.

This is shaping up to be an amazing, very well attended tournament.

If 280,000 tickets have been sold, how is that 18% more than the 263,921 tickets sold in 2000?

Maybe you could do us a chart with all attendances since 1954?
Go on, you know you want to and probably already have.

Piece from independent www.independent.co.uk/sport/gene ... 60091.html

Piece from independent www.independent.co.uk/sport/gene ... 60091.html