5000 at Leigh with dirt cheap tickets for England v France.

17000 at Hull for a test against New Zealand.

Both of these crowds are terrible. Neither Leigh or Hull should host an international again.

I doubt the Hull one would have be bettered anywhere in the UK.

The problem is not with the fans it is with the game, the running of it, the Clubs ad the RFL.

17k is about the combined core fan base of the Hull Clubs. As a matter of interest, where abouts were you sat in the ground? The marketing drive on this game and series has been woeful. It’s only three years ago that the same venue got over 23.5k. Also, the pricing was unreasonable. £55 for a ticket close to the half way line.

Some 24 hours before the game I got an email offering discounted tickets in the near empty corners of the ground.
In hindsight the RFL should have been offering these much sooner.
Someone in the marketing department should be a little worried about going into work on Monday morning.

17k is hardly a disaster given the decline in crowds in SL over the last couple of years. Before we start blaming the clubs, was there any incentive (such as a percentage of the gate receipts) for them to sell the tickets?

I have a suspicion that this time, next week, you'll be blaming LFC for their poor effort.

And as usual, you are talking nonsense, although the attendances were mickey poor
Although Leigh is not renowned for hosting internationals, I've been to plenty at Hull (including yesterday) and unless i'm mistaken, it's not the host club that is responsible for ticket sales or any pre match entertainment.
What is desperately needed is some advertising/promotion for the matches.
.

The advertising was nonexistent locally. The night before the match a bloke in my local asked me if there was a match and if he’d known he would’ve bought some tickets.

Also, tickets were not available to purchase locally, only through the RL website.

To expect people to know about a match that wasn’t advertised and to then make them hunt for tickets was never going attract a good crowd.

This fixture had 24k at Huddersfield in 2016 and 44k at the Olympic Stadium London in 2015. 17k is a disgrace.

France are an absolute joke, so I don't blame the punters of Leigh and Lancashire for staying at home, even with dirt cheap tickets, games with France just dont offer the right entertainment.

The KCOM attracted crowds of over 20k for every international before yesterday, with several 25k sellouts. The decline in crowd shows the general decline in RL over the last few years. The marketing is non-existent, and as others have commented the pricing was all over the shop.

So where should it have been played in your opinion, with Hull having 2 SL teams in there it seems an obvious choice - clearly it needs someone of your thinking to grow the sport, so let's hear your pearls of wisdom

Like I said in another thread. What did England RL and the RFL do in the towns of Beverley, Bridlington, Scarborough, Shorpe, Grimsby, Cleethorpes, Lincoln etc. (none of which have big association football or rugby union teams) [and more of the smaller towns and villages closer to Kingston upon Hull] to market the game or advertise tickets for the game yesterday? Never mind in the city of Hull itself!

Why haven’t England RL and the RFL in conjunction with HFC and HKR been to all of those towns in the last ten months to promote a “Big England international just a few miles down the road from you in a ‘growing sport’ that needs more supporters”?

In a thirty second bypassing thought I came up with the idea of having a “Ticket Battle” between Hull’s two clubs; a race to see which club could sell the most tickets or something like an initiative to see if HKR could sell more tickets for the England game at their rival’s stadium than their usual allocation for a Hull derby.

Was there anything other than a few emails to the same people who always buy tickets? I’d actually like to know!

Same next week. The ticket battle could have been between Wire, Wigan and Saints; who can sell the most tickets for Anfield between the region’s three best supported clubs?

Why are some tickets priced at £55 for these games? Why isn’t it £5-7 for juniors and OAPs and £15-17 for adults?

It’s acutally stupid to think that you can rely on the same people to buy tickets for games who’ve just been before. They could have changed email addresses, changed their email preferences so they don’t receive promotional emails, moved away so can’t get to the game or even died!

You have to branch out and get to new audiences with new ideas and I’m afraid the same inept people are making the same inept mistakes at England RL and the RFL and have failed so far in their selling of tickets for this series.

I’m dreading Anfield next week. I think it might be an all time low for the England international team with huge swathes of empty seats, a far cry from thirty years ago when we’d even sell out Wembley!

In Barcelona they have ticket kiosks around the city where you can walk up and buy tickets for Barça games. I bet there wasn’t even a poster up in Kingston upon Hull advertising the game, never mind a ticket stall!


RFL, if you’re reading, give me £35k/year salary and I’ll do your marketing on my own and do a better job than your whole organisation has done for years!

The ourleague app is she shoddiest booking system I’ve ever used (and I’ve designed a couple) - the basket doesn’t delete unused selections even after a day, clearing the basket breaks the system even if the app is deleted and reinstalled. Forgot password - asking for a reset gets you 3 or 4 emails with different new passwords!
The discount is not applied automatically you have to find a promo code which isn’t mentioned anywhere! In the end had to use Ticketmaster directly.

Against France the cheap ticket was only available as a single ticket purchase so someone else could buy the one next to you before your mate buys his or as someone helpfully suggested from the RFL “use another Id to set up another account” - absolute clowns.

Didn't see any billboards and posters in Hull.

The KCOM doesn't have a proper ticket office, but that's an issue caused by Hull City's idiotic owners. But that problem could have been avoided by letting FC and Rovers retail stores sell tickets. I'm sure Hull City Council would have also been up for doing similar at their own ticket offices if there was a chance to earn some commission. Even in this increasingly digital age there are people who still like to pay cash and get paper tickets.

It could have been played in Denver, with an even worse crowd and "extended credit"
Right venue, zero promotion of the fixture, maybe you could put yourself forward to show everyone how its done and advise on just where these fixtures should take place.
Although it's not the job of The BBC to promote our sport, you would hardly of known that this game was going to be shown.
Now, if it was England RU, against ANY opposition, the fixture would have had wall to wall adverts, which knocks a huge hole in the usual knockers of our sport who claim the RL fans are the wrong type to interest advertisers as the Beeb doesn't have any.
It would be helpful if someone who actually knows, to tell us just who is responsible for promoting these games.
We have some heavyweight earners at the top of the sport but, nobody seems to be doing a damn thing about the receding profile of the sport across ALL media platforms, even the SL website was very late to show details of the fixture, squad etc.