.....are the fans going fo the footie or the beer or just because they are free.......



also, looks like more than 40 empty seats here....and fewer beer tents to the left as well...

Great crowd, who cares if the tickets were free or if they are there for the beer?
Well done to TW for actually trying to introduce the sport to a new crowd.

I couldn't give a flying one if there were 5 or 50,000 there....the REALITY is that a team full of UK/AU/NZ journey men are being hyped up as the future of the game, when the reality is that EVERY SINGLE TICKET is free, the beer festival has shrunk and Argyle has the arrogance of a few other RL club owners........which, if he bores/tires of it, will see Toronto vanish as quickly as they arrived.

My sincere wish is that Toulouse do them in the GF........they are a SL squad in the lower tier and if we are doing expansion, they should have been fast-tracked instead of messing with the lower tiers. The championship 2019 could have been a really competitive if it weren't for the millionaires toy strolling through it.

London down, Toronto up and I reckon the 2nd tier will be a far better product in 2020.

I’ve just tried the code for future games and it doesn’t work.
The OP’s obsession with Toronto is bizarre. They seem to be doing virtually everything he’s said a new club should do and yet still seems determined to slag them off.

The sport gets poor crowds Gutterfax complains. The sport gets better crowds Gutterfax complains.

Nah....sorry, but no way.
Toronto will deliver a little bit of extra press.....but to emphasise how minimal Canada is in the terms of North America, I would consider Toronto to be as influential in America as Carlisle is in the UK.
We get a hard on for a rich aussie in Toronto, because it's different....London, with the Skolars and the Broncos running sides that are 70% organic is the future, not some rich tool throwing cash at promotion and buying success...........the fact is that tickets were available FOC.......and they will be again.

The real issue here is that the RFL/SL are happy for the freakshow, because up until Good Friday, you couldn't find attendances in the general press.....and by Easter Monday, they had vanished again.....but Toronto going up will be headline news and backslapping central at the head office.....because we'll forget that SL crowds are still at 2006 levels, whilst other sports including soccer and union as well as netball are all on the rise.......Man United are up 18% in that period.....the Union premiership are up 38%, we're down 8%.......DOWN......

.....and a rich bloke paying for people to attend a beer festival in the summer months and not doing anything to actually grow the development of players isn't going to change that at all.....other than giving SKY TV a Sunday evening filler which they won't pay for!

Then Toronto should be in a Canadian league then.....whoops, silly me !

1. I didn't say it was a bad thing
2. I did say it wasn't the saving grace of the game either.....

....Toronto isn't the model for saving the game. Perez has already said his model wasn't followed through on Toronto and he will look for more native players next time out.....

as for being pathetic?
I will spend close to £5,000 following my team this year.......pathetic if fans who won't travel more tan 4 bus stops!

May the 4th be with you.

They need to make it into an event first and foremost. THE place to be. Something of a novel concept for many British RL clubs. Is free tickets the best means of achieving that ? Who knows. Is it the worst? No. There are worse efforts on display every weekend.

There's two points to the OP's argument, so let's look at them both.

"Are they only there for the beer?". Frankly, that's not the point. The beer garden is very much a part of the matchday experience at Toronto games in the same way that Bullmania was very much a part of the matchday experience at Odsal, or the South Stand is at Headingley. Asking "how many only go for the beer?" is akin to asking how many kids at Odsal were only there because the like Bullman.

If a craft beer garden is something that pulls curious punters in, then it's a success. Given how -poor the beer offering is at most SL grounds (who wants a plastic bottle of whatever p*sswater Carlsberg is trying to pass off as beer these days?), perhaps its something that our clubs can learn from.

What's also striking is how many people seem to stay in the beer area after the event. Given that at the very least TW will be charging a pitch rent, and possibly also taking a % commission from each stand, it strikes me that getting people in "just for the beer" is probably good business.

As for the free tickets argument, free and cheap tickets have a time and a place. The issue is when free or cheap tickets become the only tactic in the playbook, as they have been at certain clubs for some considerable time. If free or cheap tickets are being used tactically, then that's not an issue. If they're being used to give discounts to people who would / could / should be paying full price anyway, then they're an issue.

Of course it wont work as its b*******.

of course, what the OP fails to mention is that Toronto have also sold every single allocation of season tickets.

Have london managed that?

Is there a public footpath going through the front of the stand? Constantly people walking throughout the game.

As Toronto fans have said, the provenance of the players does not seem to bother American/Canadian sports fans. Winess Las Vegas Golden Knights NHL team. As far as I know it did not exist five years ago. Rich dudes bought a franchise, hired 'mercenary' players from all nationalities/states and last year reached the Stanley Cup final, winning tremendous crowds in what is not by any means a traditional NHL city. OK, that's on a bigger scale than Toronto, but it's not dissimilar in terms of the approach to building a new team and support to go with it.