If you are going on population / attendance to calculate best and worst supported teams in SL then surely London are worst followed by Leeds. Best supported been Cas Tigers followed by Leigh.

I wouldn't go on "population" unless all towns and cities contained only born and bred locals, everyone walked to the matches and watching RL was the only sporting choice.............

So called "support" is also affected by success and private investment fuels that..... We can hail the great support of locals in a small town where their team is succesfull and condemn support levels where a club don't have two pennies to rub together.

Maybe if Jack Fulton had ended up at Featherstone not Cas................

Featherstone are actually a good example of where the figures don't tell the true story. Featherstone's sole source of support is not the village of Featherstone, it's a lot of the former mining areas around it, and the decent sized town of Pontefract. It's only by having that wider demographic pull that they can be an aspirant SL side.

Its very difficult to determine the true population of a place. Hull for example has a very tight local authority area covering the city boundary only, but in reality there are thousands more living in the suburbs and towns such as Beverley around it, its hard to get the true population figure. The country also doesn't know its true population number anyway! there have been millions more applications for EU settled status than was predicted.

London's problem has and I fear always will be moving too often, if they were a Yorkshire team it'd be the equivalent of a team moving from Hull, to Leeds to Middlesbrough, to Donny...and expecting the fanbase that has been built to battle through the traffic, pay for the trains to get them there on a busy Friday night.

Surely it’s Salford?

Thanks for the name check.

IIRC London's problem was that [i"Even Richard Branson could not make it work"[/i so Hughes agreed with Tony Rea that they should give up on the club.

But Hughes could not bring himself to do it. I don't think Hughes expects anything nowadays, he just likes running his own Rugby League club.......

Last time the clubs were "head to head" averages were......

London 2019 season 2,014
Salford 2019 season 3,746

However the Salford figure will include a lot of away fans e.g.

Salford.v.Waarrington 4,879
London.v.Warrington only 2,357

Interestingly London's worst attendance was against Salford 1,445

You have a point here even though it was London......

But you wouldn't take Saints from the population of Merseyside, that is skewing again, unless you take London from every Borough/County they have played in, in this case Surrey !

Leigh, Wigan & Salford do not take their % from population of Greater Manchester, you take from the town or city to get a true reflection of % of population attending.

I would 'guess' in percentage terms that Salford & London are fighting it out to be the lowest.

My maths may be a little out, but over the 20 seasons and some 264 games, London Harlequins RL Broncos averaged 3,436.

What are you basing your ''guess' on here Ste, I'm confused.



Population of Salford - 245k
Population of London - 8.9m

Based on those populations I'd 'guess' London might edge it.



No surprise to see sadsack RuBron chirping up again on this thread with his usual inane waffle.

It shows how dead our sport is when some fans of successful clubs with over 100 yrs of history think their club is doing well supporter wise, when they 'boast' of having just 5k-10k more fans than some relatively fledgling clubs.

That Saints, Wigan and Leeds haven't made significant gains outside of their immediate areas shows the games inability to penetrate into any new fan base.

To be fair, the last full season of SL saw St Helens, Wigan, Wire, Leeds, Hull FC and Catalan all average above 10,000 which is pretty good in terms of revenue generation.
These 6 can easily boost their gates from this point by incentivising new spectators to the lower demand games or even by attempting EVENT games like the other lot, but it's a worry that of the other 6 sides that year only HKR and Castleford are within touching distance of the 10k needed to break even.
I despair for sides like Wakefield, Salford, Huddersfield or pretenders like Leigh, London and Widnes who seem to have hit the limits as to the numbers they can attract.
in 2018, Wakefield averaged 5,468....this is 2k more than London averaged over their 20 seasons in SL and christ knows I defended the club from countless attacks about "attendances", but the question has to be asked. With no new stadium a decade and a half after it was promised and attendances that rely heavily on the visit of Castleford and Leeds, when will it become apparent that giving teams like Wakefield (and London for that matter) millions in TV money is just life support and not growing the game?
NB: This isn't a direct pop at just Wakefield...I could have used any of the others, but it was their stadium that made them slightly easier to use as an example of sides that are holding the game back.....if London had a stadium I could have used them