How is it an estimate, they know how many tickets they sold.

Tickets sold/distributed is not the same as attendance. There are plenty of events that are sold out but the stadium/arena will not be filled to capacity.

Like every game, in every sport ever held then. In the absence of any evidence to contrary we can use the published figure as the only figure we need to take into account

Well that's not really true because you are only allowed to sell tickets once, so,once it is sold out it is filled to capacity whether anyone turns up or not

The argument arises because we can now talk about two types of average. Average per game, or average per event. Most of the time they're one and the same thing so the debate doesn't arise. As long as you're clear which average you mean, there's no confusion. The trouble starts if you get elements of one mixed up with the other. In particular, if you count all the people at a multi-game event as attending both games ( which for the sake of argument assume they do, never mind details like people wandering out) and then subsequently present your per-game attendance based on this, you could ( if you didn't remind people that a double header was in there) give a misleading impression, even though you're correctly working out a per-game average. If I hadn't heard about the double header and you told me that Wales v Italy attracted a crowd of 45,000 in Cardiff, I'd being putting Nigel Wood up for a knighthood. But with the knowledge of the double header it's suddenly not quite the same stunning news.

For me, the 'per-game' number is indeed technically correct, but it represents something different if compared to a single game event. With either lots of double headers, or a few big ones, the technically correct per-game number for the tournament is less interesting - it's no longer a simple measure of how well we're doing, but a complex one which requires knowledge of the event structure. Pound value of all tickets sold is a dull but important number for me.

13,833 or 21,342 depending on which method you adhere to.

interesting that the 100% of the 500,000 target for 28 games = 17,857 average, but in fact, using the "other method" to calculate the average could have delivered 664,500 in attendance at an average of 23,732.

500,000 ticket sales v 664,500 attendees

I can't believe I actually posted a considered response in this thread earlier, that's 5 mins of my life I won't get back wasted engaging with this rubbish. Don't feed the troll, the agenda's pretty transparent.

Now then, c'mon England!!!

Pretty obvious you are an attention seeker, shame that you have chosen this board to display your insecurity

Am I the only one who finds this thread absolutely pathetic ???

No

Can I have a 5 minute argument please?

Is that on the basis that 22.5k watched each of the Millenium games? That's a bit of a thicko approach.

After the group stages:

Number of tickets sold - 259099
Number of "events" - 20
Average = 12955

or the other approach, counting all the games and including the 45k at the double header twice.

Number of attendees - 304151
Number of games - 21
Average = 14483