Im sure you can provide us with the figures to prove that fewer people are attending challenge cup, international and lower league games as a whole. You clearly have the time to, and are telling us you are able to.

Crack on………….

So why did fewer people watch it?

I've provided the reference above. If it's too hard for you to research the reference, just say so.

Perhaps you might like to crack on with providing figures for rlthis earlier assertion of yoursrl?

No?

Thought not.

Its your assertion, you prove it.

UPDATE...
SL Round 24 attendances - comparison to same fixtures last year

Salford V Leeds in 2013 = 3,235
Salford V Leeds in 2012 = 6,891
% decrease = -53.05%

St Helens V London in 2013 = 9,926
St Helens V London in 2012 = 13,262
% decrease = -25.15%

Wigan V Huddersfield in 2013 = 19,620
Wigan V Huddersfield in 2012 = 16,771
% increase = +16.99%

Think you might want to re-read that. It was actually Burnley vs Bolton, not Blackburn. Aside from the first 1,250 tickets which were priced at £12.50 (subsidised by the Football League as part of the 125th anniversary), the cheapest match tickets were £28 and the game was an unattractive 12.15 kick off live on telly.

I actually get a little tiresome of this "football is so expensive" lark. My Leigh season ticket cost £200 for 13 games, my Bolton one has cost £295 for 23 games. RL is truly in danger of pricing itself out of the market.

What would you consider a fair price for a SL season Ticket? I believe the average walk up price is about 20 notes....personally, I believe a ST holder should be charged at about a tenner a game.....any more than that and I believe people decide to pick and choose what games to go to and attendances suffer.

6500 ST holders at 180 a pop or 9,000 at 130.......I'd rather have the 9,000 with 2,500 more people spending cash in the ground...32,500 more shoppers over a season. The trick is, to budget for this over a 10 year period.....get people back into the habit of attending every game.....don't do it for 2 years and bank on a massive initial uptake......it has to be gradually built up.

The Long game isn't really the RFL's thing though...is it?

Smokey doesn't speculate. Smokey only deals in facts and what the RFL tell him. Why should he do anything else? His ramblings are only as good as the facts he has on the table and what the professionals tell him. I felt his pain when grade B licence holders Bradford collapsed six months after KPMG rubber stamped their bid. To his credit though his forum back peddling was as smooth as any high wire unicycle circus act.

William, Re Saints Crowd last night:

13k last year for this fixture was exceptional and 3k higher than the next highest attendance since 2000.
The crowd last night was higher than any equivalent crowd for this fixture bar 2010 and 2012 and I would bet the third highest ever attendance for this league fixture.

Looking back, neglecting last years exceptional attendance and the attendance for 2011 when Saints were playing at Widnes, the decrease is 4.5%. 2010 was an exceptional season as it was the last season at Knowsley road, plus Saints had a much more competitive season. Looking back at the corresponding fixture in 2009, we see a rise of 6% on the corresponding fixture in 2013.

The point I'm trying to make is that in order to analyse a trend you need to look at the longterm moving average, not an isolated case. Statistically you can't make sweeping statements about trends and only back your point up by one isolated case 2012 - 2013, you need to look at the longterm trend to smooth out statistical blips, like teams moving into a new ground, stockmarket crashes, whatever. Taking a 3 point moving average, which is a pretty common statistical technique, the trend is inexorably to rise.

The only way that you're going to put your argument to bed is to look at the complete aggregate attendances for rugby league, IE the total no. of people in each given season that went through a turnstile. I would suggest taking a period from 1980 to 2013, that way you have a good snapshot (a similar length of time) from prior to Superleague. You could break aggregates down per competition to back up the points on Cup attendances. It might be worth hiving off Lancashire and Yorkshire cup comps as well as they'll distort the statistics. It would be worth recording them for comparison though.

My prediction is that if you just take aggregates for regular league, premiership and challenge cup to roughly compare like with like, the total no. of individual turnstile clicks for RL matches will be to slowly rise since 1996. The data will probably show that the attendance at second and third tier matches has declined as has that for the challenge cup, but the rise in SL attendances will make up with that. I would love to be proven wrong though! I would do this myself, but I don't have the data, but I bet some statto has all the required Rothams books to do the calcs. Once someone has put together the spreadsheet, as a service to RL I'm happy to use my software engineering skills to put this data up online in a queryable database for the general public to peruse!

I doubt the attendances are that much different outside of SL. If you took the biggest clubs out of div 1&2 who had been relegated from SLtbe year previously out then crowds would be similar. I certainly remember going toRovers in div3 with sub 1000 crowds and mostly sub 2000 crowds in div2 and we were one of the best supported clubs in those leagues.

I agree JB. I recall attendances in the lower leagues being pretty underwhelming when I first started following the game. Certainly only Keighley were pulling them in in half decent numbers.

I think a-lot of folk have rose tinted glasses about times gone by and tend to remember the 60s. The 70s were pretty dire and unless you were a Wigan fan, so were the 80s and early 90s. Things are not brilliant at the moment as media profile of the game is well down compared to 20 years ago and the international game is appalling, but attendances, quality of the teams and stadia has taken a massive leap forward.