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

Boroughs are haphazardly designed - sometimes due to tradition, sometimes due to politics, and so on...

Most appropriate approach would probably be to do something like quantify the population within a 30-minute drive time of the ground. But I think that is called 'geodesic analysis' and it's done a lot nowadays in marketing (for example, when a store like TK Maxx is trying to find the ideal location for a new store and develop a marketing approach) and you would need someone able to access the data sets and analyse them properly - usually someone with a Masters in Maths or Marketing.

If we can't "penetrate into a new fan base" then how come average crowds in Superleague were 8,200 before the pandemic arrived and only 5,500 before Superleague came along?

Have you any idea of the crowds in the early 1970's? Soccer, RL and RU all have suffered the exact same grass roots playing decline......

If you're happy with your lot, and content that SL has a solid financial base for the future based on its current draw, and content to mock clubs who have a lower then average attendance, then fair enough.

Figures here, over the last 10 yrs or so (to 2019), look mostly like a downward trend to mehttps://www.totalrl.com/up-or-down-an-in-depth-club-by-club-look-at-attendances-over-the-past-decade/rl

The sport still, in my mind, remains marginalised and financially precarious, esp. for clubs devoid of a wealthy benefactor, and constant struggle for mainline sponsors, and I have little idea what benefit highlighting a "worst supported club" brings (noting someone will always be lowest attended).

Well, it at least highlights the club that might need support or be expected to 'do better'.

As stated above, if the RL was a serious marketing machine*, some serious analysis such as 'x amount of people live within 30 minutes travelling distance of this ground, yet their crowds are very small' might be a helpful starting point. Resources and expertise could be directed to helping that club survive and prosper.

*We could always hope.

Wigan's decline in crowds this decade is baffling and very worrying. Constant success with a mixture of local academy prospects and exciting overseas players on the field but gates have dropped down massively. Earlier in the decade I thought this was due to Wigan Athletic but they have since dropped down to League1.

I think Saints and Leeds have hit a natural ceiling, Saints due to the size of the town and Leeds due to several rival RL clubs and a big football club to complete with.

Castleford are within the Wakefield metropolitain area, that's a 350,000 population, about 90-100,000 more than the city of Hull, Hull and urban area is about 500,000, Cas/wakey and Fev combined 14,900 average att. using 2019 numbers, that's 4257/100k, Hull FC+KR at 19,700m 3940/100k

things are not as simple as made out as others have said. History, geographical location, what else is happening re sport and social/leisure offerings, employment levels, even how accessible a stadium is for fans beyond walking distance.