If you think any mathematician or statistician would divide a double header by two to get an average attendance, you are either talking to complete idiots or are making it up.

"The number of actual attendees" is where you're tripping up. It doesn't matter. Completely irrelevant.
"The number in attendance at EACH game" divide by "the number of games" gives you an "average attendance". It doesn't change for a DH.

The figure you're giving is just a halving of an attendance for what appears to be no reason.
Either back it up by finding where a mathematician or statistician would half a double header (in which case it would still be wrong but at least it'd explain where you got the notion from!), or admit you just got it wrong and made it up.

unfortunately double headed games fit no rules, if the price had been set at the same as a single game then you could say they were only getting half the revenue than 2 separate games would generate. The prices for the double headers were a lot higher than other group games. would 45k watch Eng v Aus for £5....maybe, would 45k watch Wales v Italy for £5...no way.....but 45k did watch boths game for about £10......so that means that 45k paid £5 twice....so in theory the equivalent of 90k attended if the price was adjusted to a single group game price.......

Having read through the arguments for the validity of both methods to calculate the averages for the World Cup, I would say that there is no ‘right’ way of doing it as both methods could be argued as being correct

So, as a Rugby League fan (as we all are on this site), I am going to go with the one that paints our game and our hugely successful World Cup in the best possible light…. i.e. the higher one!

I've previously tried to use the Magic Weekend as an example of why treating the double headers as one event rather than 2 games is the best way to calculate an average. Tickets are available for Saturday and Sunday, so those 2 attendances are given (this way does count people who have bought the weekend ticket twice, but as they are avaialble as separate tickets I think this is fair enough). If you were to take the 550,000 figure that would be like saying that the total attendance of the MW was 180,000, when in reality the figure given is 60,000.

Another way of looking at it, say there were 18,000 at the Froch v Groves fight the other week, does that mean that the attendance of all the undercard fights is taken and the total attendance was over 100,000? - No, of course it doesn't. This is the same, you can't take the number of games within the average as this either means doubling the actual number of fans in attendance at the DHs, which adds about 3,000 to the tournament average, or you half the total which knocks about 3k off it.

I know this thread is tedious and in reality it really doesn't matter. But people are using statistics to either over or underwhelm the true figure. I don't care what other sports do, there was not 45,000 at England v Australia and 45,000 at Wales v Italy, nor were there 22,500 at each game, there were 45,000 in attendance for 2 games as part of the same event.

You can't divide 67k by 2 because theres 2 games. You are then saying there was only 33.5k at the england nz game, when there was clearly nearly 70. And there was clearly more than that at the start of the aus fiji game.

Only way is to treat it as one game one event.

Whoever is dividing it by 2 if a ******* k**t and is doing it purely for their agenda, to draw people into a argument they know they can't win.

Yay for boring, relentless, repetitive trolls!

If only the RFL had staged a quadruple header along with a triple header on the same weekend instead?

The RLWC2013 attendances could have then been fudged 4 times on the Saturday at Cardiff and 3 times on the Sunday at Wembley to arrive at a smokeycalc-induced attendance of approximately ((45,052 x 3) + (67,545 x 4)) "Half-Priced Coded Discount Applied To Already Heavily Discounted World Cup Tickets Magic Attendance Double Big Hit Weekend of the Extraordinary!"[/i That's one way of ensuring the average attendance is higher than the full-priced 1995 or full-priced 2008 World Cup

OTOH, they could calculate the total aggregate attendance and divide by the number of games played in order to arrive at the average. That's how it's always been done in previous full-priced RLWC's.

If we count Cardiff, Wembley and all the rest as events instead...

RLWC2013 Aggregate Attendance = 457,133
Number of events = 26
Average Attendance = 17,582

RLWC1995 Aggregate Attendance = 265,609
Number of games = 15
Average Attendance = 17,707

The full-priced 1995 World Cup average attendance is still higher than the average attendance at the half-priced discount on the already heavily discounted 2013 World Cup.

There's not a mathematician, a level maths student, GCSE maths student, 11year old of a normal iq who would divide 28 data points by 26 and call it an average. The fact there are only 2 people doing so, and those two people have spent months before the WC telling us all how terrible it would be and how nobody would attend pretty much tells us all we need to know.

Everyone else accepts it's either 26 data points divided by 26 or 28 data points divided by 28, if Gutterfax and William Eve need to redefine what an average is to rescue what they think is some level of credibility, let them.

Excellent post putting this thread to bed.

I doubt it

Just to be a pedant they're doing 26 data sets by 28 (otherwise they'd be getting a BIGGER average, and I'm sure they wouldn't want that!).