I've seen a fair few very good trolls during my time lurking around RL message boards, but they usually give themselves away in the end, in much the same way William Eve has.

yep, and smaller communities which made a local sports team of the world etc, less entertainment choices...

Comparing that era with this is beyond pointless.

2003 71,212
2004 73,734
2005 74,213
2006 65,187
2007 84,241
2008 82,821
2009 76,560
2010 85,217
2011 78,482
2012 79,180
2013 78,137

Seriously, anyone criticising the crowd is an idiot. There really is nothing else to say.

I think they used the rug union calculator to count the crowd or does Wembley hold 120,000?

You could see 40,000 empty seats? Yeah you're right, this years attendance is shocking compared to last years 79k, which is definitely accurate as its only Wigan games they lie about the attendance.

Are you implying that Wembley was half full?

i think comparing challenge cup attendances for the entire competition and comparing them to other years is a bit of stupid idea; remember a lot of the draws are done from the hat so if a small teams gets the home game with a small stadium then obviously it won't get an attendance as large as big team having the home game and the small team getting the away draw. All depends on the draws up to the quarter finals on what the end overall attendance looks like, Wembley is always likely to have an attendance that just varies by around 5-8000 so the earlier rounds really skew the overall attendance figures.

What a pity the 'stats pack' posts couldn't be put, sort of behind the more interesting ones, maybe only available by pressing a red button...

So, according to William Eve's stats, if the SFs next year are Wigan v Saints (12k example) and Leeds v Warrington (12k example) then Challenge Cup SF attendances will be up by 50% woooo hooo

Wigan took a few less than last time I was there, Hull took a lot more than Leeds. Nowhere near as many neutrals there though, which is where the big dropoff was.

Challenge Cup Final attendances in recent years are deliberately inflated by the inclusion of the alleged sale of thousands of empty seats along with the Club Wembley ring of indifference. This has never been more evident than at yesterday's "Empty Seat" CC Final where it was obvious to anyone that Wembley was at least one-third empty.

The sundry knee-jerk reactions and ad hominem responses directed as a result of the provision of genuine comparative attendance stats from semi finals proving that the Challenge Cup is attended by far less people during the SL era surprises me not.

I think as other posters have pointed out, many neutrals (myself included) decided to save their money for the World Cup.

We obviously can't trust the officially announced attendancies for CC finals, so to validate the figures for the last 25 years I'm going to stitch together photos from every final and count the number of people... watch this space!