Well I am delighted Fev are going to bring a lot of fans.

Everyone likes atmosphere at matches especially kids. Three of my grandkids will be there and they will love it especially as they get to see me at HT

Well done to Fev considering they are only a small village with no hope of progression to the Challenge Cup quarter finals. Great effort from what is after all only a very small club with delusions of grandeur. A week on Sunday will feel like the Final to their supporters.

Cheers Brian hope you can make the match.

I usually give em 5p each.

Of course, any reasonable person understands that Fev's catchment area is not limited to Fev itself.

However, given the proximity to Cas, Wakefield and even Leeds, I'd have to suggest that Fev are not the only team drawing support from the areas mentioned.

As a comparison, here is a list the population totals for the areas you mentionedTotal

Here are the figures that represent Leigh and the smaller towns and villages bordering the town and strongly associated with LeighTotal

Clearly, there are more places that could be included in either total.

What stands out to me is the % numbers of people in each catchment area that live in the place the team represents. These people are the most likely to have affinity with the club and become loyal, longterm fans. At Leigh, 45% of the catchment area is in the town. For Featherstone, it is 24% of a smaller total.

However, I don't think the town sizes and catchment areas are a particular problem for either club at the moment. It isn't necessary to attract 25,000+ to establish a team as a decent Super League team, given that most RL clubs are poorly run and are underachieving.

Very interesting FACTS there Michael .

Featherstone and Pontefract are virtually 1 and the same, if you live in Pont you support Rovers, the only people that support Cas are the non drinking social outcasts, you go to any of the Ponte amateur teams and they will have the token 1 or 2 Cas fans, they are probably more passionate about Rovers than Fev folk believe it or not in my experiences, you dont hear of hardly any Wakey fans at all this side of Fev. This is the reason Rovers have drawn a dozen crowds above there population a feat not many sporting clubs in the world can get near to matching. There are a lot of Cas fans in Knottingley as well as Fev but iv never known coaches go from Knottingley to Cas games but they do to most Rovers games. Rovers have a big area to pull from we are a big club that just happens to be in a small town

I won't dispute that Fev are attracting more fans than they probably should - but please define 'big club', because to my mind you've strayed in to nonsense.

P.S. In terms of population, Featherstone + pontefract < Leigh

Depends how you define a big club, you may think its nonsense but the words i used are the exact words the Rovers board use for destination super league propaganda purposes. I define a big club through history (we have that) facilities and future prospects. We own 18 acres of land near the ground, land that will be changing from green belt as hundreds of houses are to be built very near there, this gives us superb future prospects if managed right. We can certainly compete for crowds if in the top flight as have done before, we also have a very wealthy shareholder. Put it another way i would rather be in our position than some so called big clubs currently in super league