At the game on Saturday, crowd given as 13858??

There was never 13858 there, I would have guest at around 7 - 8K!!

Was there an official attendance?

Your also probably thinking that because I expect you were most likely sat in the stand that was full or close to full?

I thought the same last year when I went to catalan and the crowd was given as 10k - when all I could see was about 3k fans, but afterwards I realised there was probably 6k in the stand we were in.

No doubt they do it to make the crowd look good for TV, as the crowd looked pretty healthy IMO on the TV pictures - but unfortunatley it doesn't do much for the gameday experience as looking out on 3 sply populated stands you think the grounds empty when in fact its not.

If you look at the highlights on youtube though you will see one stand is packed whereas the others don't have too many in. Given the size of that stand I would expect 8-10k were in that stand alone with another few thousand spread over the ground soon getting you to 13k. I'd expect 13k to be about correct tbh.

On the radio commentary they were saying that they estimated the crowd to be near 15k.

What if they had a mechanism, maybe a gate that only let one person in at a time, and every time it turned, it clicked a counter, and then you add up all the counters to see how many people were actually let in. A bit radical, and it might need a bit of work, but it's an idea...........................