2005 RL Attendances by Population

Attendance figures are often given in isolation, and so fail to reflect how successful a club has been at marketing itself within its community. The table below attempts to remedy this by showing the 2005 average attendances for all 30 professional rugby league clubs as a proportion of their local population.

This itself is still flawed, there are a number of other significant factors which ideally need to be accounted for. Those clubs not in the main West Yorkshire (West Riding) or Cheshire, Merseyside, and Greater Manchester (South Lancashire) conurbations are disadvantaged in being able to attract visiting supporters. For the same reasons, though, they also benefit from there being less clubs nearby competing for support.

Also no account is made for other sports, and their clubs, which will be aiming to attract supporters from within some of the same communities. Finally there is the obvious affect of a team's competetiveness; many will turn out to watch a successful side, and will stay away from a poor one.

Despite those omissions, it does still put a club's average attendance figure into some form of context.

Notes

All attendances are for regular-season games in either Super League or the National Leagues only.

All populations are taken from the 2001 census with the following notes:

• Populations are for named towns and cities only, not council boroughs or agglomerated areas, unless otherwise stated.
• The population of Hull does not take account of both Hull FC and Hull KR playing in the same city.
• The Leeds population figure includes that of Hunslet.
• London Broncos local community is taken to be the London Borough of Hounslow (Brentford population is 10,745).
• London Skolars local community is taken to be the London Borough of Haringey (Harringay [town] population is 10,525).

Adjustments

The above table only takes account of the population of a town or city which a team is seen to represent. This annex give the agglomerated populations, where relevant, for those areas where there is only one professional club present. In these areas it can be assumed support will be drawn from the extended area, this was not shown on the main table for sake of consistency.

Conversely as Hull contains two clubs nominally representing different sides of the city, the population here as been halved to give a more fair representation.