We've had many threads regarding poor numbers of away fans at games and the stock response is that clubs should be focusing on their own fans to maximise their attendances and this may be right.
However, there is a serious issue, when fans dont travel to the RL showpiece events and this issue seems to be having an effect on crowd numbers at the semi final double header.
Having just taken advantage of a £15 ticket, including travel to go to Bolton, you do wonder whether having 1 or 2 more overseas clubs in SL will have a detrimental effect on Magic and The Grand Final.

Although, in one sense, it would be great to see Catalan in a major final, the effect on ticket sales could be a potential disaster and this is painted against the £2 million loss that The RFL recently posted.

Can this really be good for the game of RL or, am I missing something ?

Clubs and their supporters who depend on traveling fans shows a weakness that the said club cannot or will not make an effort to market themselves. Widnes being an example. I mean look at their major jersey sponsor 'Beat the Scum, sorry Scrum'. What is that all about?? Hardly a national sponsor. Was better when ICI were on the front!

This has been an ongoing issue in the 30 years I have been watching RL. Only a few clubs do make the effort and then they are rewarded with the fruits of their labour, but this then causes the bludger clubs to become envious and jealous leading to bitterness.
Why can't the ENTIRE game work together FFS?? Is it really too hard to put aside egos for the bigger common good???

Having strong away followings is clearly not a bad thing. My issue with the "away fans" argument is that we are allowing what is a proportionally small source of revenue or potential to have an unduly high level of influence on the direction that the sport takes.

At the moment, the debate we seem to be having seems to revolve around how the sport shouldn't explore potential new opportunities for new audiences, commercial partners and media partnerships because we might see a reduction in attendance when these clubs play in the heartland areas. I think that view is extremely misguided.

Does expansion come with risk? Absolutely it does. It may be that these audiences, media partnerships and commercial partnerships never materialise, but there's equally risk in not expanding the sport that I would suggest is much greater.

Look at most professional sports and you will see that the proportion of income that comes directly from supporters has fallen consistently over the last 20 years or so. Income from ticketing and merchandise is becoming less and less significant in football, RU, the NRL and in all of the major US sports. It's still significant, but it's a much smaller slice of the pie. RL clubs haven't cottoned on to that fact, and this argument about "away fans" misses that point entirely.

It raises the question as to how this sport is possibly going to grow when advertisers, sponsors and broadcasters don't care about an audience of 3,000 mostly C2DE's in Salford? Expansion comes with downsides and risks, but I think that the upsides make that an opportunity cost worth taking. Next year Sky will complete a full roll-out of its programmatic TV advertising technology and that's going to seriously hurt this sport unless it starts appealing to new audiences.

And even with that in mind, the argument that clubs should focus on 'home supporters' is absolutely a fair one to make. These supports offer much more value over a lifetime to a club and, in a industry where supply is naturally constrained (due to ground capacities), 10,000 home supporters in a stadium is much more valuable than 8,000 home and 2,000 away in the long term.

Hardly a national sponsor? It's a partnership with the NHS so it's a bit national.

I think that expansion has that drawback of fewer away fans. But that hasn't harmed the NRL. Melbourne Storm, and North Queensland have done very nicely with their own fans dominating their home games and not traveling away. So nobody in Australia is raising this issue in deciding whether the NRL should expand into Perth.

Furthermore, this lack of traveling fans has to be weighed against the increase in sponsorship and advertising that comes with expansion teams.

Neutrals get behind the expansion teams for the big events.

The fact you had to explain it means that its hardly well known. Either that or just a rubbish logo. Slap NHS on there and we'd know. But then again, why should my monthly tax be used to prop up a rubbish team? Thats hardly going to help me when I go to the DRs.

Although there are POTENTIAL increases in sponsorship and advertising, can you point out where there has been any gain from this since Catalan joined the competition ?
Also, whilst some neutrals may well support say, Catalan against Saints, there wont be anything like as many neutrals buying tickets for the double header as there would be had say, Hull FC or Leeds playing there.
Maybe the very fact that we have a double header semi final tells us everything we need to know about the potential for travelling fans from Perpignan and just imagine what would happen if it happened to be Totonto v Catalan next season ?

If we had Catalan, Toulouse, London and Toronto at Magic next season, what would happen to the attendance and what would the ramifications be for the RFL's coffers.
The same applies to The Challenge Cup Final and potentially the Grand Final, although the latter does seem a bit far fetched.

Apply the same question to a scenario where Magic Weekend is contested by clubs from parts of the country that major advertisers and sponsors have little-to-no interest in. What are the implications for the RFL coffers then?

In a lot of cases it's possible to reach the sort of audience we speak to for less than £50-per-thousand - and that number is getting lower and lower. That's the reality of the advertising and sponsorship market we are in and the main reason why we are so attractive to online bookmakers is predominantly because they tend to be excluded from those forms of advertising.

At the moment we have one French club in SL. That French club have generated their own commercial partnerships with French companies that may never have been involved in the sport before (Renault, Air France etc). Yes, they are sponsors of the Dragons and not the league as a whole, but to say that "Super League isn't sponsored by French multi-nationals so why do we bother with Catalans?" is like complaining that we aren't sponsored by Coca-Cola because we have some clubs near one of their bottling plants. The more we increase the sport's footprint and audience reach, the more attractive it becomes.

I also think we need to stop seeing this as a zero-sum game. If heartland clubs can do what's necessary to increase our appeal to advertisers and broadcasters, fantastic. I just don't think that they can. Wigan's last publicised accounts show a drop in sponsorship income of £680,000. Unless that was a very tough year for Uncle Joes Mintballs, it should be the canary in the coal mine that one of our most prominent clubs is not an attractive proposition for sponsors.

One of the reasons why RU doesn't have the same discussions, despite being relatively geographically confined (in this country at least), is because it reaches those hard-to-reach audiences in affluent parts of the country in and around the London commuter belt. We've got affulent parts of the country on our doorstep, but our clubs aren't reaching those areas.

Excellent point, well made.

It may well be boring, but if you're looking for reasons why this sport is regressing, looking at why one of our better run, most recognised and marketable clubs is losing £680k in sponsorship is probably a good starting point.

RU is the sport of The Establishment and in England it's largely based around the capital and whether we like it or not, the game is way, way better connected than RL.
Also, the face that it commands so media attention, give it a huge advantage when talking to sponsors.

RL is looking to improve it's media appeal and who knows, our expansion into N America and further into France should help in this area but, nobody quite knows and IF we keep on taking the wrong options, the current system being yet another of these, it wont matter how far and wide "we" are spread, because the game in the UK could well be dead.

This post just stinks if anti expansionism, from a suppoter if a club who jyst about manage an away folliwing in the low hundreds, complaing that otjer sudes only bring fans in similar numbers. And rely on the big city neighbors away support to bump up the average crowds.
I hope Torobto and Toulouse come in and shake it up a bit.

have you been drinking?

And as I said, that's the risk. The problem is, the game in the UK could well be dead anyway if we don't take that risk. How do we get this sport into a position where we can generate commercial and media investment by insisting that we should only offer those investors what we are already offering them?

I completely understand why people insist on saying "focus on the heartlands", but what does this actually mean in reality? We've had 120 years and more to "focus on the heartlands" and here we are, with declining participation, falling crowds, an aging audience, falling commercial income in comparison to other sports and more and more clubs in financial distress. So what does "focusing on the heartlands" mean? Giving out more central funding (much of which seems to go purely on paying off HMRC debts)? Giving out more cheap tickets? Betting the farm on Eddie Hearn?

To bring it back to the original question, that's why I think that this obsession with "away fans" is the wrong point of focus. As a sport we are probably generating as much direct revenue from our fanbase as we can - look at how our support base only supports international fixtures if the discount codes come out. The sport needs to follow the lead of pretty much every other successful professional sport and look for revenue beyond that fan base. Again, how do we do that by simply insisting that expansion won't work, cannot work, and by offering nothing new to those investors that aren't interested in what is already on the table?

Have you seen the weather cause i have.

Nice one.

I cant decide whether you are trying to be humorous or whether you are just daft ?

Read back the first post and how it relates to RL "events" and try to work out whether an increasing number of overseas expansion clubs will have a positive or negative effect on attendances and if you still think the answer is "positive", please can you explain why it is that RL fans, from clubs not involved in the semis are getting give away ticket offers just 2 weeks before the semi final double header.
I realise that the English clubs involved also carry responsibility for the lack of ticket sales but, I ask again:
IF there are 3 overseas sides (and possibly London) in SL, how will this affect attendances at the major RL events:
Magic. Grand Final and Challenge Cup Final ?
And, as you have decided to throw an anti Wakefield slant on this one, I can absolutely assure you that should they ever make it to a Grand Final or Challenge Cup Final, the would sell rather more tickets than all 3/4 clubs mentioned put together

Read my signature.....go on, read it.
AWAY fans are a minuscule part of the game and the only people who rely on them are clubs who have disconnected with their own home base through laziness....Wakefield being a prime example......bloody shocking attendances in a metro area that size but when you spend your cash avoiding the middle 8's rather than spend it on decent facilities, you keep your 3,000 core suPPorters happy.......but you'll never attract new ones.....Warrington/St Helens are great examples of what a new stadium brings...New Sponsors and bigger gates........that's why the top 5 or 6 sides are all close to 10K averages or over......not because of away fans!

Read my post !

I'm not talking about the weekly rounds, I'm asking about the RL "events", Cup Finals, Magic and the upcoming semi final, which doesnt seem to be selling too well.

Could of sworn I was at Wembley a few years back and Catalans were there......think it got more than 16k more fans than last years final......strange that,
READ MY SIG......you anti-expansionist! There is no place for all three of Castleford, Wakefield and Featherstone in the SuperLeague......But, the same way that NZ RU has teams like Wellington Lions, Manawat Turbos and Taranaki whatever's in their second tier, these clubs fee the HURRICANES in Super Rugby, if we want the game to flourish, then the three clubs above need to fee 1 SL club......so whining pr1x like yourself can go to watch wakefield, but true fans of the sport will also go to watch Calder Cougars (or the like) when they host Toronto.......
Read my signature again and then ask yourself why it is only fans of small clus that ever whine about away fans!

Really? This again?
Exeter, Coventry, Middlesex, Newcastle, Manchester, Reading, Gloucester, Leicester, Northampton, Bath, Worcester and 1 club in London.........even if I give you Quins in Middlesex, it's still 2 from 12 and it'll be 2 from 12 next season


Really.....step away from this stupid topic now, because you're just going to dig yourself a deeper hole. Away fans have little impact on the fiscal health of any competition and it is only the weak clubs who seem obsessed with them!

Sorry but, you are wide of the mark concerning my views on expansion, although I do have a problem with Toronto being part of "our" comp. I think it just not practical.
The bigger picture of establishing RL in N. America may well make it worthwhile and only time will prove this but, the cost and timing issues in having a league, with teams so geographically spread is just crackers.
Call me whatever you want, it matters not but, please answer the question that I asked about the effect on major events: Magic, Grand Final and Challenge Cup Final.

Your point about the final attendance looks interesting but you seem to have deliberately removed any context.
There may have been 76000 for the final where Catalan took part, which may compare well with last year but, there were 83000 the year prior and over 85000 the year following.



Just a simple question for you regarding the double header, which is what sparked my post and that is whether you think the appearance of Catalan has : a) forced the RFL to stage a double header so as not to have one of the games played in a half empty stadium.
b) had a negative effect on ticket sales, leading to a giveaway offer for the game in just 10 days time.

WRONG........
St Helens v Huddersfield (Twickenham attendance) 65,187
Catalans v St Helens, 2007 Attendance 84,241
Hull v St Helens 2008 Attendance 82,241
Wire v Hudds 2009 Attendance 76,560
.....shall I go on?


Regardless of if Catalan v London and Toronto v Toulouse were the SF line up this year, the RFL were always planning to have a double header this year.....they get a kick back from the local council for hosting it as well as the ticket revenue.....it's why Newcastle is preferrd ahead of a ground nearer the heartlands......SFA TO DO WITH EXPANSION OR GROWING THE GAME AND EVERYTHING TO DO WITH £

As I say...step away now. Away fans are becoming even less of a relevance now.....TV money, hosting rights, geographical reach (on a budget) and a host of other things come before the fans, or have you missed the Thursday night scheduling?

My error on attendances, should have gone to specsavers


I've no idea on the RFL plans prior to the semis being drawn but, there didnt appear to be any advance notice of the double header or, did i miss that as well ?

I agree about fans being "less important", which is clear from the constant changing of fixtures and the spread over different days.
THe cheap tickets must simply be some late "window dressing" to cover the empty seats at The Macron.

Are you new to RL? Late discounting is always on offer.......unless there's earlier discounting, like being able to buy next years CC Final tickets almost immediately after the CC Final for a tenner as was the case a couple of years back.

4,568 - Widnes
10,366 - Leeds
10,347 - Hull FC
2,328 - Salford
7,137 - Castleford
6,711 - HKR
9,138 - St Helens
9,121* - Hudds
???? - Wakefield
8,807 - Wire
????? - Wigan

7613 is the average attendance when catalans visit the UK....831 fewer than the entire competition average.....which means that the 9 venues with reported attendances will gave been down a collective £16,000 each in ticket revenues at £20 a ticket......except....Widnes, Salford, Huddersfield, Castleford, Wire and Hull FC have all had LOWER attendances than those reported for Catalans visits......6 from 9.....so again I say......STEP AWAY FROM THE AWAY ATTENDANCE DEBATE.........It's unwinnable for you!