Quins cashing in on Twickenham factor
Peter Jackson looks at how attendances have changed in the last 20 years and sees good news in the capital cities
Twenty years ago, at the end of a season when England won the World Cup, attendances for the four capital city teams required surprisingly little counting.
Harlequins averaged fewer than 7,000 which made them the tenth best supported club in the 12-strong English Premiership, above only Leeds and Rotherham. Afortune teller predicting that one day London’s famous old club would be playing in front of more than ten times as many at Twickenham would have been told where to go.
They took over HQ twice in recent months, an initiative which required infinitely more counting than 20 seasons ago. The Pied Piper effect has raised the mighty Quins up to where they have never been before, the first British-Irish club to average 25,000 over the course of a domestic campaign.
In Dublin, Leinster’s season came and went at Donnybrook two decades ago as if nobody really cared one way or the other, an indifference strengthened by average gates in the Celtic League of barely 3,000. Before the end of that season the number had shriveled to 1,068 for their penultimate home game.
Nobody could have imagined that one day Leinster would have the clout and charisma of a Grand Slam-winning international team, that, like Ireland, they could switch home fixtures to the big stage, Lansdowne Road, then the Aviva Stadium, and fill it.
In Edinburgh 20 seasons back, the locals endured their own loneliness at Meadowbank where numbers dwindled to fewer than 1,500. They broke the 3,000 barrier just once and then only just, 3,036 turning up for the last home League fixture against Glasgow. The idea of the club game growing sufficiently in popularity for the capital to stage a crowd larger than for any football match at Hearts (Scottish Premier League average 18,402) or Hibs (16,932) was so off-the-wall that nobody thought of it.
After long years of setting and re-setting the world’s empty seats record at Murrayfield, Edinburgh returned there to see the old year out with the help of almost 40,000 for the URC derby against the Warriors from the west.
In Cardiff 20 years ago, the Arms Park was only once half-full for a Celtic League match all season long despite no shortage of Welsh opponents. The first season since the WRU’s contentious decision to compress their top clubs into five regional operations brought an ominous sign of what was to come.
Four of the five never got close to a five-figure attendance. Llanelli Scarlets, as they were then known, reached 10,000 twice despite running away with the Celtic League title.
Neath-Swansea Ospreys, alternating between The Gnoll and St Helen’s, finished up just under 4,000, the Newport Gwent Dragons just above. Cardiff suffered from an equally faded box-office appeal, averaging fewer than 4,500.
The Celtic Warriors, an amalgam of Bridgend and Pontypridd, discovered that the novelty value of a new operation vanished all too quickly.
“Quins are the first British-Irish club to average 25,000 over course of a season”, in next to no time their crowd had shrunk by two-thirds to 1,500 and that despite a galaxy of Welsh internationals headed by five Lions: Gareth Thomas, Neil Jenkins, Gethin Jenkins, Dafydd James and Matthew Rees.
The writing had been on the wall a few weeks earlier when only 2,100 turned up for a local derby against the Dragons at Sardis Road in Pontypridd. Once the Warriors went bust, Ponty fans found their team reduced to feeder status for Cardiff as part of the capital region. They have been voting with their feet ever since, understandably so.
Twenty years ago, Welsh teams accounted for all but one of the top six positions in the Celtic League: Scarlets (1st), Dragons (3rd), Celtic Warriors (4th), Ospreys (5th), Cardiff (6th). Ulster, the best-supported contender at a modest 6,850, finished runners-up.
Far from healing the old wounds, time has merely widened the disconnect between the regions and the fans, prompting the WRU to reconsider the nuclear option of reducing the surviving quartet to three.
Amid fears on either side of the Severn Bridge over another club going bust, the boom in France keeps booming, as reflected in their €698m television deal for live coverage of both the Top 14 and the ProD2.
Le Ligue Nationale de Rugby, organisers of the Top 14 and ProD2, report crowds of an all-time high in both competitions. Vannes, for example, averaged 10,518 in topping ProD2, virtually as many as Ospreys and Dragons combined.
UBB (Union Bordeaux-Begles) has strengthened its undisputed status as the best-supported club in Europe, average crowds of almost 28,000 adding up to about a third more than those of Girondins Bordeaux, the city’s football club mired in the no-man’s-land of the French Second Division.
Over the last ten seasons, UBB has increased attendances by almost 50 per cent. Lyon and Bristol can beat that, largely because both started from a low fan base in the second tier of their national competitions.
Lyon won promotion from ProD2 in season 2013-14 with gates of marginally more than 7,000 which they have since more than doubled. Bristol averaged 5,662 at the Memorial Ground in the Championship during the same season before losing both legs of the play-off final to London Welsh.
Since then the club, re-branded as The Bears, relocated at Ashton Gate and rejuvenated by billionaire owner Steve Lansdown, has more than tripled its following. If they ever get round to winning a national title, Bristol will expect to narrow the gap on Bordeaux.
The attendance figures in the panel above for season 2023-24 are restricted to matches in the regular seasons across Europe’s three major Leagues: the Premiership, Top 14 and United Rugby Championship.
