The Virtual Terrace • Challenge Cup Final

There needs to be some acceptance that when you're talking about an individual club's following, you're talking about clubs in a sport where even the biggest get maybe 15k at absolute best for home games. That's being generous too. For many clubs it's <10k. No club actually has 30k passionate fans, as evidenced by not a single ground in Super League requiring that capacity, and few if any games anywhere being sold out. This isn't a dig at "glory hunters" because without them we might as well play our finals in Huddersfield and no one wants that. What it means though is that if a club does take a 30k following to a final, a large number of them will be casual fans who have little or no interest in going every week. Those people will often not be up for going every single time once they've been before, so that explains the drop off. Wires fans used to slag off Wigan fans for not turning up, taking it for granted etc. We're now in a similar position as we go to our 11th major final since 2009. The fact that we've developed a habit of losing them obviously doesn't help, but that's a separate issue.

To be well attended these finals rely heavily on neutrals, and with so much else going on now - including withing RL with events like Magic - "Wembley weekend" is never going to be the big day out for thousands that it used to be.

Statistics: Posted by Dropkick Murphy — Sat Aug 24, 2019 12:37 pm — Replies 31 — Views 1747

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