Attendances 2014

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Originally Posted by oriel

I think they only have one match on each week on Friday nights. Still think they could find a much better time than 3pm on Saturday.

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Whilst I think this is correct for teams like Dungannon etc who have done friday nights and seen an increase, it doesn't work for linfield.

If we move away from 3pm Saturday our crowds are noticeably down. So for Linfield its a no goer. I think every team needs to see what suits them best and work from their. If Linfield are away to Dungannon for instance, it would be better for Dungannon to play on a Saturday so they get 1k supporters travelling to them, if they moved it to Friday, although they might get more of a home support, the Linfield support will be down by 2/300 which would probably be as much if not more than the home support.

So basically in a nutshell, each club needs to do their homework as to what timeslot on what day generates the biggest crowd.

I think comparing IL and the LOI attendance wise is a non-starter. NI is a far smaller place so will generally have far smaller crowds. It's like comparing LOI to SPL, it's not really a fair comparison.

I'm happy the IL is increasing it's support base and I hope we see a steady increase over many years and maybe one day we'll see average IL crowds around the 1200 mark overall which I think is realistic in our wee country. Obviously it would be great if we could attract an average of 2k+ for every game in the IL, but that's never going to happen

Some good points made there Steve, I can see why some clubs prefer the Sat 3pm now, probably most actually. It is interesting all the same when comparing both leagues, one is day time the other night time. I think the only time LOI plays daytime is after an international weekend or a re-arranged game after a European match.

The only other daytime matches are possibly on bank holidays but that's mainly league cup. Then again I grew up watching Dundalk play at 3.30 on Sunday's. They used to be great, especially in the winter when the floodlights went on almost at kick off. I think they only changed to evening kick offs from the mid 90's, and that was a Thursday, definitely prefer the current Friday night though, that's been consistent since 2009.