There was a stage around mid-season when it was quite unbalanced in terms of games in hand. Not that much though. Maybe they're leaving out games with no attendance available? I just suggested mid-season as teams had roughly 18-21 games played (out of 36). Not an exact science though.
It looks reasonable, if strange
That's what I was thinking.Originally Posted by pineapple stu
Either way, its pretty poor that there are apparently no official figures anywhere.
Even the NI Football League puts up the figure for each Premiership game a day or two afterwards:
https://www.nifootballleague.com/pre...-2023/results/
Impressive that the figure are up there, even if you'd take a them with a large pinch of salt (likely to be higher).
Have you ever won the treble?
Yeah great its kept so well. We're lucky if the official LOI website is kept up to date with tables and scores!!
Tbh, the reason I'm asking is because I'm interested to know how much (the increasingly impressive) LOI attendances have grown in the season just past, for comparative purposes with the IL.
After 3 seasons between 2016/17 - 2018/19 when IL average crowds stagnated at just over 1k , 2019/20 (part Covid curtailed) added 9.5% to 1,192. Season 2021/22 added 20.9% (1,441), while 2022/23 has added another 7.5% so far, at 1,549. Will be interesting to see whether the cost-of-living crisis will allow this to be maintained, esp since each week there's now a game streamed live/free on the BBC, plus the odd extra game on Sky.
(For people who are nerdy about such things like me, 15 x seasons figures, both overall and by club, can be seen here: https://www.irishleaguesupporters.com/attendances.php)
It's a shame that all these attendances aren't being tracked somewhere. I remember there being a fairly comprehensive table being updated on a weekly basis on here a few years ago.
The Galway United forum was tracking attendance during the year. Does anyone else have complete figures from any of the other clubs?
Waterford 4/3/22 3023 Treaty 14/3/22 1355 Cobh 1/4/22 1759 Wexford 9/4/22 1519 Bray 22/4/22 1307 Longford 2/5/22 2805 Athlone 20/5/ 1248 Cork 27/5/22 4115 Treaty 24/6/22 1741 Waterford 1/7/22 1267 Cobh 8/7/22 1434 Wexford 5/8/22 1903 Bray 19/8/22 1380 UCD (Cup) 26/8/22 1121 Cork 16/9/22 3132 Athlone 7/10/22 2815 Longford 21/10/22 1034 Longford (playoff) 30/10/22 3031
So the total attendance for the season was 32958.
Which is an average of 1939.
Found it too difficult to get official attendances, and there were far too many estimates to chase up to get anything semi accurate.
https://kesslereffect.bandcamp.com/album/kepler - New music. It's not that bad.
Sad to see that we cant get an average attendance for the season. It seems to be dying out altogether with official figures. If you cant trust FIFA with their attendances how can you trust our clubs? Pity Nigel!
Gary Cronin is he the right man to manage Longford Town?
Official figures courtesy of Dodge on Twitter
https://twitter.com/seidodge/status/...0dcQWjXbaT9Omw
Not far off a full house of attendances being up at every club in the LOI, it’s only Athlone, Bray, Dundalk and Longford that are down
Last edited by 2 Year Contract; 20/12/2022 at 10:10 AM.
Paaatrick's Agletic
Do Athlone have a backer or are they totally amateur? Tiny numbers there in a decent size town...
Irish by birth ,Harps by the grace of god.
Crowds really are booming the last few years. I think 2019 was a slight improvement on 2018 too overall, before the post-pandemic related boost.
Very impressive figures, both absolute and %age increase.
The IL Premiership has enjoyed a similar increase: 2018/19: 1,089 vs 2022/23 to date: 1,520 = +39.6%:
https://www.irishleaguesupporters.com/attendances.php
To some extent you might consider this is down to certain individual clubs boosting their crowds (eg DCFC/Shams/Cork and Cleraine/Larne/Glentoran) Yet both leagues have also had clubs whose attendances have declined.
I wonder might this be a reaction to Covid i.e. people have appreciated the opportunity to get out and about again, with big crowds leading to improved atmospheres, which in turn has led to even bigger crowds? There is evidence of this for lower leagues in England, esp the National league/5th tier:
https://sportsgazette.co.uk/2021-202...l-attendances/
This season's crowds in the NL arepretty amazing:
https://www.footballwebpages.co.uk/n...ue/attendances:
By contrast, I know that Rugby League in England was very worried that crowds had actually declined post-Covid, as this article from August 2021 indicates:
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/20...s-rugby-league
(Not sure whether this has continued through 2022, but the article speculates that with RL fans being older than average, maybe they were more cautious about mixing in crowds even after lockdown ended?)
To be fair, only 4 out of 19 teams saw a decline- and apart from Longford, I can see obvious reasons why. Dundalk left a golden period (but even still, it's only a handful of people difference), Athlone continues to be a basketcase (which is pretty sad), and Bray had a very unpopular merge. I don't get why Longford's attendance dropped though.
It is also not just English Rugby either. Also in Ireland, Rugby attendance is falling: https://archive.ph/6F0mh
I do think the rise in attendance doesn't have much to do with COVID, but rather just a general disillusionment with the top level of the sport. I find people are less rabid English Premiership fans now than in the early 2000s- and more or often, less people are totaly wrapped up in it and are more casual fans.
Finally, I always thought the LOI was a great product. I watched it with many foreign football friends who absolutely loved the pace of the game and the less theatrics in it than maybe the top-level ball. Even still, compared to GAA, LOI is a slog, it takes a huge amount of effort to follow a team for a year. Its fantastic to see the attendance rise over a whole season and not just big games.
In fairness, to get 21 increases out of 21 would have been spectacular. The law of averages says you're always going to get some going down, even if the overall trend is up.
Very frustrated with those Longford figures. We've got a brilliant ground, our managers since Fenn all the way through to Cronin have all played a really good brand of ball but we simply aren't resonating with the local community. Up to the powers that be to knock heads together and see why that is and what can be done.
Is there any effort to connect with the community? If you visit Longford town on match day you'd hardly know there was a game on, and seemingly neither do staff in many of the shops.
https://kesslereffect.bandcamp.com/album/kepler - New music. It's not that bad.
In the last full season before Covid hit, 2018-19, the average home attendance for the four Irish provinces was 12,502, which last season was down to 10,242.
10,242 x 4 = 40,968 total average home attendance of the 4 Proviencial Rugby Clubs.
486,365 came to Premier Division games, an average of 2,687 and 178,000 attended First Division matches, an average of 1,193,
[(2,687 + 1,193)/ 2] x 19 = 36,860 total average home attendance of the LOI.
Rough maths, give or take... Put it seems pretty clear that domestic soccer is catching up to professional rugby, and might even surpass it next season (if the average LOI attendance goes up 210). Also not clear if the rugby numbers include their European Games or not (I pretty sure it does), and if it doesnt, they only play 21 games (+3 playoff rounds), and have bumper attendence for Leinster vs Munster in the Aviva, which would have a little skew of their numbers.
According to wiki, Total URL attendance for Irish Clubs:
Connacht 40,140
Ulster 91,752
Munster 102,101
Leinster 155,512Total= 389,505 (minus Ulster is 297,753)
LOI mens Total= 664,365
So the LOI brings in far more bums on seats in a season than Provencial Rugby does.
Best I could find on the GAA is this: https://www.balls.ie/gaa/gaa-attenda...d-world-124430, which shows the total GAA attendance is 880,000. Considering GAA does particulary well with creating finals and big matches - LOI is doing pretty well. If you add the FAI cup or removed the All-Ireland finals from the GAA to make it a more like-for-like comparison, they are not that far away from each other.
Would certainly help if the local media paid more attention to the club - just had a look at the Longford Leader sports pages, and the only mention of Town is for the fixtures announcement:
https://www.longfordleader.ie/section/135/sport
Now of course, this being the close season, it's probably completely unrepresentative of their true coverage, but it still seems less than even junior soccer gets in the local papers here.
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