The AFL have a long standing membership and crowd culture that was built over decades.
And Melbourne's central stadiums are actually centrally located and easy to get to, whereas Sydney's are pretty painful.
But the first point is the more important one - comparisons at this stage are fairly meaningless.
The NRLs membership program is 10-20 years behind, despite rapid growth, and most importantly the NRL (despite claiming to be targetting a 20k average by this year) have actively made moves to subdue crowds.
Timeslots, scheduling, stadium choices and poorly designed rule changes are all contributing.
The real concern isn't NRL vs AFL, it's ARLC-NRL vs Gallop-NRL. To be losing crowds compared to an organisation that was run by a puppet with a media company deliberately underselling it is a tragic embarrassment to say the least.
It's not as if Melbourne is the only place the AFL get good crowds. Their crowds in Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide are all phenominal. No doubt next week in Sydney the swans will get a crowd that dwarfs any crowd in Sydney for the NRL so far this year so it's hard to just blame Sydney.
I know why a 1:1 comparison between the AFL and NRL isn't fair. My point is that it looks bad when all year long we've been hearing that Thursday night is awful for crowds and no one could pull a big crowd on that night and then bam the AFL attract 70K (the swans have previously pulled 30K+ as well from memory).
I agree though that the bigger concern is that even when you compare the NRL to itself crowds are still stagnate and based on the start of the year are almost certainly going to decline.
We have more money, resources and media coverage then ever before. We have far more members than ever before and growing. Yet crowds are going nowhere if not backwards.
Even worse so far this year ratings have remained flat, even a tiny bit down despite this.
The NRL is totally incompetent and is making even the Gallop administration look great which as you say is pathetic.
