No, simply population vs crowds wasn't my point. I agree that higher population centres contribute to greater attendances. My point was about the concentration of people in these centres, and their distance to the venue. The higher the density in relation to the distance of the ground, the higher you can expect the crowds to be.
All within reason though.
You can't expect the majority of people who live an hour away from Suncorp to be regular attendees. The further you get out from Suncorp, the less likely people will come. Its actually a very simple principle, and one thats been proven to be true in leagues in England and the US.
If you drew concentric circles around Suncorp, the percentage of people that attend would diminish the further you went out. Thats logical, and it makes sense.
Now, some people have said that getting from places like Ipswich and whatnot to Suncorp doesnt take long. Lets say its 40 minutes (35kms). That doesn't exclude people from Ipswich getting to Suncorp, but it greatly diminishes the number of the 170,000 people that reside in Ipswich from attending, as opposed to say the number of people living within 10kms of Suncorp.
Saying that there are 3million people who are potential regular attendants at Suncorp by using the Brisbane metro is laughable. The actual catchment area for the Broncos is much smaller than that figure. Don't mistake potential fans with potential attendees. People living in Ipswich can support the Broncos in large numbers through TV, but in much smaller numbers in the stadium. The majority of the Ipswich populace - even if you can make the ground in less than an hour - are prohibited from being a strong potential catchment area because of the distance between it and the ground.
The study I use as a reference is from England 2001 (
http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/48823/1/Document.pdf)
In England you have cities which are much closer than Ipswich is to Brisbane huddled together. Its a small country, and you can get around quite easily. Despite this, the study found that the majority of people who attended (again, not supported, but just attended) grounds regularly lived within
10 miles/15kms of the ground. The further you go above that, the numbers became tiny. And within that 15kms, the concentration of people was much higher the closer they lived to the stadium.
People can point to all the personal evidence they want in this thread, but
virtually no one can convince me that Ipswich is a plausible catchment area for the Broncos. "Knowing people" or whatever just isn't good enough. If you got a list of people that attended Suncorp regularly for Broncos matches, I'd be surprised if there were more than 50-100 people from Ipswich, if that.
