Reality is most Sydney teams have 10-14k paying customers. That varies by a couple of thousand depending on form and weather. It is only when two Sydney teams are playing each other do you see a significant change in home crowd size ie Dragons v Sharks last week when the crowd is boosted by two sets of fans. How often do you see 20K+ crowds for Sydney games against out of town teams? When you look across the NRL there really isn't much difference in paying fanbase of any club except Brisbane. How to get that home fanbase of 10-14k up to 20k is the big challenge facing clubs and we won't see any significant change in avg annual attendences until it is addressed.
Brisbane has around 30k paying fans, that is a decent size home crowd and comparable with majority of the best supported teams in any code in the country.
I know this season is still very young. But these figures are from this season
As of the end of R6 we have had seventeen games played between two Sydney teams Of those games four have topped 20,000 including one that was over 35,000. We have had two games under 10,000. The average crowd is 17,885.
For the same period we have had nine games played in Sydney involving an out of Sydney team. Of those games we have one that topped 20,000. We have none of these games with a crowd less then 10,000. The average crowd is 14,629.
I understand where you are coming from. But what this season has shown is that their isn't a whole lot of difference in average crowds between games involving two Sydney teams as opposed to games involving just one.
But it's early days and the gap could widen or even narrow as the season moves along.
