European rugby attendances point to major issue for the sport
Hopes of a newfound interest in the European Champions and Challenge Cups took a hit this weekend as home sides struggled to fill their terraces for what some argue are the best club competitions in world rugby.
Attendances peaked at a bastion of European rugby in Munster’s Thomond Park where 21,884 watched the province lose to Toulouse.
And though 21,250 turned out for their match against Castres in the pool stages of last year’s Covid-19-hit season, the club traditionally see their 25,600 capacity stadium sold out weeks in advance for European matches.
Magical 10,000
Elsewhere, however, no English side managed to reach the 10,000 mark in round one of the Champions Cup. Gloucester were the best attended side at 9,117, while only Bath surpassed the 10,000 figure in the Challenge Cup, with 11,251.
One of the bigger selling points of this year’s European competitions is the inclusion of five South African teams. Four of them – the Bulls, Stormers, Sharks and Lions – compete in the United Rugby Championship, while the fifth – the Cheetahs – have been invited into the Challenge Cup.
The Lions hosted Wales’s Dragons on Saturday in front of a pitiful crowd of just over 1,500. To put that into perspective, multiple fourth division French sides exceeded that number at the weekend.
European slump
Europe used to be the holy grail of club rugby, but it doesn’t feel like that at the moment.
Changed formats have led to more complicated qualification processes and fewer back-to-back games against some of the continent’s biggest sides. The obsession with forcing “big” ties takes away from the old fashioned match-ups fans crave, while of course the cost of living crisis and aftermath of Covid-19 don’t lend themselves to the cost of a ticket to watch teams play when every match is on television.
This year’s European competition kicked off in Brentford, where London Irish were in the top flight for the first time in more than a decade. It was their return to the big time, a reward for hard work over 10 years and their visitors were French champions Montpellier. It doesn’t get much bigger.
So imagine the disappointment seeing just 5,514 fans making it through the turnstiles. To put that into perspective, the 2010-11 competition saw Irish draw crowds of 20,118 – unsurprisingly, against Munster – as well as 12,240 against Toulon and 12,115 against the Ospreys.
The Welsh side – who in turn drew a crowd of 12,437 against Irish in 2010-11 – managed just 6,618 against Leicester Tigers this year.
These figures should be a wake-up call for club rugby and the European game, but how this trend can be changed is one for the bigwigs. There’s no quick fix.