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After watching the match between the Sydney Thunder and Melbourne Renegades, I wondered where have Sydney’s sporting fans gone?
For a city with the largest population in Australia – some 4,627,345 people – there should be no excuses for poor crowds.
Obviously I understand there are some people out there with financial issues, but other than that there is really no excuse not to go and support your team.
The recent Sydney derby in the Big Bash League only pulled in a crowd of about 15,000. The game was the Sixers’ home game at the SCG, one of the greatest cricket grounds in the world, on a perfect Saturday night.
Why didn’t the Sixers’ fans want to turn up? They were up against their biggest rivals, they are the current BBL champions and just won the biggest T20 tournament in the world, the Champions League T20.
Only 7,000 turned up at ANZ Stadium to watch the Thunder and Renegades. I honestly could not believe how many people were there to see Chris Gayle’s first match back and the Renegades’ big names like Muttiah Muralitharan and Aaron Finch.
Meanwhile, the Adelaide Strikers, based in a city with a population of around 1 million, got 10,000 to their first home game of the season.
Sydney’s A-League crowds are not the greatest either. It all started brilliantly for Sydney FC, with the Euro Snobs coming to watch Del Piero’s first few home games. But after Sydney FC started to lose the fans jumped off the bandwagon and crowds badly dropped off.
The first home game they got a healthy 35,000, then it went downhill to 20,000 then down to around 12,000.
The Western Sydney Wanderers have been doing okay crowd-wise, getting around 10,000 people to their games, which has been one positive with Sydney sporting crowds.
One of Sydney lowest drawing sporting crowds is the Greater Western Sydney Giants, the newest team in the AFL, with an average attendance of 10,825. The average is only this high though because they got 38,000 in their first ever match against their local rivals the Sydney Swans.
Without that first match their crowds were around 8,000 on average, which is disappointing.
The Gold Coast Suns’ first ever year they averaged 19,000 at home games and the Gold Coast has a much smaller population then Sydney.
So Sydney Roarers, why don’t you go to your club’s matches? Are there any reasons I should be aware of?
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