Crowd figures at matches owes more to ticket sales than attendance

The Oxford dictionary defines the word “attendance” under a couple of auspices, firstly as “the action or state of going regularly or being present at a place or event”, or secondly “the number of people present at a particular place or event”.

There is essentially no ambiguity in the meaning of the word, yet when employed in the context of an occasion in sport to signify the number of people present at an event, it appears to take on a different connotation that’s less rigid in interpretation.

The vouched attendance for public consumption at a sporting event, generally announced over the PA system, doesn’t necessarily correlate with the actual number of people in a ground. The only time this doesn’t hold true is when there is a full house because that’s when the arithmetic really is simple.

Last Saturday, Leinster lost to Munster at the Aviva stadium in Dublin. The claimed attendance on the night was 43,817, a figure released over the tannoy and also listed as the officially recognised figure on the Guinness Pro12 website.

Inflated figure

There weren’t 43,817 patrons at the Aviva on the night. The actual figure was a smidgeon over 40,000. In some respects, this is a poor example because the discrepancy is usually more pronounced when it comes to the difference between those on site and the official attendance. So why give out the inflated figure?

Well, firstly it’s important to point out that the official figure released under the guise of the attendance is actually the number of tickets sold for that particular match, a tally that would include season-ticket holders – whether they are present or not – and it is a common practice across the four Irish provinces.

Using broad brushstrokes by way of an analogy, the difference between the claimed attendance at the Aviva stadium last Saturday and the actual numbers of supporters that pushed their way through turnstiles, is largely down to the number of Leinster season-ticket holders that didn’t attend the game.

So when supporters give an involuntary snigger or look around with incredulity at the RDS, Thomond Park, Kingspan stadium or the Sportsground at the vast swathes of empty seats as the announcer lays claim to a seven-eighths full capacity there is every justification to do so.

Ulster's starting point for any attendance figure is the 10,100 season-ticket holders, Leinster pre-paid patrons number just under 12,500 and these core groups are replicated across Munster and Connacht. Celtic Rugby doesn't attach any criteria as to how clubs should compile their attendance figures. There is no directive to say that season-ticket holders should be included. That's a practice that the Irish provinces pursue of their own volition.

There are obvious commercial, marketing and sponsorship arguments for portraying healthy attendance figures, but even the most cursory research would reveal the impure mathematics of the equation.

So is it impossible to give a precise figure on the exact numbers in a stadium on a given day? No, absolutely not. To comply with health and safety regulations and those of the fire officer, the exact figures are available.

Digital scanning of bar codes on tickets facilitates this process but even when a barcode fails to scan, a stub is taken instead. The provinces just choose not to make these figures available for public consumption.

In a minor aside, because there will always be a small number of malfunctioning barcodes, usually measured in three figures for a national-sized stadium, and because they are counted manually, that exact number is often not included in the “official attendance” given out on the day.

The FAI claim they only include season-ticket holders present in their accredited attendance figures for international matches, although for anyone who has ever been to a friendly or five, the figures offered on occasion might politely be described as beggaring belief.

The GAA also assert that their attendances pertain only to the footfall through the turnstiles on the day. So, for example at Croke Park, premium ticket holders – they equate to season-ticket holders in other field sports – are only counted if they are in the stadium on the day.

Modern practice

Today’s rush to overinflate attendance figures is a far cry from days gone by when the diametrically opposite practice was in vogue, where the mathematical equation seemed to run along the lines of providing a conservative guesstimate, dividing it by half and adding a prime number to render the final figure more believable. The beauty of the cash-based business was that the revenue, the official receipts, was in the eye of the beholder.

Returning to the modern practice, when is an attendance not an attendance? The answer appears to be when it is subsumed somewhere in the figure for ticket sales. So it’s about time the practice of announcing the attendance was abandoned – or maybe it’s just time for the media to no longer act as a conduit to the deception.