The COVID-19 shutdown and subsequent ripple effects on professional sports might expose some issues within the rugby community especially.
For this writer, we're prompted to think back to an article we read some years ago, a profile of a US-based player who was going over to Europe to get some experience. Rugby, said the writer, who didn't know much about the sport, was played in front of crowds of 50,000 in Europe. Yeah, no ... not it's not.
Well, mostly not. Yes of course test matches are more than that, usually, and some major championship games (Heineken Cup, Premiership, Top 14, Pro14) are played in front of large crowds. But the regular day-to-day professional games are not. Based on 2018-19 season figures, the Gallagher Premiership in England and the French Top 14 both average about 14,500 per game. The Pro14 is about 57% of that figure. Super Rugby in 2018-19 had about the same attendance at the Top 14 and the Premiership, but that was the result of an almost 25% dropoff from a couple of years earlier.
In short, professional rugby doesn't draw a lot of fans, certainly not the numbers that professional soccer or other competing sports in those countries. Soccer in France drew about 22,000, in England it was about 38,000, and AFL (Aussie Rules) drew about 37,000. Rugby did outdraw Gaelic Football in Ireland, just.
(Sources include World Football, Stuff.co.nz, AFL.com, BBC, and league stats)
This won't, of course, get better with rules limiting fans, and it also shows how vulnerable the game is commercially if it relies on in-person attendance. In many countries, and, in fact, on a worldwide basis, top-flight rugby union has depended on attendance at a few internationals to fund everything else.
As we've pointed out, in the USA this has not been managed well and has become a recipe for disaster.
