Shutdown Exposes Crowd Issues In Professional Rugby
Shutdown Exposes Crowd Issues In Professional Rugby
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.
But World Rugby does it with the Rugby World Cup (albeit leveraging sponsorship dollars, as well). The Six Nations is the key funding driver for rugby in the UK. Rugby-mad New Zealand still is losing money, but rely very, very heavily on test matches to fund everything else.
And there's a limit to how many test matches you can have. You can't take players away from their regular teams much more than happens already; World Rugby has specific test match windows; and fans start to lose interest if internationals lose the cachet of being rare.
Maybe that's why in these pages we concentrate on high school and college. For us, while we love our Eagles and we respect anyone who wants to play at the highest level possible, rugby is and will always be a participation sport that has meaning past wins and losses.
