LOL

Try 7.5k

LOL still better than a number of AL clubs

Actually 6.5k 

Keep going

Still worse than every HAL club bar CCM.

the probability of 16,000 being in attendance on saturday night is about the same as Waleed Ali and Fraser Anning holding hands and singing kumbaya together.

so crowds are up at the tennis,grand prix, melbourne cup, afl,nrl and nbl  

The difference is that all of those sports provide what their respective fans want. Whereas football fans in Australia get a watered down version of what the competition should be.

They can lie all they want but the money received will always be the truth.

Will crowds finish down on last year?

Hope so. The FFA don't deserve any positive PR from their failure. 

might go down to the wire

if the correct numbers were reported they would be significantly down.

They are down 3.5% after 22 rounds and its likely they won't catch up in the last 5 rounds.

I've heard that in April, all train lines in Melbourne are under works on the wknds, meaning noone will be able to get to AFL games on wknds.

Start of the season will be crucified crowd-wise.  They'll have a huge drop in attendances as a result

Good. Hope it gets worse. 

I doubt any of us care

You must be new to these boards.

Just noticed, MV only has 1 home match in last 5 rounds so you can expect average to fall further

It was more than that.

It was about 9 to 10K in all seasons bar the last one.

Secondly, I think we need to move away from this metric.

getting an average of 8k with an open league is 10 times better than what we have today with an average of 10500. We are virtually not watching a true competition.

This.

One thing that many overlook is that there has been no real growth in attendee's since the HAL's inception. Population growth in Aus has been over 20% in the same period so if we had of stayed at the same level of "market penetration" the numbers should have gone up by 20% as well. As someone who has been going to pretty much every MV match for the last 8 years, what I notice is that I recognize almost all the regular faces in the crowd. Many others have dropped away and that is reflected in teh crowd numbers dropping.

But there's little doubt that we have made up enormous ground on the Winter codes in that time.

Here 5 seasons worth of regular season attendances (Showed 3 different decades).  The average never even got close to the 9 or 10 you claim (unless you're adjusting for inflation and exaggeration)

	1977	1978	1979	1987	1996/97
AGG	67187	95478	78400	31017	88001
AVE	5168	7344	6031	2585	7333

http://www.ozfootball.net/ark/NSL/NSL.shtml

Facts are the enemy of the people.

that's still some pretty good numbers

AOK,

I was referring to SMFC having an average of 9 to 10K average crowds.

The NSL had 14 teams and some of the teams had averages of 3K. Crowds were never a metric.

The only thing that mattered was the performance on the ground.

This is what we need to go back to. A crowd of 3K is fantastic for a grassroots club.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOO, not back to the NSL & SMFC.

NSL clubs are not grassroots clus

They are the SMFC crowds.