Super League club refuse to release attendance figures

[josie andrews]

Hull KR are one of the fastest growing and developing Super League clubs at the moment both on and off the field ahead of the 2024 Super League season.

The club are taking a unique approach to a number of areas and it is growing the fan base at an exponential rate as seen by their season ticket sales but some fan concerns about these have been addressed by the Head of Fan Experience Laura George at a recent fan meeting.

She explained: “All tickets have to be signed for but we understand that some post masters put them
through the letterbox. The reason we must send via this method is that if tickets get lost in the
post, we need the tracking information or the Club will be charged by the other clubs for re-issuing tickets

“Salford, Wigan and some of the other Super League clubs will be on Ticketmaster in 2024 and there could be
more stadiums in 2025 utilising Ticketmaster, which will make away ticketing easier for fans.
But we can only use away digital tickets if the away team grant us access to their system. Some
still may not allow this and therefore our hands are tied and we have to use the physical ticket
method, this is out of our control.

“There needs to be more communication around physical tickets so fans know when they will be
issued with the physical tickets and the methods of collection. The RFL are moving away from Ticketmaster therefore their games will be physical tickets too.”

These ticket sales are impressive but one thing has been questioned is the fact that the club don’t release their attendances. The club have remained committed to this stance with Head of Operations Craig Franklin saying: “Match attendance figures were traditionally a barometer of a club’s health and everyone took a great interest in this. Now there are a lot of other measures, corporate income, retail, broadcast revenue that shows the true health of our club. Hence, why we moved to a more in depth club wide, but less frequent, update.

Paul Lakin: “There is an unhealthy fixation in the Super League on how many are attending our games rather than what is happening on the pitch. As a Club we wanted to put the focus back on the players and their superhuman athleticism and not on attendance figures.”

Franklin added: “There needs to be some independently and auditable way to publish attendances, the
figures are part of the IMG score so it’s important it’s a level playing field. We could put through an additional 1,000 free tickets each game and then publish that figure, which would boost our IMG points but it would not be a true figure. So we decided to take a bit of a principled stand at the start of the season until it’s a more robust metric.

“We believe the metric should be a number which can’t be manipulated like ticket revenue, yield per ticket sold or similar. Let’s encourage clubs to grow attendances with paying fans, not devalue the sport with price gimmicks and free giveaways.

We hope other Clubs follow our lead in not publishing attendance figures, a number of clubs have indicated they’ll follow our lead.”

https://www.seriousaboutrl.com/super-le ... res-86535/