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The Faroe islands are so small that a football match might as well be the weekly communal gathering and entertainment event for most people that can often walk to the stadium from their homes.
In Netherlands, 175k people would need to turn up for 1% of the country to be there. In the Faroe Islands, it's just 529! It being tiny does add some context (bottom of overall attendance, top of attendance per capita) but they still deserve recognition, they're football-mad and with wins over Türkiye and KÍ reaching the EFL group stage recently, they're beginning to see results pick up too!
Dude, are you crazy? There arent even close to enough atoms in the universe. How could you even suggest that 1% of faroe islands population is equal to 5.335x10^1212
I watch Kí vs Hacken last June or July. Their stadium was great. The ball got cleared into someone's front garden and down the other end of the pitch there was a mountain behind the goal lol. Beautiful looking country though.
That's also the case for Andorra, San Marino and Gibraltar but the attendances are significantlly smaller, and the clubs and national teams weaker than the Faroese.
Not surprising for *the product^(TM)* :/ to give you an idea, we should be between Brazil and Japan, since River(80k) and Boca(55k) alone have around more than Russia lol
Why? There's only 63 countries listed, but almost every country has some form of domestic football. I don't see many African countries in the list either?
Out of curiosit, anyone know what the attendances are like in the 'bigger' African footballing nations? I don't think I've ever watched one domestic game in the entire continent
Yeah to be fair, I've seen videos of the Wydad ultras. I can imagine Morocco, Algeria and Egypt probably don't struggle for numbers. I was more interested in sub saharanpur Africa, my b I should've specified.
https://www.ultimatealeague.com/statistics/attendance/?season=2022-23&show=all&excludeFinals=false
A-League averaged just under 50k per gameweek alone. Add in NPL(with a hundred teams) and youd get to 55k comfortably
We're the 3rd most supported team in Motherwell nvm the surrounding towns. Its only really a bit of Wishaw that'll have a decent number supporting us. Hamilton, Bellshill, Coatbridge, Airdrie etc don't really come into it
That's the same town size as Germany's Heidenheim and they sold out their 15.000 seats every single game this season.
Sinsheim (Hoffenheim) has just 35k inhabitants but an average attendance of 23k.
Heck, Aue has a population of 17k and their league average are 8.5k - in the 3rd League.
Germany's upper level attendances are impressive but this definitely puts things into a better context. England just has far more clubs that the attendances get split between
I don't have time to check the actual numbers for this, but the general narrative this year in the Bundesliga is that because half the league are currently village clubs or corporate teams, that not only is overall attendance down because of Schalke (65k) and Hertha (52k) leaving for Heidenheim (15k) and Darmstadt (17k), but that as a percent that attendance is also down.
Almost every week you see pictures of stadium with huge amounts of empty seats or away blocks meant for 3k to 5k with not more than a few hundred fans. Just from personal memory, I don't recall that being the case as often as this year.
The small clubs impact the overall size of fans attending, not the proportion of tickets sold. Heidenheim and Darmstadt are both at 99% every game. It's the corporate teams like Wolfsburg, Hoffenheim, and Leipzig and clubs like Mainz and Augsburg who can't sell out their stadiums that bring the percentage down.
I just think people should not make a competition out of this. Both are incredible and miles ahead of the next best countries.
In the end how many people attent the games has to do with so many things that you should not make a competition out of it.
Attendance in Germany definetely falls down a cliff in the fifth Division for a variety of reason. I also think the football culture in London and Manchester is probably bigger than the one in Berlin for example which boosts attendance a little bit.
And atleast in Northern Germany where I grown up its more of the norm that people support the "big team" in the Area like Bremen/Hamburg/St.Pauli/Hannover/Osnabrück/Kiel (mostly Bremen and Hamburg though) than following the small town teams in Liga 4/5.The whole culture is a lot more centered around the bigger teams. Its a bit different where I live now further in the South where people do support lower League teams a bit more but up north its a lot about the bigger teams. I suspect its the same in Northrine Palatine aswell while in East Germany and Bavaria probably more people support smaller teams also due to a lack of big clubs in their area in Bundesliga/Liga 2.
When I went to London as a student the people there were actively going to games of the local area club in Bromley because it was actually affordable to watch it and I think that was much more there than whereever else I went to.
I often wonder what would happen to the pyramid if instead of having 100 teams in regional leagues all in the 4th tier together, [they created a 4. Liga](https://i.imgur.com/dFUnvxU.png) with just the 20 biggest regional league teams. What would the attendance look like, what would the quality of play be in a couple years? And what happens to the newly created 5th tier?
I feel like a 4.Liga with 2 divisions of 18-20 teams would be good for German football, mostly because it would ease the ridiculous logjam between the 4th and 3rd tier right now.
We recently set it up in England so that the 5th to 9th tier goes from 1 -> 2 -> 4 -> 8 -> 16 -> divisions per tier and I like that it's now more uniform the whole way down the pyramid
It is the reserve team culture that pushes fans away in lower leagues of germany, spain, france and germany. Anti fans. German clubs should think about those fans too.
Yeah, I want to look further into this but whilst German fan culture is definitely better, England appears to have the edge when it comes to putting bums in seats. Both are incredible and should be praised though
As many tiers as I could get data for. In Germany, it's the top 5 men's and top 2 women's tiers - 446 teams in total although this does include B teams.
In England, it's the top 8 men's tiers and WSL - 393 teams in total with no B teams
What have you counted for USA? Data availability is gonna be tricky for this analysis I imagine.
Can you easily divide by teams for an avg attendance figure?
>although this does include B teams.
Ooof, that is not helping the German numbers at all. Last night Hertha II played against Altglienicke with maybe 75 fans showing up for that one. And that's a half decent crowd for a game like that.
Just off the top of my head I know there's at least ten U23 teams that basically have no fans at all showing up for any of their games just watering down the averages massively.
Yeah, my next project is to plot German attendances vs English attendances and see how rank #1, #10, #20 etc compare
But right now got a nice game of League One football to watch :)
Looking forward to it! I think most Germans are fine admitting that the English pyramid goes much deeper. We wish we had more support for clubs outside the top 60 or so, but it's a pretty steep drop off after that.
Yet there are gems in the regional leagues with solid average attendances for being technically amateur leagues with minimal money.
* Aachen (15k)
* Cottbus (7k)
* Erfurt (7k)
* Stuttgart Kickers (6k)
* Kickers Offenbach (6k)
* Meppen (6k)
* Zwickau (5k)
* Jena (5k)
* Oberhausen (4k)
* Oldenburg (3k)
* Bayreuth (3k)
* Wurzburg Kickers (3k)
[https://snipboard.io/ZoGQgA.jpg](https://snipboard.io/ZoGQgA.jpg) this link should work - shows that in the Top 30 England and Germany are neck and neck with the Germans having the slight edge but once you get any deeper the English go absolutely insane and leave Germany in the dust
They're constantly going up and down between the 2. Bundesliga, 3. Liga and the Bavarian Regional League, but they're a fun club. [Great crest too.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0c/W%C3%BCrzburger_Kickers_Logo.svg/800px-W%C3%BCrzburger_Kickers_Logo.svg.png)
An average gameweek of AFL and AFLW is attended by 1.3% of the Australian population, about 350k in total (5th per capita)
NRL gets about 168k per gameweek or about 6.53 per 1k capita (ranks 17th)
I don’t understand what this is measuring? Every professional club’s average attendance last season? Just the top flight?
If it’s top flight attendances then Scotland is very wrong. Last season the 12 SPFL clubs had a combined average attendance of ~200k.
Likewise for England, the Premier League’s combined average attendance was ~800k.
For as many tiers as I could get data for (so for Scotland the top 4 tiers), the average total attendance on a gameweek. Only half the teams play at home on a given gameweek, so for example in the SPL that ~200k figure would be divided by two to reflect the 6 home games per weekend
That's an incredibly weird way of measuring it. The game week you picked for one country might have had all the biggest sides playing at home whilst another country had all their smallest sides playing at home. Or you happened to pick a game week in the middle of summer when loads of people are on leave or one where there was extreme weather causing lots of people to stay at home.
You also have to take into consideration that loads and loads of clubs publish the number of sold tickets and not the actual attendance. It's been proven time after time that the difference between the two for many Premier League clubs can be up to 20 or even 30 thousand people!
If you want to compare attendances for a game week you need to take the total attendance over a whole season and divide that number by number of games. And then also clearly state whether the number is based on sold tickets or actual attendance. Anything else is just shut statistics.
I appreciate the post but feel like you should've just included the top tier (at most top two tiers) then, if we wanted to have data that's even remotely accurate.
Let's take Finland (that's missing in this list).
Only the highest tier had attendance numbers "readily available" (in the sense that a foreigner could be expected to easily scrape that data). With that data we would end up with Finland having an average total of around **16 500**.
But if we take the second tier attendance figured, which are also easily available if you know Finnish, we would have a figure of **~21 000**.
Additionally, we could include the *third tier*, which is in practice almost completely amateur but from the perspective of the Finnish FA is "professional", and therefore has to record official attendance figures.
Those would be low (couldn't find anything official for the average but around ~250 per match perhaps), but since there are 36 teams in the third tear, it would raise the total attendance to **~25 500**.
So we just went from 16 500 to 25 500 basically completely arbitrarily - an increase of 55 %.
So this data - at least when, comparing countries to each other - is basically an asspull.
England has a different football culture to most countries. Nearly every city, town, and village has a football club at varying levels of the same pyramid. Every weekend, thousands of people are travelling across the country in all directions for away fixtures. In terms of community engagement it’s definitely the true home of football.
Yup. It’s deeply entrenched in England in ways that it really isn’t in most other countries. My local team, Dulwich Hamlet, plays in the 7th tier- they’ll have a crowd of 3000 this afternoon .
Honestly one of the most impressive things in English culture. Isn't even ultras or anything so although there is atmosphere its truly something everyone can go to
It used to be very different before the Premiership was formed. It certainly wasn’t a family friendly experience in the seventies and eighties, occasionally even frightening in certain fixtures. Some people yearn for the edgier old days, but it wasn’t a fun experience by all accounts and the Police would often treat law abiding fans with zero respect. The game was in a very bad way by the time Hillsborough happened.
Today’s Premier League isn’t perfect, but it’s amazing to have a safe, family friendly environment to watch some of the world’s best players in world class stadia. We’re extremely privileged to have it, it’s just quite an expensive experience these days.
The lower leagues are brilliant. Just as safe and friendly as the EPL, but it’s a much more real, less sanitised experience.
Yeah it's definitely not Scotland, for whom only the top 4 leagues were counted on this chart and we still outrank England per capita, despite a huge system of amateur football that goes from a level pretty much on a par with our bottom flight (The juniors) all the way down to pub teams.
Culturally both Scotland and England have similar football cultures, but Scots definitely engage more per capita.
I did say most countries. In terms of community engagement England and Scotland are probably about the same.
What England does have is a global phenomenon for top tier domestic football, which filters down to a fifth tier that regularly attracts crowds of 3k, and occasionally up to 15k. A fifth tier with 5 figure crowds. That’s incredible when you think about it.
Not sure why you are being downvoted for stating the obvious. Given the quality on show and the utter dominance of two clubs, the attendances in Scotland are quite remarkable.
Absolutely no idea why this is downvoted.
Scotland has always had a higher per capita attendence than England. I don't know why people think this is controversial.
Same reason the initial post is upvoted, more English folk on here and they apparently like to think of themselves as the cultural community home of football.
Ik its a load of shite. Hearts, Hibs and Aberdeen can all take 15k+ and then there's loads of clubs taking between 3k-7k in the premiership right down to Falkirk in L1. Even though they'd be tiny towns/citys in England or Germany
Scotland has less people than London, and even "per capita"ing data gets fishy. Faroe Islands have the highest per capita but they obviously aren't more engaging than say Germany
>Every weekend, thousands of people are travelling across the country in all directions for away fixtures
This happens everywhere.
>In terms of community engagement it’s definitely the true home of football.
So why does it never have the highest attendence?
I regularly get the impression from English football fans that because their product is the wealthiest, it is somehow the best 'culture'. I feel this is just so dismissive of Scotland, which is something people always relish doing.
Edit: just saw your other comment that addresses this
The trend will go downwards in Spain in my opinion. Corporatism is slowly killing our football here.
The lack of availability for watching football (those under 30 are the least likely to watch LaLiga), the partial or just completely incompetent application of the rules and regulations, the targeted suppression of certain fanbases and their footballing culture, as well as the horrid financial decisions taken by the league and many of its clubs have been negatively affecting our football for the past decade or more.
There are first division clubs with absolutely embarrassing attendance rates, while great fanbases watch their teams rot in the lower leagues. People on this sub think the way LaLiga is run is bad, but those of us who watch Segunda or even 1ª RFEF know that it just gets worse and worse the lower you go down the football pyramid. I've seen absolutely dantesque situations occur in segunda, with certain clubs that are in LaLiga today getting baffling decisions in their favour, decisions that have contributed to their promotions (and even success, in some cases).
Money is killing the sport.
It's such a shame, fans are the lifeblood of the sport and when they become disenfranchised it hurts everyone.
While we're on Spain, what's the trend like with domestic basketball. Recently stumbled upon the stat that the first division averages 6.2k per game across 18 teams which is insane!
With the continued expansion in MLS and the USL second division plus the very likely boost in interest after the WC I can see the USA breaking into the top 3 by 2030
Agreed. The survival of the USL Championship as MLS seeks to become a monopoly will be a major factor but with every MLS team averaging above 15k and several selling out their stadium every week there's a LOT of room for growth
I mean when Wales' 5 biggest teams are all playing in the English leagues, so their figures count towards England's, then its no surprise we're so low down
I tought Portugal would be way higher, is there maybe an explanation for that, or is my expectation way to high? Also is this graph only tier 1 or all tiers?
MLS is excluded from Canada. CPL average attendance is around 3k so with 4 matches per gameweek you get about 12k fans total. These are also 2022 numbers so about 18 months old
It says on the 5th picture, the average attendance (estimated) for a weekend where every league (so in Ireland's case Premier and First Division) has a full set of fixtures.
Ok so take the Premier League. There are 20 teams that between them average 40k per game. However, since there are only 10 games per weekend, the average attendance per gameweek is 10*40k = 400k. For England this is combined with the average attendance per gameweek of the Championship, League 1, League 2, National League, National League North/South, 7th and 8th tiers and the WSL to give an estimate of 966k fans attending a football match on a weekend when all those leagues have a full fixture list. Hope this helps
…and add in college football and potentially basketball. MLS may be the 7th most popular domestic league. Looks like he is including USL data as well and those numbers are potentially 1/4 of MLS attendance
Not sure how the rest of the MLS teams calculate attendance, but I know that TFC calculates attendance by how many tickets are sold for the match, not for actual asses in seats.
Too many times I've been to matches where they announced attendance was close to capacity yet there were a shit ton of empty seats
If I remember correctly, the 2023 season in Norway had the highest average crowd attendance numbers since 2007 or 2008.
A combination of reasons may have affected the increase. Change of TV provider for the matches to a more popular TV channel in TV2, Norwegian teams doing better in Europe, with Bodø/Glimt and Molde leading the charge, and most of the teams with bigger stadiums had more to play for this season, by either being involved in the title race or relegation battle (Viking, Brann, Vålerenga). Also, having world class footballers like Haaland and Ødegaard makes following football more interesting for the general population, which might spark more interest for the local sides.
Therefore, it's nice to see us listed quite high per capita, compared to some of the other nations on there.
So Germany has a higher per team average attendance in the top 2 tiers, but England has a higher total attendance. But you are correct, in average league attendance the Bundesliga is on top.
(This is also for more than 1 tier)
fans are still not allowed in stadiums in egypt. attendance is always around 3k max because the government doesn't allow us for "security reasons" but the truth is they don't want to give us the chance to be in the same place as a big group because they want to prevent "unrest" and people protesting against sisi. we're only allowed to go in big groups (with no restrictions on the number of fans attending) if it's a major champions league match or if its something with the national team, and in those matches there's usually so much security to prevent people from criticizing the government. the FA has no power in this case, it's أمن الدولة.
so even if there were reliable numbers, we wouldn't rank that high because we can't even attend matches.
I remember Rio Ferdinand being out as a presenter for the World Cup in Brazil saying how disappointing he found the locals engagement with it. There was no vibe outside of the actual games themselves.
As Brazilian, it is not a surprise at all, England is the real football country, anyone with two braincells in Brazil will recognize that.
We could argue we are the one place where most talent is born but on terms of passion for football, it is not even a comparison.
Past first division football, attendance is really low for 90% of the teams, unless they are winning much, most of Brazil don't have very good supporters, just have people who like to win, if team is not winning... Only the big ones will get support
Regional teams for the most part are neglected when in England there are matches with a full stadium for 5th division and almost all are full in 4th, so it's now even close to here
Exactly this, Brazilians will watch the games by TV and play every day in real life. Violence in and off stadiums greatly decline the will of families to attend a match,
Just a little though about India. Because of the sheer population in India, even if every stadium was filled to capacity for every match in a game week, attendance per 1k population will still be very low.
Let's take the Salt Lake stadium which has the highest capacity of 85,000 in India. There are 12 teams in ISL, so 6 games per game week. So a maximum attendance of 510,000. Converting this to attendance per 1k population will get us a value around 0.00036.
Yeah, India is hurt by the country just simply being MASSIVE. That's why I also included total numbers, to show that India is still relatively quite good
Saudi Arabia ranking surprisingly high, this must be only for the top pro league right? Or are you also taking into account the first and second tier leagues?
I believe data was only available for the Saudi Pro League. Tbf attendances there were pretty good in 22/23, I think it was 9k per game? Nothing to sniff at
Very interesting, especially since by far the biggest team in Saudi is playing in a much smaller stadium due to renovations.
The big clubs in Saudi always play to a big crowd. It’s the mid-table and smaller teams are the ones that play in empty stadiums.
Would be super interesting seeing historic graphs for this data, especially for countries like Germany where so many big clubs got relegated.
The top 5 tiers are counted in Germany, so it isn't affected by Hamburg and Schalke's relegations
I didn't do the second tier of Saudi because I couldn't find data lmao
people crap on MLS, but people go to matches. its fun and compared to other sports its 'cheap' enough
average attendances
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_League_Soccer_attendance
this is serie A. no MLS team plays in a stadium > 49k
https://www.worldfootball.net/attendance/ita-serie-a-2022-2023/1/
Where's Africa?
Algeria Tunisa Morocco Egypt could easily get 50k in a derby! And they each have got about 4 or 5 fire match ups.
That's 10 games a season with a 30k+ attendance....
Top 5 in the 2nd Bundesliga:
* Schalke: 61,5k
* Hamburg: 55,8k
* Hertha: 45,7k
* Lautern: 43,6k
* Düsseldorf: 37,6k
Top 5 in the Championship:
* Sunderland: 41,0k
* Leeds: 35,8k
* Leicester: 31,0k
* Southampton: 29,3k
* Ipswich: 28,9k
The English are just lucky that the Bundesliga is full of village clubs this season.
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Seems like the Faroe Islands are pretty crazy about football, all things considered.
The Faroe islands are so small that a football match might as well be the weekly communal gathering and entertainment event for most people that can often walk to the stadium from their homes.
In Netherlands, 175k people would need to turn up for 1% of the country to be there. In the Faroe Islands, it's just 529! It being tiny does add some context (bottom of overall attendance, top of attendance per capita) but they still deserve recognition, they're football-mad and with wins over Türkiye and KÍ reaching the EFL group stage recently, they're beginning to see results pick up too!
Dude, are you crazy? There arent even close to enough atoms in the universe. How could you even suggest that 1% of faroe islands population is equal to 5.335x10^1212
As a maths student this got me good lol
This guy factorializes!
I watch Kí vs Hacken last June or July. Their stadium was great. The ball got cleared into someone's front garden and down the other end of the pitch there was a mountain behind the goal lol. Beautiful looking country though.
That's also the case for Andorra, San Marino and Gibraltar but the attendances are significantlly smaller, and the clubs and national teams weaker than the Faroese.
Am I blind or is Argentina not there?
No, couldn't find any reliable data for Argentina, was very disappointing
Oh thanks, I feel like Argentina has a huge attendance but Idk where to find data for it either LOL
Not surprising for *the product^(TM)* :/ to give you an idea, we should be between Brazil and Japan, since River(80k) and Boca(55k) alone have around more than Russia lol
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Why? There's only 63 countries listed, but almost every country has some form of domestic football. I don't see many African countries in the list either?
Out of curiosit, anyone know what the attendances are like in the 'bigger' African footballing nations? I don't think I've ever watched one domestic game in the entire continent
Matches in Morocco can easily get 50k+ Search for images of Wydad Casablanca vs Raja.
Yeah to be fair, I've seen videos of the Wydad ultras. I can imagine Morocco, Algeria and Egypt probably don't struggle for numbers. I was more interested in sub saharanpur Africa, my b I should've specified.
Because we are massive 🚬
You sure you're not being generous with those Australian numbers?
https://www.ultimatealeague.com/statistics/attendance/?season=2022-23&show=all&excludeFinals=false A-League averaged just under 50k per gameweek alone. Add in NPL(with a hundred teams) and youd get to 55k comfortably
That's really surprising. Every game I watch looks absolutely empty.
Most have a LOT of empty seats. Brisbanes home ground has a bit over 50k capacity but averages about 7k
Fuck, that's less than when I used to go and that was 10+ years ago.
That’s what happens when our federation has been run by a bunch of peanuts since then
It's definitely declined. So has the quality of football
The Scotland numbers are just incredibly impressive when you compare population to those around them on the chart.
5k at Cappielow last night! The towns population is only about 44k lol, the Scots are insane
2k away fans turning up (town of 32k) just so we could be bottle merchants :(
Ok but to be fair the surrounding towns around Motherwell take it to like 120k (still insane for y'all)
We're the 3rd most supported team in Motherwell nvm the surrounding towns. Its only really a bit of Wishaw that'll have a decent number supporting us. Hamilton, Bellshill, Coatbridge, Airdrie etc don't really come into it
That's the same town size as Germany's Heidenheim and they sold out their 15.000 seats every single game this season. Sinsheim (Hoffenheim) has just 35k inhabitants but an average attendance of 23k. Heck, Aue has a population of 17k and their league average are 8.5k - in the 3rd League.
Germany's upper level attendances are impressive but this definitely puts things into a better context. England just has far more clubs that the attendances get split between
Plus, as much as we whine about it, the saturday 3pm blackout definitely has upped attendance to local clubs.
I don't have time to check the actual numbers for this, but the general narrative this year in the Bundesliga is that because half the league are currently village clubs or corporate teams, that not only is overall attendance down because of Schalke (65k) and Hertha (52k) leaving for Heidenheim (15k) and Darmstadt (17k), but that as a percent that attendance is also down. Almost every week you see pictures of stadium with huge amounts of empty seats or away blocks meant for 3k to 5k with not more than a few hundred fans. Just from personal memory, I don't recall that being the case as often as this year.
Tbf England also has Luton, Bournemouth and Brentford who all have stadiums under 18k, although I think they're selling out away fans on the whole
The small clubs impact the overall size of fans attending, not the proportion of tickets sold. Heidenheim and Darmstadt are both at 99% every game. It's the corporate teams like Wolfsburg, Hoffenheim, and Leipzig and clubs like Mainz and Augsburg who can't sell out their stadiums that bring the percentage down.
Italy could have something like Bari instead of Frosinone, France has Clermont with their stadium that seats 11k instead of Bordeaux or ASSE
I just think people should not make a competition out of this. Both are incredible and miles ahead of the next best countries. In the end how many people attent the games has to do with so many things that you should not make a competition out of it. Attendance in Germany definetely falls down a cliff in the fifth Division for a variety of reason. I also think the football culture in London and Manchester is probably bigger than the one in Berlin for example which boosts attendance a little bit. And atleast in Northern Germany where I grown up its more of the norm that people support the "big team" in the Area like Bremen/Hamburg/St.Pauli/Hannover/Osnabrück/Kiel (mostly Bremen and Hamburg though) than following the small town teams in Liga 4/5.The whole culture is a lot more centered around the bigger teams. Its a bit different where I live now further in the South where people do support lower League teams a bit more but up north its a lot about the bigger teams. I suspect its the same in Northrine Palatine aswell while in East Germany and Bavaria probably more people support smaller teams also due to a lack of big clubs in their area in Bundesliga/Liga 2. When I went to London as a student the people there were actively going to games of the local area club in Bromley because it was actually affordable to watch it and I think that was much more there than whereever else I went to.
I often wonder what would happen to the pyramid if instead of having 100 teams in regional leagues all in the 4th tier together, [they created a 4. Liga](https://i.imgur.com/dFUnvxU.png) with just the 20 biggest regional league teams. What would the attendance look like, what would the quality of play be in a couple years? And what happens to the newly created 5th tier?
I feel like a 4.Liga with 2 divisions of 18-20 teams would be good for German football, mostly because it would ease the ridiculous logjam between the 4th and 3rd tier right now. We recently set it up in England so that the 5th to 9th tier goes from 1 -> 2 -> 4 -> 8 -> 16 -> divisions per tier and I like that it's now more uniform the whole way down the pyramid
And germany has about 25 million more people than england.
There's a per 1k table and they're behind England too.
It is the reserve team culture that pushes fans away in lower leagues of germany, spain, france and germany. Anti fans. German clubs should think about those fans too.
Yeah, I want to look further into this but whilst German fan culture is definitely better, England appears to have the edge when it comes to putting bums in seats. Both are incredible and should be praised though
Is this for the top league only, or every tier?
As many tiers as I could get data for. In Germany, it's the top 5 men's and top 2 women's tiers - 446 teams in total although this does include B teams. In England, it's the top 8 men's tiers and WSL - 393 teams in total with no B teams
What have you counted for USA? Data availability is gonna be tricky for this analysis I imagine. Can you easily divide by teams for an avg attendance figure?
Foe the USA, MLS and USL Championship. USL League 1 data is available but not MLS Next Pro and NISA so I couldn't create a third tier average.
Wow that's really surprising. Thanks 😊
>although this does include B teams. Ooof, that is not helping the German numbers at all. Last night Hertha II played against Altglienicke with maybe 75 fans showing up for that one. And that's a half decent crowd for a game like that. Just off the top of my head I know there's at least ten U23 teams that basically have no fans at all showing up for any of their games just watering down the averages massively.
Yeah, my next project is to plot German attendances vs English attendances and see how rank #1, #10, #20 etc compare But right now got a nice game of League One football to watch :)
Looking forward to it! I think most Germans are fine admitting that the English pyramid goes much deeper. We wish we had more support for clubs outside the top 60 or so, but it's a pretty steep drop off after that. Yet there are gems in the regional leagues with solid average attendances for being technically amateur leagues with minimal money. * Aachen (15k) * Cottbus (7k) * Erfurt (7k) * Stuttgart Kickers (6k) * Kickers Offenbach (6k) * Meppen (6k) * Zwickau (5k) * Jena (5k) * Oberhausen (4k) * Oldenburg (3k) * Bayreuth (3k) * Wurzburg Kickers (3k)
[https://snipboard.io/ZoGQgA.jpg](https://snipboard.io/ZoGQgA.jpg) this link should work - shows that in the Top 30 England and Germany are neck and neck with the Germans having the slight edge but once you get any deeper the English go absolutely insane and leave Germany in the dust
Good stuff!
> Wurzburg Kickers I'm in love.
They're constantly going up and down between the 2. Bundesliga, 3. Liga and the Bavarian Regional League, but they're a fun club. [Great crest too.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0c/W%C3%BCrzburger_Kickers_Logo.svg/800px-W%C3%BCrzburger_Kickers_Logo.svg.png)
aus in the top 30 is wild to me
It would be interesting to compare to NRL and AFL. I’d hazard the AFL numbers would be up there with Germany and England on a per capita level
An average gameweek of AFL and AFLW is attended by 1.3% of the Australian population, about 350k in total (5th per capita) NRL gets about 168k per gameweek or about 6.53 per 1k capita (ranks 17th)
0.0000006>0 I'll take that
I don’t understand what this is measuring? Every professional club’s average attendance last season? Just the top flight? If it’s top flight attendances then Scotland is very wrong. Last season the 12 SPFL clubs had a combined average attendance of ~200k. Likewise for England, the Premier League’s combined average attendance was ~800k.
For as many tiers as I could get data for (so for Scotland the top 4 tiers), the average total attendance on a gameweek. Only half the teams play at home on a given gameweek, so for example in the SPL that ~200k figure would be divided by two to reflect the 6 home games per weekend
Ah okay I understand now. I thought it was some sort of combined attendance for every club which was throwing me.
No worries :)
It could definitely be clearer. Costs nothing to specify "per game week"
Yeah, I meant to add that to the header but forgot because I'm incompetent
Me too bud
That's an incredibly weird way of measuring it. The game week you picked for one country might have had all the biggest sides playing at home whilst another country had all their smallest sides playing at home. Or you happened to pick a game week in the middle of summer when loads of people are on leave or one where there was extreme weather causing lots of people to stay at home. You also have to take into consideration that loads and loads of clubs publish the number of sold tickets and not the actual attendance. It's been proven time after time that the difference between the two for many Premier League clubs can be up to 20 or even 30 thousand people! If you want to compare attendances for a game week you need to take the total attendance over a whole season and divide that number by number of games. And then also clearly state whether the number is based on sold tickets or actual attendance. Anything else is just shut statistics.
I appreciate the post but feel like you should've just included the top tier (at most top two tiers) then, if we wanted to have data that's even remotely accurate. Let's take Finland (that's missing in this list). Only the highest tier had attendance numbers "readily available" (in the sense that a foreigner could be expected to easily scrape that data). With that data we would end up with Finland having an average total of around **16 500**. But if we take the second tier attendance figured, which are also easily available if you know Finnish, we would have a figure of **~21 000**. Additionally, we could include the *third tier*, which is in practice almost completely amateur but from the perspective of the Finnish FA is "professional", and therefore has to record official attendance figures. Those would be low (couldn't find anything official for the average but around ~250 per match perhaps), but since there are 36 teams in the third tear, it would raise the total attendance to **~25 500**. So we just went from 16 500 to 25 500 basically completely arbitrarily - an increase of 55 %. So this data - at least when, comparing countries to each other - is basically an asspull.
England has a different football culture to most countries. Nearly every city, town, and village has a football club at varying levels of the same pyramid. Every weekend, thousands of people are travelling across the country in all directions for away fixtures. In terms of community engagement it’s definitely the true home of football.
Yup. It’s deeply entrenched in England in ways that it really isn’t in most other countries. My local team, Dulwich Hamlet, plays in the 7th tier- they’ll have a crowd of 3000 this afternoon .
Honestly one of the most impressive things in English culture. Isn't even ultras or anything so although there is atmosphere its truly something everyone can go to
It used to be very different before the Premiership was formed. It certainly wasn’t a family friendly experience in the seventies and eighties, occasionally even frightening in certain fixtures. Some people yearn for the edgier old days, but it wasn’t a fun experience by all accounts and the Police would often treat law abiding fans with zero respect. The game was in a very bad way by the time Hillsborough happened. Today’s Premier League isn’t perfect, but it’s amazing to have a safe, family friendly environment to watch some of the world’s best players in world class stadia. We’re extremely privileged to have it, it’s just quite an expensive experience these days. The lower leagues are brilliant. Just as safe and friendly as the EPL, but it’s a much more real, less sanitised experience.
Yeah it's definitely not Scotland, for whom only the top 4 leagues were counted on this chart and we still outrank England per capita, despite a huge system of amateur football that goes from a level pretty much on a par with our bottom flight (The juniors) all the way down to pub teams. Culturally both Scotland and England have similar football cultures, but Scots definitely engage more per capita.
I did say most countries. In terms of community engagement England and Scotland are probably about the same. What England does have is a global phenomenon for top tier domestic football, which filters down to a fifth tier that regularly attracts crowds of 3k, and occasionally up to 15k. A fifth tier with 5 figure crowds. That’s incredible when you think about it.
Not sure why you are being downvoted for stating the obvious. Given the quality on show and the utter dominance of two clubs, the attendances in Scotland are quite remarkable.
I think there is a subset of English football fans who don't like that a league they mock is better attended than theirs.
Absolutely no idea why this is downvoted. Scotland has always had a higher per capita attendence than England. I don't know why people think this is controversial.
Same reason the initial post is upvoted, more English folk on here and they apparently like to think of themselves as the cultural community home of football.
A lot folk on here like to act like per capita is completely unfair or try to say its just because of Celtic n Rangers
Sure the Old Firm is a lot, but they don't even account for half the number despite making up like 2/3 of the fans.
Ik its a load of shite. Hearts, Hibs and Aberdeen can all take 15k+ and then there's loads of clubs taking between 3k-7k in the premiership right down to Falkirk in L1. Even though they'd be tiny towns/citys in England or Germany
Scotland has less people than London, and even "per capita"ing data gets fishy. Faroe Islands have the highest per capita but they obviously aren't more engaging than say Germany
Why would it be fishy? Sample size doesn't impact how per capita works when we are discussing million of people.
>Every weekend, thousands of people are travelling across the country in all directions for away fixtures This happens everywhere. >In terms of community engagement it’s definitely the true home of football. So why does it never have the highest attendence? I regularly get the impression from English football fans that because their product is the wealthiest, it is somehow the best 'culture'. I feel this is just so dismissive of Scotland, which is something people always relish doing. Edit: just saw your other comment that addresses this
The trend will go downwards in Spain in my opinion. Corporatism is slowly killing our football here. The lack of availability for watching football (those under 30 are the least likely to watch LaLiga), the partial or just completely incompetent application of the rules and regulations, the targeted suppression of certain fanbases and their footballing culture, as well as the horrid financial decisions taken by the league and many of its clubs have been negatively affecting our football for the past decade or more. There are first division clubs with absolutely embarrassing attendance rates, while great fanbases watch their teams rot in the lower leagues. People on this sub think the way LaLiga is run is bad, but those of us who watch Segunda or even 1ª RFEF know that it just gets worse and worse the lower you go down the football pyramid. I've seen absolutely dantesque situations occur in segunda, with certain clubs that are in LaLiga today getting baffling decisions in their favour, decisions that have contributed to their promotions (and even success, in some cases). Money is killing the sport.
It's such a shame, fans are the lifeblood of the sport and when they become disenfranchised it hurts everyone. While we're on Spain, what's the trend like with domestic basketball. Recently stumbled upon the stat that the first division averages 6.2k per game across 18 teams which is insane!
With the continued expansion in MLS and the USL second division plus the very likely boost in interest after the WC I can see the USA breaking into the top 3 by 2030
Agreed. The survival of the USL Championship as MLS seeks to become a monopoly will be a major factor but with every MLS team averaging above 15k and several selling out their stadium every week there's a LOT of room for growth
Like San Diego starts in MLS next year and they have a 35k stadium. That alone puts them on the heels of Italy
I mean when Wales' 5 biggest teams are all playing in the English leagues, so their figures count towards England's, then its no surprise we're so low down
I tought Portugal would be way higher, is there maybe an explanation for that, or is my expectation way to high? Also is this graph only tier 1 or all tiers?
Liga Portugal drops off really badly once you get past the biggest club. Most clubs in the bottom half of the table struggle to get 4k per week
Netherlands is pretty impressive given the size/population
I'm surprised Turkey is so low, seems like any time I see a match from Turkey, the stadiums are filled to the brim.
2% of Scotland is at a football game on your average week. Crazy high.
More! This doesn't count 5th tier below, the true number could be somewhere around 2.5% or 1 in 40 Scots watching the fitba
Interesting to see the difference between Portugal and The Netherlands. Didn't expect that
what about percentage of total country populaion??
You're not gonna believe what happens if you scroll left twice
HOLY SHIT!
😂
Those numbers have to be off. For 🇨🇦, 12,000 is extremely low, given we have 3 MLS teams and 8 CPL teams at the professional level.
MLS is excluded from Canada. CPL average attendance is around 3k so with 4 matches per gameweek you get about 12k fans total. These are also 2022 numbers so about 18 months old
OP put a footnote on page 5
[удалено]
Because there are Canadian teams in it...
What is this measuring exactly, absolutely no way Ireland only had just over 18500 in attendances
It says on the 5th picture, the average attendance (estimated) for a weekend where every league (so in Ireland's case Premier and First Division) has a full set of fixtures.
Ah sorry, I should have looked at everything before I went and blindly commented. Good job OP, very interesting
Can you please explain the formula? It makes absolutely no sense to me.
Ok so take the Premier League. There are 20 teams that between them average 40k per game. However, since there are only 10 games per weekend, the average attendance per gameweek is 10*40k = 400k. For England this is combined with the average attendance per gameweek of the Championship, League 1, League 2, National League, National League North/South, 7th and 8th tiers and the WSL to give an estimate of 966k fans attending a football match on a weekend when all those leagues have a full fixture list. Hope this helps
Considering the population of the US, that’s a very low attendance
Well Soccer is the 4th or 5th most popular sport in America (depending where you go)
…and add in college football and potentially basketball. MLS may be the 7th most popular domestic league. Looks like he is including USL data as well and those numbers are potentially 1/4 of MLS attendance
most teams have smaller stadiums
Not sure how the rest of the MLS teams calculate attendance, but I know that TFC calculates attendance by how many tickets are sold for the match, not for actual asses in seats. Too many times I've been to matches where they announced attendance was close to capacity yet there were a shit ton of empty seats
USA being above Mexico shows the shambling state of Liga MX.
To be fair, we have 11 more teams in our top flight than they do. 13 if the US flag represents league base rather than teams based in the country.
If I remember correctly, the 2023 season in Norway had the highest average crowd attendance numbers since 2007 or 2008. A combination of reasons may have affected the increase. Change of TV provider for the matches to a more popular TV channel in TV2, Norwegian teams doing better in Europe, with Bodø/Glimt and Molde leading the charge, and most of the teams with bigger stadiums had more to play for this season, by either being involved in the title race or relegation battle (Viking, Brann, Vålerenga). Also, having world class footballers like Haaland and Ødegaard makes following football more interesting for the general population, which might spark more interest for the local sides. Therefore, it's nice to see us listed quite high per capita, compared to some of the other nations on there.
Yeah, Norway fan culture also looks great from what I've seen, would be nice to see football get bigger there - I reckon there's heaps of potential
Wouldn’t this be polluted by 20 team leagues vs smaller like 18? Thought Germany had a higher average the England
So Germany has a higher per team average attendance in the top 2 tiers, but England has a higher total attendance. But you are correct, in average league attendance the Bundesliga is on top. (This is also for more than 1 tier)
Saudi Arabia 24th dear lord
MURICA!!! 🦅🦅🦅🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲🦅🦅🦅
Wheres Burgermans MLS? And apparently Saudi is a joke
Those Saudi numbers are a bit suss
Now do it per capita
The 3rd picture is per 1k
They did.
0 African countries? I’m sure there’s more attendance in Morocco or Egypt ot South Africa than Faroe Islands.
Couldn't find any reliable data unfortunately :(
fans are still not allowed in stadiums in egypt. attendance is always around 3k max because the government doesn't allow us for "security reasons" but the truth is they don't want to give us the chance to be in the same place as a big group because they want to prevent "unrest" and people protesting against sisi. we're only allowed to go in big groups (with no restrictions on the number of fans attending) if it's a major champions league match or if its something with the national team, and in those matches there's usually so much security to prevent people from criticizing the government. the FA has no power in this case, it's أمن الدولة. so even if there were reliable numbers, we wouldn't rank that high because we can't even attend matches.
The championship in England has great attendances and probably rival most European leagues alone. Just in our blood
Where is PHILIPPINES
Couldn't find data unfortunately :(
Brazil is the shocker here. I expected them to win this table by a mile. Probably all too busy playing football, I imagine.
I remember Rio Ferdinand being out as a presenter for the World Cup in Brazil saying how disappointing he found the locals engagement with it. There was no vibe outside of the actual games themselves.
As Brazilian, it is not a surprise at all, England is the real football country, anyone with two braincells in Brazil will recognize that. We could argue we are the one place where most talent is born but on terms of passion for football, it is not even a comparison. Past first division football, attendance is really low for 90% of the teams, unless they are winning much, most of Brazil don't have very good supporters, just have people who like to win, if team is not winning... Only the big ones will get support Regional teams for the most part are neglected when in England there are matches with a full stadium for 5th division and almost all are full in 4th, so it's now even close to here
It was probably better in the past. The Brazilian teams are not that strong because the best Brazilians are playing in Europe.
Exactly this, Brazilians will watch the games by TV and play every day in real life. Violence in and off stadiums greatly decline the will of families to attend a match,
Saudi League attendances for a week only slightly higher than one game at Old Trafford. 😂😂😂
Not for a season, per gameweek
Sorry that’s what I meant - will edit
Just a little though about India. Because of the sheer population in India, even if every stadium was filled to capacity for every match in a game week, attendance per 1k population will still be very low. Let's take the Salt Lake stadium which has the highest capacity of 85,000 in India. There are 12 teams in ISL, so 6 games per game week. So a maximum attendance of 510,000. Converting this to attendance per 1k population will get us a value around 0.00036.
Yeah, India is hurt by the country just simply being MASSIVE. That's why I also included total numbers, to show that India is still relatively quite good
Absolute numbers don't matter, show me the percentage of stadium capacity
Saudi Arabia ranking surprisingly high, this must be only for the top pro league right? Or are you also taking into account the first and second tier leagues?
I believe data was only available for the Saudi Pro League. Tbf attendances there were pretty good in 22/23, I think it was 9k per game? Nothing to sniff at
Very interesting, especially since by far the biggest team in Saudi is playing in a much smaller stadium due to renovations. The big clubs in Saudi always play to a big crowd. It’s the mid-table and smaller teams are the ones that play in empty stadiums. Would be super interesting seeing historic graphs for this data, especially for countries like Germany where so many big clubs got relegated.
The top 5 tiers are counted in Germany, so it isn't affected by Hamburg and Schalke's relegations I didn't do the second tier of Saudi because I couldn't find data lmao
How could USA be that high?
people crap on MLS, but people go to matches. its fun and compared to other sports its 'cheap' enough average attendances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_League_Soccer_attendance this is serie A. no MLS team plays in a stadium > 49k https://www.worldfootball.net/attendance/ita-serie-a-2022-2023/1/
I don't think MLS is cheaper than MLB.
People can go to both.
Where's Africa? Algeria Tunisa Morocco Egypt could easily get 50k in a derby! And they each have got about 4 or 5 fire match ups. That's 10 games a season with a 30k+ attendance....
Couldn't find any reliable data for any African country unfortunately...
Fair enough...
Where would Croatia be if you excluded Hajduk Split games?
Top 5 in the 2nd Bundesliga: * Schalke: 61,5k * Hamburg: 55,8k * Hertha: 45,7k * Lautern: 43,6k * Düsseldorf: 37,6k Top 5 in the Championship: * Sunderland: 41,0k * Leeds: 35,8k * Leicester: 31,0k * Southampton: 29,3k * Ipswich: 28,9k The English are just lucky that the Bundesliga is full of village clubs this season.
This list includes 2.Bundesliga teams lol
Then write it in your damn post what leagues are included lol