Bath figures swell with move to HQ
PETER JACKSON consults his stats book to reveal a big climb in Europe’s attendance numbers
Over the course of a few costly weeks, Bath suffered the galling experience of watching a first European final for 13 years float off down the Seine. No sooner had they paid for missing a penalty with the last kick of the Challenge Cup thriller against Stade Francais than they found themselves high and dry with nothing more to play for.
Five defeats over the last seven matches amounted to grim confirmation that they had inevitably missed the last boat to the Aviva Premiership play-offs, finishing a distant fifth. It may not be much by way of consolation but there is one pan-European table where Bath made the biggest move of the season. The Rugby Paper’s exclusive table based on attendances throughout the regular season across Europe’s three major Leagues shows that Bath made a greater gain at the box-office than any of the other 37 fully professional teams throughout England, France, Ireland, Italy, Scotland and Wales.
They pushed their average gate to an all-time high of 18,320, an increase of marginally more than 5,000 per game on the previous season. Wasps, alone among the other box-office hits, managed 2,000.
Bath’s jump of ten places from 15th last season reflects more than their ability to fill the Rec. Their initiative in transferring one of their home fixtures and staging it at Twickenham paid handsome dividends with more than 61,000 rolling up at HQ for the win over Leicester which raised fleeting West Country hopes of elbowing their old rivals out of the play-off zone.
While the top four remain unchanged – Bordeaux, Leicester, Harlequins and Toulon – Bath have soared above Wasps, Clermont, Saracens as well as the Irish provincial pair Ulster and Leinster.
The irony will not be lost on Bath fans that their sharp rise coincides with the even sharper decline in support of their Challenge Cup conquerors, Stade Francais. Eight seasons ago the Parisians, under the charismatic Max Guazini, towered above the rest with an average home attendance of 34,717.
Now, with Guazini’s touch as a latter-day Phineas T Barnum a distant memory, they have shrunk to barely 10,000. How much that contributed to the club’s short-lived merger with Racing is not clear but at least the comparative few will still have a team to follow next season thanks to the player-led protest over what they saw as a take-over by their cross-city rivals.