Tigers top despite end to playoff run
PETER JACKSON reveals his exclusive table of European rugby’s best supported clubs
For those in Tigerville still smarting over their team’s abnormally anti-climactic end to the domestic season, the news may come as scant consolation but it reaffirms their supreme people power.
Leicester have reclaimed their status as the best supported club in Europe and the fact that they have done it despite failing to make the Premiership play-offs for the first time since 2004 makes the feat all the more commendable.
They still managed to keep the Welford Road average attendance at almost 23,000, thereby reducing any temptation to join the increasing number of rivals in moving at least one home fixture to a larger venue.
A level of support superior to a few Premier League football clubs proved just enough to end the four-year reign of another under-achieving club, Begles-Bordeaux.
They lost almost 2,000 fans per game, the inevitable consequence of a season so far below average that they finished the Top 14 nearer the bottom than the top.
Neither of the two other clubs in the top four,
Harlequins and Bath, made it beyond the regular season. Taking one-off home matches to Twickenham allowed each to return an average crowd greater than the capacity of their respective homes at the Stoop and the Rec.
The Rugby Paper’s exclusive analysis of attendances across the three major European Leagues is limited to regular-season fixtures. On the Champions’ Cup front, nobody came close to matching the pulling power of Leinster and Munster.
Ireland’s powerhouse provinces outnumbered every other big-hitter, Leinster topping 30,000 and Munster falling not far short of 25,000. As our table shows, nobody else got as high as 20,000, not even Leicester.
Four clubs – two French, one English, one Scottish – increased their gates by more than 2,000. The largest drops in attendance reflect the domestic struggles of the trio concerned – Northampton Saints, Harlequins and Ospreys.
None of those in charge of the three clubs at the start of the season were still there at the end of it, a grim reminder that they are becoming almost as sackable as their counterparts in the Premier League. Jim Mallinder’s exit from Franklin’s Gardens was followed by those of John Kingston, left, from the Stoop and Steve Tandy’s from the Liberty.