Last weekend’s Welsh derbies in the Guinness Pro14 attracted attendances that could best be described as modest. Geraint Powell traces the decline in crowds and says the problems are deep-rooted.

 

The issue of crowds at the regions – or, rather, the consistent lack thereof – has returned towards the top of the domestic rugby agenda.

Even before the “Welsh derby” matches, Brendan Gallagher of The Rugby Paper, and a 1980s veteran of the Western Mail Championship/Whitbread Merit Table circuit from his time with the South Wales Echo, had tweeted about how big rugby spectator bases had been “brazenly abandoned” and “never returned” in South Wales.

Both true and incredibly depressing, for the original raison d’etre of representative regional rugby was to create a new tier of player and financial resource concentration for the professional game that all rugby fans could buy into without compromising any pre-existing club loyalties and affinities.

Obviously, this sensible concept did not survive the non-commercial power politics and jostling between the biggest South Walian clubs and a then impecunious WRU, leading to the dog’s breakfast finalised on April Fools’ Day 2003.

Brendan Gallagher’s sentiments echo across many of the great rugby towns of South Wales.

For those who hoped that long-term declining crowds could not get any lower than during the final death throes of the club meritocracy in 2002-03, and laughed at the notion that David Moffett’s suggested minimum 8,000 average crowds would be enough to financially sustain professional rugby even on a 2003 cost base, it really could not get any more depressing.

The official attendances for the second “Welsh derby” weekend of the season in Round 7 of the Pro14 were 7,442 for the Ospreys v the Dragons at the Liberty Stadium in Swansea and 9,003 for the Scarlets v Cardiff Blues at Parc y Scarlets in Llanelli.

This is certainly not the first time that one crowd has noticeably suffered when both the Ospreys and the Scarlets have had home “Welsh derby” matches on the same weekend.

It is a regular occurrence.  We saw a similar phenomenon in Round 6 last season and where a 10,860 crowd for the Ospreys v Cardiff Blues was followed 24 hours later by 6,361 for the Scarlets v the former Newport Gwent Dragons.

These are the very matches where a surplus would have to be run up, to offset the visits of the likes of Zebre and Benetton, to even clear David Moffett’s low and somewhat antiquated hurdle.

The only regional match with a good crowd is the end of season Judgement Day event, and many regional fans never cease to point out that many spectators are not there to watch any team and are not converted into attending regional fans.

And even these “crowd” figures at the weekend come with a huge caveat, for the market practice at this level of global rugby is to calculate the official attendance on the basis of tickets out rather than people in, so that even those clubs with the technology to count actual attendance are therefore dis-incentivised from using those figures.

If you buy a season ticket, you will automatically be included in the attendance.  So we do not know the actual numbers in the stadium, let alone how many in the stadium actually paid for their tickets.

The rather obvious discrepancy between the official attendance and attending crowds at one regional ground is frequently debated on social media, and the reasons for that non-attendance.

Attending crowds are a wonderful barometer of the health of the regional game, for you only have to look across the Irish Sea to see the large crowds in Dublin and in Limerick and in Belfast to gauge the contrasting health of the Irish provincial game, but this debate does undoubtedly annoy the apologists for the poor Welsh crowds.

They point to more than half of regional income coming from the centre, whether the central competition platform income (mostly broadcasters) or the WRU’s cross-subsidy from the Test game.  They point to the limited place of ticket – season and match day – income amongst the decentralised income streams on match days and in generally sweating stadium assets all year round.

They certainly hope that nobody asks the rather obvious question – even if all central income streams were equal, wouldn’t the Irish provinces still have a significant competitive advantage from having much higher decentralised crowd income?

When they are completely desperate, they start with the gibberish of higher crowds per head of population.  As if places like the South Wales valleys, the Scottish borders, the English West Country and around Limerick historically had the same interest in rugby as was the case in central London, Manchester, Dublin and in Glasgow.

Welsh regional rugby in South Wales inherited a very high population interest in rugby and failed to capture much of it.

The low regional crowds are in reality a painful reminder of a number of home truths and self-inflicted wounds:

Firstly, historic clubs were always the wrong vehicle for commercialised professional rugby in viscerally tribally diverse South Wales.

Secondly, when we belatedly adopted regional rugby in 2003, we significantly compromised the product by unnecessarily both growing out of and adding historic clubs to the package.

Thirdly, by placing all four professional rugby teams in South Wales and disenfranchising/excluding North Wales from the new regional rugby model, we sacrificed all potential commercial and retail income from the north (including trying to entice with the product some English rugby fans from the poorly served adjoining English border counties).

Fourthly, by placing two “regions” in and around Swansea, we would potentially be placing enormous commercial stresses upon them and test their resilience to breaking point – it is ironic that the additional strength added to them by stadium state aid has been offset by the golden era of the Swansea City Football Club and the upwards cost base driven by the Anglo-French clubs.

Fifthly, until the re-birth of the Gwent region this season, two regions were basically Cardiff RFC and Newport RFC in the coastal “soccer cities” and little was done not to alienate thousands of potential attending rugby fans.  The rugby communities in the famous rugby towns of Ebbw Vale, Pontypridd, Pontypool, Bridgend, Maesteg etc were never going to support rival clubs “as regions”.

So we have troubling attendances, when the options to increase desperately needed regional incomes are limited and with TV contract/s to renew.

There will no doubt be widespread interest in Dragons crowds in 2018-19 and 2019-20, as a different and more inclusive approach is adopted and as the latest Gwent wounds occasioned by Newport RFC crashing out of the professional game upon their veteran funding directors retiring slowly heal.

People will finally realise that ongoing antagonism between the Dragons region and Newport RFC is not in the interests of either party.

Crowd solutions for the Blues appear as intractable as ever, especially as the Blues directors have to currently emphasise their club heritage to try and pressurise the Athletic Club management committee and trustees into approving – what is for them – a high risk property redevelopment.

And addressing the issue of the regional duplication around Swansea, at the expense of North Wales, will have to wait for a later date and probably the brutal intervention of market forces rather than sensible strategic pre-emptive risk management planning.