Game 1 & 2 Eng v Aus / Wales v Italy : 45052 (74500)
Game 3 PNG v France : 7500 (10150)
Game 4 NZ v Samoa : 14965 (15200)
Game 5 Fiji v Ireland : 8872 (10,249)
Game 6 Scotland v Tonga : 7,630 (10000)
Game 7 USA v Cook Islands :7,247 (12,100)

Total so far : 91,266 (132,199)
Percentage of seats taken up : 69.03%
Average per game : 13038

Not looking too shabby, certainly ahead of my expectations in this moment in time.

On course for it to be the most well attended International Rugby League Tournament ever.

Average per game: 19,474.

Error corrected for you

looking ahead to the next few matches we have the next 3 games likely to all have 5 figure gates with saints the only slight doubt of the three. then wales in wrexham which is selling well followed by another derwent park game for scotland, which i would imagine will be a good crowd after the tonga game the other evening. onto next week and a second game at hull kr and its a real appetiser with png up against the entertainers of samoa, this should get a bigger crowd than the france game. leigh has been selling really well, and the only unknown is the game at salford stadium which for some reason seems to struggle with attendances generally.

Don't go there...

Sage like advice

the biggest positive for me is that the game seems to have re-connected with heartland audiences in Cumbria & Rochdale, while we've sold to new fans in Cardiff, Bristol & Wembley. The challenge for the game is to turn these fans old & new in to regular fans.

Can't do it without taking top flight games there.

The challenge of this World Cup was to reunite the sport and draw in a new audience
The changes to the structures motivated me to purchase over 100 tickets for this event that I wouldn't have done if we were keeping the franchise farce as I had become disenfranchised from the greater sport in recent years

Its excellent to see stadia outside the "traditional" heartland with full terraces, no empty seats. The problem with the 2000 world cup was the, 1000 attendance in Belfast for a first day match etc. It doesn't get the game off to a good start.

This time round, people have bought into the tournement much better, I wonder what that is down to?

More money available to promote?
Better team put together to promote?
More press coverage?

A few small changes make a big difference. You rightly point out the farce of opening the tournament with a ridiculous fixture - we avoided that this time and made sure that the first day (alongside the final, the day most likely to have journalists paying attention) was a big one. A few have tried to disparage us, but we haven't given the anti-League press any open goals. The new structure, designed to avoid blow-out scores has also worked pretty much perfectly so far. Plus, England showed up against the Aussies. Some good decisions and no doubt some good luck have seen the stars align themselves pretty well so far. Disaster avoided, it's now just a question of how good the thing can be - mainly it now comes down to how far England go. The one area where I can't help but think we'll let ourselves down, is, paradoxically, following an unlikely - but possible - England win. Massive opportunity for the best PR in a generation or more, but I doubt very much we have a great plan in place ready to exploit it to anything like the maximum potential. Hopefully it'll be made easier by starting with a last minute 100-metre try by a Tomkins or such like to win the final, then a visit to Downing street, etc. Look what happened when a union carthorse managed to scrape a mis-kicked drop goal over the bar.

I don't know how much Olympic fever has continued on in England, but International sport got much better crowds for years after the Olympics in Australia. People would buy tickets to a hopscotch tournament if it was international.

Without being on the inside of how both tournaments have been promoted and run, it's difficult to say. From the outside looking in you can see clear differences which someone just mentioned above.

I mean 7k, on a cold wet wednesday night........in bristol.........for cook islands v usa? Someone somewhere is doing something very right.

I think the price of tickets has done a lot to help, if the tickets had been twice the price we prob won't have sold half as many, if I had read a small sign mentioning the rlwc but I had never heard of it before it would have perked my interest maybe worth a google and if there was a game near my house why wouldn't I go only a tenner for a cheap ticket.

reasonably priced tickets is the key along with the 50% promotions, I'm currently going to 5 games maybe more and taking people with me when under previous pricing policies I'd probably only go to 1 or 2 max

Pricing is a factor, to some extent, of course but the fact is that at the top ofthe list, you have to make people WANT TO GO. this was conclusively proved when a year or two back, all SL season ticket holders got a FREE admission to their club's first Challenge Cup game. Now, you can't get better than free - but it made little or no difference to attendances, and so was quietly dropped.

Bottom line is, marketing. Both central and local. Both seem so far to have done a truly outstanding job. And of course now that the teams have provided the sort of start to the comp that we could only have dreamed of, there's no reason why the good work can't be maintained.

I'd take issue with your marvellous marketing, I was in Cardiff last weekend as the wife's from Cardiff and none of the in-laws even knew it was on even though the welsh assembly had paid for their bid using some of their taxes!

I think people always want to go but you have to make it affordable which they have this time. Your example of the challenge cup is flawed as most of those games were obvious one sided mismatches.

I live near Leigh there are some lamppost signs along the bypass and a large sign outside the ground advertising the game, but if you lived on the other side of town any didn't use the bypass you wouldn't know about it, world of mouth does a a lot more than a fancy marketing spread, I'm taking 3 extra people to the game at Salford as we meet up last night and I mentioned the rlwc and it perked their interest so I just said they should by tickets to Salford as they live in Manchester and they have done, they didn't really know about it until I said.

I think we also need to accept that a well organised international tournament is attractive to people. They like watching international tournaments, they like being part of it. Sponsors, advertisers, fans, players and broadcasters and other media all want to be a little part of a World Cup. Those two words get peoples attention

It feeds in to the most basic narrative of sport, that the plucky underdog with the interesting back story can play the goliaths. Whether they have the chance of winning it or not, they are in it.

Good post, I still think they could have had a larger publicity campaign, can't remember the last time I saw an advert for the rlwc and it could have passed people by, but it's appealed to enough people which has let it spread, the combination of well priced tickets, half price deals, underdog matches and the general pull of a World Cup is bringing new people to the sport, it could so easily have been a washout.

So instead of people trying to poke holes in it lets just enjoy it and put on the best attended World Cup ever, we are still in a recession so the RFL has hit the demographic and has made an appealing product that those who may not have seen the game before are able to go and watch.

I think it's very harsh indeed to criticise the marketing, when they will have had to make the most of every penny they had. Even the marvellous opening ceremony was a triumph of how to get the best out of a limited budget. Whatever they're doing, they're clearly doing it better than any previous World Cup, and that is off the back of an uncertain time for the game.
Of course the best thing of all is that the one factor we can guarantee is that the games will be great, because the sport is so good.

Just bought 6 tickets for the quarter final at Leeds! Looking like New Zealand v Italy/tonga. 10% off at £13.50 each! Great value!

The game at the Shay is cranking up its sales too!

Sorry, but you can't take issue. Because they have done it, they have achieved extremely good attendances. The object is to fill the grounds- not to ensure that every human on earth is fully informed. What you fail to realise is that (especially in the current economic climate) this type of marketing needs to be targeted in a way that will bring the crowds in and this it has achieved. Would your in-laws have paid to go had they known?

the Welsh Assembly point is, to afford it due respect, utter hogwash. The Welsh Assembly spends millions and I would wager that your in-laws never know what 99% of that money is spent on.


But people plainly DON'T "always want to go", if you think they just inherently do, so all that is requered is cheap ticketing, then there's no point in discussing this with you.


Not at all. Many of the RLWC fixtures to date were supposed to be one-sided mismatches yet the crowds have still come so bang goes that argument. Then just refer to blatantly one-sided games in RU where everyone knows a game may be an 80-point blowout yet they can still sell Twickers out. Many factors come into play in deciding whether a person will pay to watch and what you call "mis-matches". Or back to Cup games, what if in the FA Cup there was a mismatch like Runcorn v Man U? Or Dag+Red v Liverpool? Where would those full houses leave your one-sided mismatches argument? On the contrary, those would be exactly the sort of fixtures you could sell out while giving your entire marketing team a month off.

I'll take that as a complement, given I wrote the bid and delivered the programme...

Huge kudos to RLWC2013 for a courageous decision to run with Bristol. The top team there, Sally Bolton, Jon Dutton, Mark Forster and Martin Johnston, have been superb throughout.

In fact they created the structure that has made this comp a success... a bidding process that meant local partners had to commit to delivering each individual game on a local level.

In Bristol there have been some brilliant, key individuals, who made it possible, and some fantastic organisations, particularly Bristol City and South Glos Borough Councils, Bristol Rovers, SGS Filton College (did you know we have a RL Academy in Bristol?), Bristol Sonics RL, UWE, and Watershed Arts Centre.

But the framework for success was set by the RLWC2013 team, and in turn by the RFL who commissioned and created them.

My big question.... what next?

Here's a few thoughts:

- invest in development staff in Bristol, to run a primary programme that follows a generation of kids from 5 to 16, adding in years below as the first intake move up through the years

- stage big events in Bristol. England vs Wales, with Cardiff only 40 minutes away? Super League on the road? I'd push for Magic Weekend at Ashton Gate... yes, it holds around 26,000 and current ticket sales are 30,000, but suddenly instead of being a 'maybe/maybe not' event, fans would have to get in early and it would sell out. How about an extended-format WCC game there?

- invest in Bristol Sonics. It would take a couple of salaries to make them into a Championship 1 side. No more that that on top of the existing central contributions to all Champ 1 teams.

- support Student RL, and the Student Alumni properly - that's a genuinely national game, and why? Because it is self-run by smart young adults.... a pool of (intellectual) talent we don't nurture and sustain after they graduate (which is sad, because they become the bosses, teachers, leaders in the next generation)

- plan for a Bristol SL team. Not parachuted in, or on the whim of a rich benefactor, but a strategic 10 year growth plan, so that those primary age kids who start playing now, are pushing for first team contracts by the time Bristol RL hit the SL. There is nothing special about the kids in Wigan or Leeds that makes them more suited to RL than the kids in Bristol and Bath... just years of coaching and playing opportunity. Even then, how many of our greats only played their first game of league as adults.... Boston, Sullivan, Davies, Van Vollenhoven, Risman... etc.... the SW is a Rugby heartland, and unlike in the north, where playing union is a social class thing, it's just the game that the ordinary blokes play if they are too tough for soccer.

Of course, the SL clubs can't even stay in a meeting room together at the moment, and the RFL has the will, but not the money, to grow the game without their revenue from the tv deals. It would take vision, especially from the smaller-town SL clubs and aspiring Championship clubs, to make the game truly national because they'd find it much harder to reach the top of a SL game that had teams in Bristol, Coventry, Glasgow, Newcastle. But if the pie gets bigger, everyone gets more. League 2 football teams turn over more money, and attract more fans, that some current SL teams. If only the current SL teams could think that far ahead.

...and that is exactly how it's been done.

In Bristol we have had:

- a corporate touch rugby event
- a female only touch rugby event
- a museum exhibition
- a cinema screening
- a music competition
- a cheerleading festival
- a student rl nines
- a wheelchair rl exhibition game
- a secondary schools rl competition
- a coaching masterclass.

- a stall at the Harbour Festival and the Brisfest Music Festival
- stalls at the weekend 'make Sunday special' events
- a stall at the Half Marathon
- the trophy tour for 4 days in Yate (a small local town), Bristol City Centre, and the international Balloon fiesta.
- a stall at the 1908 Cup Schools events (400+ kids from Gloucestershire playing an annual RL festival)

We've regularly been at the two universities, UWE and Uni Bristol, with a standard RFL ticketing deal for ALL their student clubs.

We've engaged with all the local amateur RL clubs

We (I) have emailed every rugby union club (over 150 of them) with the RFL ticket offers.
We've mailed all the coaches, volunteers, rlc players and RL spectators that we have contact details for

We've staged press events at the bid launch, the announcement of the venues, the 1 year to go, the announcement of the game, the 100 days, the 50 days, the arrival of the Cook Islands, the Civic reception for the team, the raising of the CI flag, and the USA flag.

We've had viral campaigns for our local theme song, with a video I cut from other videos ([urlhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTz7VXkLH0A[/url), and the footage of the Cook Island lads doing their haka at a local arts centre in Team Suits ([urlhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rHGYfpaNO0[/url)

We've had a huge social media campaign, particularly by systematically building up a twitter audience (we have 1753 followers in Bristol... Leeds has 1294).

We've had local leading councillors and mayors involved at major events.

We've run competitions for stash and tickets on all the local and regional radio stations.

We've run standard ticket offers for cashback to the Community Foundations for Bristol City, Bristol Rovers and Bristol Rugby.

We worked with the Cook Islands Tourist Board to get a troupe of Dancers over... they have performed for the Mayor, at an arts venue, at a museum, and at the Bristol Rovers home game v Chesterfield last weekend, before coming to the match and performing there.

Our entertainment included a local choir, the Bristol Samba Band, our singer (NICOLE), three groups of cheerleaders, the local Police Ceremonial Guard, 'Mr Isambard Kingdom Brunel' from SS Great Britain, 7 local schools, all the schools from the RL competition, and 4 local RL clubs

The City Council bought and erected huge banners around the city. RLWC funded bus ads and bus-shelter adshel ads.
The Council also ran a few local ads, and advertised in the Cardiff programme, and put flyers and fixture cards in all the leisure centres and libraries.

S Glos Council ran library exhibitions, and presented every school with a RLWC ball

We've run press articles in Forty-20, the African-Caribbean media, local history bulletins, and in papers from the regional Bristol Post down to the doorstep-local 'Bishopston Matters' news-sheet.

In other words.... we've reached out to hundreds of different groups of people, a very few who know RL, a lot who only know union or football, and even more who don't follow any sport. We built our audience over 2 years and dozens of programmes, in the framework from, and supported by markeing from, RLWC2013. The key was, and is, to get people talking about it, to make one or two key advocates in dozens of different groups, and to get them to spread the word. We didn't spend a fortune because we didn't have a fortune to spend.

But we did get 7000 people to a RL match in Bristol.