Fan is short for fanatic. To be a fanatic you have to be prepared to pay money to watch games and you have to be interested in the games enough to pay.In TWP's case they had some fans, some people who were fans of Beer festivals, and some people who wandered in because it was largely free to get in.

The club failed to find a single NA player, nor a single cent for televising their matches which they promised and on which they were admitted to the game here, so they forgot all that and started boasting of big crowds.

Calling leigh fans "Fairweather" is nonsense as the 6000 Leigh fans actually all pay to get into the grounds and I say grounds plural as they take a good following to most leigh away games and create a great atmosphere.

Fairweather fans are the sort that turn up when their club is winning easily every week and who disappear when they start losing. Which is the position Toronto Wolfpack were heading for when they lost all their Superleague games. However before they were due to go back to Canada with a losing team their number one fan fled the club......

Toulouse have fans and in the 2019 season in the play off's their big game against Featherstone Rovers drew 1,068 paying fans for the game of the season.....

I would guess they all paid and that there wasn't a beer festival on.

Remarkably in March 2019, 6,103 people came to see the visit of Toronto Wolfpack to Toulouse. Where the extra 5,000 French fans came from I don't know? Maybe it was the glamour of TWP themselves? Maybe Toulouse rented the Stade Ernest Wallon and put on a beer festival and passed thousands of free tickets around the city?

Maybe it was all Hocus pocus in a joint venture to try to promote the idea of a Transatlantic league??

All I know is leigh have a great core of 6,000 paying fans many who go pay at away games, and many who follow their club and the game and don't need leigh to be winning all the time to support their club. This is one big reason why they got the gig........

This is just a general comment (I haven't checked your quoted stats) but surely there would be a dip in average attendances as the majority of visiting Super League clubs would bring more away supporters than the majority of Championship clubs.

That's certainly the case.

Looking at the stats an all leigh fans crowd (e.g. the sort you would get against catalans) in Superleague was 5,600.

The following year Leigh.v.Batley was 3,200

Having said that whilst in the Championship Leigh fans away support has provided clubs with their best attendances at times doubling gates, so for me the criticism is one eyed,

Toronto let most people in for free that’s the reason the fans were inflated, and that’s possibly part reason they don’t play rugby now

Evening H, how are you? Well one would hope.

There was no inference that genuine TWP fans were in any way less than other fans, merely that they were FEWER than reported (as admitted by several senior staff at the club).

Wanderer (another bad result today, mate) made a genuine point about lower gates at LSV following relegation to which may be added a factor from my own experience. I was able to attend far more games when Leigh were in SL as I have work commitments on most Sundays.

Harking back to my earlier question regarding the definition of "fan", it was directed to Steph and was mainly rhetorical but everyone started shouting answers from the audience.

NO MORE HELPING THE CONTESTANT, PLEASE!

Are you saying that Catalan brought 2.4k to the attendance? I seriously doubt that.

If so, why the drop the following year if not fairweather fans?

Catalans brought between 20 & 50 fans *was difficult to tell* & in that regard was similar to Toronto fans in Championship *about 20* & so your point is very valid.

There is always an 'uplift' in home & away support attendance from Championship to Super League as their is from Championship to Premier League in football. It appears that our average attendances almost doubled, Toronto's attendances also increased but less dramatically. Look at any before & after promotion average attendance stats & you will find uplift or good time Charlie's increasing the numbers !

You may have an unwitting point about "fair-weather" fans, SH. The Batley match was played in early February 2018. Here is the first line from the match report from The Centurions website:

"Leigh Centurions opened their account for the season with a six-try victory at a wintry Leigh Sports Village."

Many other matches were called off completely

Leigh's 2017 home game against Cats was played in April, poisson!



The point is that, whilst every club experiences a downturn in turn-up (copyright Bongser) upon relegation there are so many possible variables that it is not right to pin the difference's colours to one mast only.

I understand that but the post I responded to was highlighting Donny's contradicting stats.

Another very painful watch! Going to go down as the worst team in the Club's history at this rate. A small number of decent players but far too many not of the right standard.

Apologies for the thread drift but only courteous to respond ...

I'm good thanks, hope you are too.

The attendances at RL games have for years been affected by the level of club "loyalty" some fans have and the desire for other club fans to watch a higher grade of sport.

It's a free country and if someone wants to buy into a Superleague season with Leigh that's their choice, if they don't want to watch second tier Rugby league that is also their choice. If we ran Leigh it would be a thank you very much to anyone who crossed our palms with silver to enter LSV. If a Leigh fan went missing for a season in the championship and then came back for SL and placed £20 in your hand to watch a game would you really say [i"you can stick it good time Charlie keep your money"[/i

The other nonsense always dredged up is about "away fans" where clubs as businesses are not supposed to count these fans as relevant. I wonder when clubs are going to start banning away fans and maybe neutrals too??

What you missed in the post we are talking about Ste is the posters usual attack on Leigh fans to wind them up.......You will also find this posted on another thread

[u"My opinion is that the current Leigh squad is the worst in SL history"[/u........... when clearly it is not.

So to summarise Leigh get promoted and out comes the [i"rubbish team and rubbish fans"[/i nonsense. The reality is Leigh are a Great club, great owner, great history, great ground, great fans.....

Well go ask Bradford why they are no longer getting 10k+

I've heard some say that when we hit the bad times we all went back to watching Halifax and Huddersfield. Its apparently where most of the fans were poached from. It would explain why our gates dropped at the same time there's swelled back to epic proportions.

I actually think Bradford Bulls did remarkably well for fan attendance given the troubles that besieged the club !

Bradford probably peaked at 15,259 in 2003. Huddersfield crowds at the time didn't show a significant drop but actually a small rise....

Halifax's crowds dropped that year not because their fans went to Bradford, but because after winning the first game when the fans had bought their season tickets , Halifax collapsed and did not win another game and were relegated. If they had charged off to Bradford then Bulls attendances would have gone further up but they went down 2004.

At that time Bulls were pretty red hot at marketing and IIRC they had a season ticket bus and that went all over targetting anyone interested anywhere. It did quite well in Batley and Dewsbury, The Batley chairman complained bitterly. I remember talking to my dentist about Rugby 20 miles away from Bradford. He had come down from Workington and wanted to watch Superleague and Bulls had the attraction.

If anything SL clubs probably attracted championship fans who wanted to watch the Professional game.

You are in a time capsule. You are clearly brainwashed with expansion. You are still looking to blame others for Toronto failing.

Yes,the only club that had fairweather fans! All of them! Would never have worked and the Aces will end up down the same route. Unless they create their own League.

Up the Comics..

Care to offer something constructive and non personal?

TWP only existed as long as £10 Million a year was being pumped in, money Ottawa Aces don't have. They have no money as no owners showed up at their launch.

Fans are fans, and fans were never the point. Again the point was of TWP, for them to stimulate investment, player development and TV deals these are the three things that did not work

Posters are welcome to show that these things did work.....

Don't you ever get bored?

How was a club that was around for three years be expected to achieve these things. Some UK clubs fail to do so after how many decades?

The club doesn't even operate anymore yet you bring them up daily, go take the dog for a walk.

The expectation came from Eric Perez. I have urged you to research just what he promised the game here. It's all on record, but people ignore it if it doesn't suit them.

Once again he promised SL quality North American Players [u"Pretty quickly"[/u through converting grid iron players. His plan was to make those trials and conversions into a [usports TV show to sell to NATV.[/u

He achieved neither, then four years later Brian McDernott was pressed on where the player development was as it hadn't even been set up and he admitted there was none. He was asked about paying TV deals and again he said they had tried and there was no interest.

Mate, I would not raise these things time and again if other posters didn't raise the issue of "expansion" time and again in which they think removing English clubs from SL and replacing them with Canadian and French clubs is somehow "expansion". It's just not is it??

Do you think he doesn't know this already?



You do know TSH is now laughing because he gotcha.

In mitigation I posted the facts in the spirit of the Mods requirements that all the name calling is stopped and that posts should be, and are, civil and polite.

The post from the Gentleman in question whom I responded to, didn't breach those new requirements so I thought it only polite to reply



The reply I gave centred on something a number of people (not just m'learned friend) can't or don't want to understand, and that is that expansion means an expanded pool of professionals thanks to the North American and French clubs bringing their own through, and an expanded Television income thanks to North American and French clubs getting TV deals to share with us in their own countries adding to the one here.

Let's say Wigan were expelled from Superleague for some reason and Red Star Belgrade replaced them and bought up the Wigan team. This in the eyes of many people on TRL and a couple here would be "Expansion" only because the distance to games and back had been expanded, forgetting that losing Wigan as an SL club and them being replaced by a fledgling overseas club may well seriously diminish Superleague.

And that reply wasn't exclusively for our friend, it was to anyone who misunderstands what expansion really is.

A really good example of expansion here was the advent of Cumbrian clubs in the period after the war........

you certainly don't



Care to mention which these clubs are

As for taking the dogs for a walk why not