This attendance figure is a disgrace, especially for a so-called heartland club. No excuse that the visitors were the lily-livered Wakefield Trinity Wildcats, from the dust bowl of west Yorkshire.

Even with a big tycoon billionaire racehorse owner as club owner, the Salford club cannot attract fans from the greater Manchester connurbation.

How much longer will the big hearted and deep pocketed Mr. Marwan Koukash put up with this, before he turns his attention more wholeheartedly to the NRL?

How much longer should the RFL put up with this?

More people at Batley this afternoon

Never mind the announced figure of 2,223, there were FAR more than that there. I was there, and there were more Bulls fans there today than there were people at Salford

Yep Bradford fans are enjoying themselves down here in the pit of eternal damnation

It shouldn’t be allowed Jean, the RFL should throw Salford out of the competition at the end of the season & fast track Toulouse straight in.

The flamboyant Dr must be scratching his head as to why the crowds aren’t flocking to see the S.L Galacticos ripping up the league.

At least he can look forwards to a bumper pay day when the Catalan hordes head into town

.

Wakefield always have a decent away following also but that crowd is pathetic after the doc said there were no excuses not to attend

That is an interesting idea. You should present this proposal to Big Nigel.

He would probably go for it, as long as it was accompanied with a tin of Quality Streets.

Salford have never had a Massive hardcore support, you look at the league positions over the last few years. Then wen they get a half decent attendance, they get a hammering!

They have the potential to be getting 7k plus, they need to start having some success on the field and the crowds will come.

I suspect Jean is a little sexually frustrated since Lama Tasi broke Carney's ribs last week. He's been forced to stroke one garlic-infused ejaculate out over brochures advertising Toulouse, instead of everyone's fave tattooed pish drinker.

The mighty Trinity took a very respectable following to the game today, there were certainly more travelling Wakefield fans than there is when the Catalan cart horses plod anywhere other than the South of France

Salford are a dying club. They had a soul once at their old ground, but it was degraded by decade and decade of being terrible. The move to the new ground was supposed to be a new era, a rebirth of the club. The fans simply haven't allowed it to be a success. They are down to the bare bones of their support now and Marwan's calculations of his losses are ridiculously short of the mark. He'll lose millions a season and it's now solely on him to keep the club going. The most likely outcome is a continual struggle followed by either relegated and a London-esque existence where the owner still keeps the club technically alive on life support, or Marwan will pull out and they will disappear altogether. It's a difficult one, the location of the new ground isn't ideal, it's isn't close enough to the old ground and the team isn't worth supporting currently, so I don't blame the fans for not turning up.

Marwan should have played the longer game. Invested his money in the academy, got hundreds of kids signed up at youth levels and start bringing the premier NW talent through at Salford. In the meantime while he built from the bottom up he should have been giving away 5,000 tickets per home game and investing in getting the ground full enough to generate an atmosphere, even if no one was actually paying.

The RFL meanwhile seriously needs to start thinking about a plan b. Toulouse, a RFL backed Bradford, or take a punt on Leigh.

Koukash to Leigh? Did the rounds about 2/3 weeks ago, would make sense if he wants a real crack at RL

Any road good win for Salford, in the top 8 now i believe

I think the attendances Salford get are ridiculous considering they are the closest super league team to the city of Manchester which has a population of approx. 550,000 let alone the greater Manchester region which has more like 1.5million people. This is an enormous market that Koukash has failed to tap into.
If anyone wants a good stat, the attendances of 3,000 or so is 0.2% of the population of greater Manchester.

Rumour has it that an ever hopeful Jean bought himself a nurses outfit and travelled to Carney's house offering to give him sponge baths whilst he's recovering.

well done Salford..great crowd.

Congratulations on taking more fans to a match 40 miles away than a club based over 1,000 miles away in a different country

Would that be a bubble bath?

It must be really frustrating for the hard core Salford fans, after years of mediocrity they get a shiny new ground followed by a Sugar Daddy.

O.K, the quick fix mentality isn’t the way to build a successful club, but it’s more appealing than what had gone before.

Surely Koukash realises this isn’t football, due to the S.C & it will take an age to emulate the top clubs.

No matter what the optimists try to peddle, attendance are declining, & not just at Salford, licencing, a slight chance of promotion, blah, blah, & yet there’s a full house at Twickenham to watch that pile of poo.

R.L has been shoved to the margins & I cannot see a way to stop its terminal decline.

The day R.U became a professional sport, was a hammer blow to our game imo.

Nothing to worry about.

The press says Dr K is worth $3bn. No one has denied this or provided alternative estimates. If Dr K gets 5% growth a year that is $150,000,000. A few million a year in losses is peanuts.

He has plenty of money to cut prices / market extensively / bus people in.

A man worth more than the owners of SL / championship / national one put together will hardly notice a few seasons of small gates.

I'm sure he will. Perhaps not financially but I'm sure he will. It's hard to escape the conclusion that it's a none runner if someone with that alleged level of finance and influence can't make a difference.

It's too simplistic to say "big city should equal big crowds". The same criticism gets leveled at Leeds on occasion, and regularly got leveled at London. The problem is that with big city markets come big city challenges.

Manchester has a massively competitive leisure market, all fighting for a share of that finite resource known as disposable income. You only have to look across the Barton Bridge to see what sort of competition Salford has to get people to part with their £20. Go further into the city and you have a thriving city centre and the small matter of 70,000 people at Old Trafford on the same day.

You have to consider how that 500,000 population is made up as well. In big cities, populations are much more transient than in the outlying towns. There are more students for starters, and more people move from elsewhere in the country to big cities than they do to outlying towns. Take a look at the population of, for instance, Widnes or Castleford, and I'd wager that the proportion of people living in those districts who were born there would be significantly higher than in Manchester, Leeds or London. In short, a larger proportion of the people living in Manchester / Salford have much less affinity to Manchester / Salford itself.

That's not excusing Salford or giving them a free pass. There are clearly a lot of things they are doing badly when it comes to marketing the club and there are some major 'customer friendliness' issues with the stadium (Sale Sharks have made similar complaints), but to point to that mass of tall buildings in the distance and say "they should be getting 10/15/20k" is massively simplistic.

If Leigh had of had a similar success to Salford in recent seasons, they too would be averaging a similar crowd. Just because crowds are up at the moment, after a good few seasons of positive results and sweeping aside any opposition that laid in wake, we’ve seen before how fickle the Leigh public are to a losing Super League team.

Salford need to get things right on the pitch first. Since Koukash taken over Salford, we haven’t beaten one of the “big four” in Saints, Leeds, Wigan and Warrington – has anyone other club in Super League in the last 2 seasons not achieved this? Everytime we build ourselves up, get a good crowd in we let ourselves down on the pitch with a hammering.

The corresponding fixture last season attracted 7,200 so the interest is there. We just need to give them a reason to keep coming back.

If anything Salford are a great example that a new stadium shouldn't be built at any cost. It needs to be the right stadium in terms of size, location, transport etc. Let's say I'm your average member of the public, I've never been to a rugby league game before. I live somewhere near the centre of Salford and saw them on the Super League show (I'm also an insomniac) or live in the Challenge Cup on the Beeb one weekend. I quite fancy going along to that. How do I get there? No parking? I'll take the bus. What do you mean it takes 40 minutes from the centre of Salford? I'll give it a miss.

No, two tins.

Koukash to Bradford would make most sense. I think he maybe realised that, somewhat belatedly, when he tried to get his lass accepted as a buyer.