{"id":320909,"date":"2025-12-01T16:47:30","date_gmt":"2025-12-01T16:47:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/320909\/"},"modified":"2025-12-01T16:47:30","modified_gmt":"2025-12-01T16:47:30","slug":"adelaide-crowd-bigger-than-afl-nrl-grand-finals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/320909\/","title":{"rendered":"Adelaide crowd ‘bigger than AFL, NRL Grand Finals’"},"content":{"rendered":"

ADELAIDE Grand Final organisers claim to have the premier \u2018grand final\u2019 of all of Australia\u2019s sporting codes off its best-attended Supercars round in a decade.<\/p>\n

A total of 285,700 fans came through the gates across the event\u2019s four days, the biggest crowd since the 2015 event and third overall behind 2008 and 2013.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a sharp uptick from last year\u2019s crowd of 259,400 in the final year of the traditional Adelaide 500 format.<\/p>\n

This year\u2019s event was the first under Supercars\u2019 new Finals format, which virtually guaranteed that the 2025 champion would be crowned on the Sunday of the event.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

It was a day that featured the announcement and signing on the grid of a new deal between Supercars and the South Australian state government to hold the Adelaide Grand Final until 2034<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Sunday drew a crowd of 102,000 on its own to see Chaz Mostert<\/a> crowned as champion, and concluding in the Adelaide stop of legendary rock band AC\/DC\u2019s world concert tour.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat is the largest attendance for any sporting event in Australia this year,\u201d Mark Warren, chief executive of the South Australian Motorsport Board, said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s bigger than the AFL Grand Final, it\u2019s bigger than the NRL Grand Final.\u201d<\/p>\n

For context, this year\u2019s AFL Grand Final sported an attendance of 100,022 at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, and the NRL Grand Final 80,223 at Stadium Australia.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we set out to set the benchmark for Grand Finals in a sporting context, we could never have imagined that we were going to achieve such high benchmarks,\u201d Warren added.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow we\u2019ve set the standard, not just nationally but globally for world motorsport, and we\u2019re looking forward to continuing that to 2034.\u201d<\/p>\n

The free-to-air television numbers on the Seven Network backed up the rise in crowd figures, posting the highest final-round ratings since 2021 when the season closed with a COVID-rescheduled Bathurst 1000.<\/p>\n

Seven reported that its Adelaide weekend coverage reached a total of 2.37 million viewers, up 31 percent on last year\u2019s finale.<\/p>\n

That included a national reach of 1.28 million and a national audience of 498,000, up 17 percent on 2024.<\/p>\n

It capped a year where Seven\u2019s FTA viewership was up at all its major events, headlined by 5.78 million viewers across the Bathurst 1000 weekend.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis year\u2019s Bathurst 1000 was the biggest viewing audience on Seven since 2016 and the momentum has continued through the exciting new Finals format, with huge numbers watching the Gold Coast 500 and the season\u2019s Grand Final in Adelaide,\u201d Angela Rampal, Seven\u2019s head of motorsport, said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is exciting to see Supercars get recognition as the premier motorsport category in the country and there was no better way to have the Championship decided than in the very last race of the year, this weekend past.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Speedway action at the 2024 Adelaide 500. Pic: Ross Gibb<\/p>\n

The Adelaide event had regularly opened the Supercars season in its original run from 1999 to 2020.<\/p>\n

The latter year featured an attendance of just 206,350, a figure that prompted the state government of the era to cancel the event.<\/p>\n

Resurrected in 2022 off the back of an election promise by now-South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas, the event shifted to the final round of the Supercars calendar.<\/p>\n

Along with the Supercars and support-category race action on track, the event has featured a carnival-like array of sideshows and entertainment.<\/p>\n

Last year featured a temporary Speedway oval and sprintcar racing during the evenings, a popular innovation that returned this year.<\/p>\n

This year\u2019s grand final also featured demonstrations by the Red Bull Formula 1 team, and not just on-track \u2013 during Friday\u2019s rained-out session, they used one of the cars to play a rendition of The White Stripes\u2019 Seven Nation Army with its engine.<\/p>\n

But the big music acts were saved for the two concert stages, with Saturday\u2019s show headlined by Lenny Kravitz and Sunday\u2019s by AC\/DC.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a format that began during Adelaide\u2019s F1 grand prix era and will continue in the event\u2019s new grand final phase.<\/p>\n

\u201cHaving rock acts like AC\/DC, that\u2019s all part of having a having a grand final and the grand final experience,\u201d Warren added.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll certainly look to continue with having epic rock acts and other bands here to really cap off what is a fantastic event experience.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll be out there looking for something that achieves that same benchmark. A challenge, no doubt.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve got to make sure it all lines up with world tours but keep an eye on what\u2019s coming and they might be right here in Adelaide.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ADELAIDE Grand Final organisers claim to have the premier \u2018grand final\u2019 of all of Australia\u2019s sporting codes off…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":320910,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[560],"tags":[638,64,63,55,639,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-320909","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-afl","8":"tag-afl","9":"tag-au","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-australian-football-league","12":"tag-australianfootballleague","13":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=320909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320909\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/320910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=320909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=320909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=320909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}