{"id":544575,"date":"2026-03-16T18:40:24","date_gmt":"2026-03-16T18:40:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/544575\/"},"modified":"2026-03-16T18:40:24","modified_gmt":"2026-03-16T18:40:24","slug":"have-your-say-crowds-plunge-so-why-didnt-you-go-to-the-footy-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/544575\/","title":{"rendered":"Have your say: Crowds plunge \u2013 so, why didn\u2019t you go to the footy?"},"content":{"rendered":"

AFL Round 1 crowds dropped by almost 50,000 people within 12 months with final attendance numbers falling well short of league forecasts.<\/p>\n

The total attendance figure for Round 1 came in at 384,544 \u2014 down 46,961 on last year\u2019s Round 1 record crowd total of 431,505. <\/p>\n

Supporter groups voiced their angst at Thursday night\u2019s Carlton v Richmond <\/a>clash and Friday night\u2019s match between Essendon and Hawthorn being made fully ticketed, meaning club members had to pay to upgrade to reserved seats. <\/p>\n

North Melbourne\u2019s barnstorming win over Port Adelaide saw league-owned Marvel Stadium filled to less than half of its capacity. <\/p>\n

League boss Andrew Dillon had said on Saturday that there may have been some fatigue from clubs that had opened the season the week prior, but had said that \u201cthe forecast for (round one) is close to 400,000 which will still have it in the top ten rounds of all time\u201d. <\/p>\n

But he said the issue surrounding fully-ticketed games was \u201cat the front of our mind\u201d. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s something that we\u2019ll look at because the forecasts were slightly above the (actual crowd numbers),\u201d Dillon said on SEN.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe weren\u2019t expecting the same numbers that we had the year before because \u2026 of a number of factors going into it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The AFL Fans\u2019 Association told this masthead on Saturday that it would be querying the league regarding fully-ticketed games and how they were determined. <\/p>\n

Originally published as Footy Fans Survey: Have your say on why AFL crowds were down in Round 1<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AFL Round 1 crowds dropped by almost 50,000 people within 12 months with final attendance numbers falling well…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":544576,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[560],"tags":[638,64,63,55,639,85],"class_list":["post-544575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-afl","tag-afl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-australian-football-league","tag-australianfootballleague","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544575","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=544575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544575\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/544576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=544575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=544575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=544575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}