St. Patrick's Weekend Game - A Record Crowd?

Doing the Sums
By BrianC
February 4 2003

Yes folks, it is that time of year again. The time we start speculating on the size if the St. Patricks weekend crowd. Will we have the biggest ever ZP crowd on 16th March? I've been doing some sums.

The Biggest Ever ZP Crowd?

 

On Sunday 16th of March London Irish take on Harlequins at the Madejski Stadium. St. Patrick's Day is actually the 17th March. Traditionally London Irish have always used the weekend closest to the day itself to party. Make no mistake, this year will be a big one.

The biggest ever ZP crowd was 19,764 who watched Saracens vs Newcastle on the 19th April 1998.

The Craic is running a competition, offering a bottle of champagne as the prize, where we invite you to guess the number of spectators on the day. It is free to enter and open to all, regardless of who you support. The only proviso is that you have to be there on the day to collect your prize.

For the purposes of simplicity some of the following figures have been rounded to the nearest 100.

As always trying to guess the crowd is something of a black art. There are however a few pointers we can look at. At the end of January we have a report from the ticket office that 5,000 tickets have already been sold. Add to this 3,500 season ticket holders - few will miss this day - and those on a corporate hospitality package where the tickets are not sold via the ticket office, say 500. That gives us a minimum of 9,000, the maximum is of course the stadium capacity of 24,200.

To get some further clues we can look at the crowds we have attracted in our previous two St. Patrick's weekends at the Madejski. As we were in different stadiums before then it is not feasible to look back any earlier. These crowds were....

17/3/2001 - London Irish vs Northampton - 12037

16/3/2002 - London Irish vs Bristol - 12873

That growth does not look that spectacular, but if you factor  that Northampton bring a lot of supporters with them (The estimate was between 1.5 and 2k for the 2001 game) whilst Bristol, like ourselves, do not yet have a huge travelling support and brought a maximum of 200 last year. That gives us a growth in our home supporter base for this match of  about 17% from one season to the next.

This year our ZP crowds are significantly up last. We are now averaging 8459 whereas the previous season we averaged just over 7254. In simple terms that again looks like a 17% growth on the 2001/2 season. The complicating factor is that last years average includes the St. Patricks weekend gate. If we were to strip out that day the average gate would be 6692. This means that our gates at this stage in the season are 26% up on the same time last year.

Based on the two growth figures outlined above it is not unreasonable to assume that our 'home' supporters at this game will this year be 20% up on last. Strip out the Bristol figures from last years crowd and we can assume a figure of 12,700 + 20% or 15200.

To this figure we now need to add the travelling Quins support. They tend to travel well, particularly to games in SE England. Last year the attendance at their Madstad game was 6803, I reckon they brought 1.5k with them. Add to this the fact that it is our special weekend, my guess it that they will bring 2k with them. 

This gives us an estimated figure of 17,200 which would be a new  club record and almost certainly the highest ZP crowd of the season but still short of the all time ZP record.

Weather aside, I see one other factor which could have a significant impact on this figure. Our last two St. Patrick's Weekend games have been held on a Saturday. The impact of the switch to Sunday for this year is unknown, things could go either way. This author thinks it may be negative, principally on the grounds that people are less inclined to want to party into the night when they have to work the following morning. 

If the crowd is significantly lower than 17,000, particularly if it falls below 14k, our club will have to look very hard at the Saturday/Sunday issue, particularly in relation to this weekend.

For the Guess the St. Patricks Crowd Competition I have already predicted a figure of 17433. Having now looked at the figures in some detail I don't think that is too far from the mark.