UK Championship Attendances : 2016-18

The regular season has concluded and an exciting competition was enjoyed. The attendances were up on 2016 but down on 2017. The changing of teams involved each year has an impact on the averages so in reality it's hard to read too much into the total figures.

What we can see is the Summer Bash festival wasn't that successful this year, in terms of attendees. Also, because Toronto played its first two games away from its Lamport home ground and forfeited a third home match to compete in the SL Magic Weekend meant its average wasn't as high as it would otherwise had been. Let's look at individual clubs over the past two seasons (2016 vs 2018) to see how their attendance numbers have fared.

Pluses: London (+15.4%) Sheffield (+13.1) Toulouse (+13.1, one season comparison) Featherstone (+11.8) Average (+11.5) Swinton (+1.3).

Minuses: Leigh (-0.2%, middle season in SL) Batley (-1.6) Halifax (-11.8) Dewsbury (-15.2) Summer Bash (-25.8) Rochdale (-37.5, one season comparison).

Toronto and Barrow weren't eligible to be gauged.

CHAMPIONSHIP – Regular season only
	2018		2017		2016
1	Toronto	5,781	Hull KR	7,351	Bradford	4,621
2	Leigh	3,539	Bradford	4,119	Leigh	3,545
3	Toulouse	2,437	Featherstone	2,457	Featherstone	2,071
4	Featherstone	2,316	Toulouse	2,154	Halifax	1,986
5	Halifax	1,752	Halifax	1,695	Dewsbury	1,181
6	Barrow	1,239	Batley	1,150	Batley	1,100
7	Batley	1,082	Dewsbury	1,089	Oldham	877
8	Dewsbury	1,001	Rochdale	878	Swinton	829
9	London	861	Oldham	815	London	746
10	Swinton	840	London	804	Workington	704
11	Sheffield	704	Swinton	791	Whitehaven	702
12	Rochdale	549	Sheffield	626	Sheffield	623
	Summer B	11,805	Summer B	16,444	Summer B	15,912
	Total	249,125	Total	279,664	Total	225,100
	Avg	1,805	Avg	2,012	Avg	1,619

Summary: Hull KR's presence was huge in 2017, not only home games but travelling supporters too. Bradford too was missed in 2018 and those teams not being there took the average down. Toronto doesn't provide travelling fans despite it's strong home support, which is another factor to consider. Teams from offshore will never bring fans along but that is a small price to pay for expanding the game.

With those points taken into consideration, it was a reasonably supported competition. Many of the clubs are in smaller population centres, so will never have huge numbers turning up. Some in larger cities are clearly flying beneath the radar. Could they do more to enrich the game day experience and attract better crowds? Of course and that is something that they should be taking on board.