gingerjon

It may have changed but back in the day when you could more easily see BARB numbers, the games were getting 30,000 ish viewers a time. No idea on the rights fee.

The 50,000 for this one is a bit of a blip. It's been 75k for the past few years. Week in week out WSL attendances are poor (some A League W games are higher) but the games at the Emirates etc pull in decent gates when played. Rangers played Celtic in the Scottish Women's Cup final yesterday. There were just over 10,000 there. They meet in the league and it's several hundred people.

Probably the same as the one for the festival of World Cups they were holding.

It didn't help this year that it was an FA Cup final that was very hard to love between two teams who enjoy very little neutral support or interest. Also interestingly, much of the comment I've seen on the Women's FA Cup has focused not on the crowd but on the pitch: some complaints that 'rugby markings' were clearly visible.

For population surveys, this is the model. For projects/organisations funded by Sport England there are other things, including direct reporting from NGBs and whoever is delivering the specific work back to Sport England, which may or may not then be independently audited. But those different sets (as far as I know) never merge.

Very sad news. RIP.

It was on Kayo Sports, apparently

There’s not a lot come back on a search but I liked this https://vm.tiktok.com/ZNR7ed7uJ/

The Women’s FA Cup today is an odd one. They seemed to accept early it was not going to sell big. I believe they have put prices up as well so long gone are the days of whole families getting in for under £20.

I have gone for the ultra conservative option of keeping things as they are. This isn't because I think things are perfect but because I think we are so far from doing our best with what we have that any changes we make will be being done without any understanding of whether they will improve things. As I said before, I think the earlier rounds now work well and the first batch of SL entry games are something for Championship clubs to aspire to hosting. The dead rounds between then and the final - we just have to accept, for now, that these are not going to sell the Cup well. But if we stop fiddling elsewhere we can come back to these. Wembley is not a great venue but it is 'Wembley' and therefore a fitting destination for the Challenge Cup. We just (just doing some heavy lifting) need to put more into the event nature of the day and really go for it with finding smart ways to engage lapsed and new audiences away from the heartlands. I actually think that is easier done if we always know that final will be on X weekend at X ground. All of this only applies to the men's Challenge Cup. I get that the optics of moving the women away from Wembley are terrible but so is the set-up with their final as an early starting curtain raiser. Women's RL needs proper investment in standalone events so let's make the Cup final one of those. There are plenty of exciting grounds it could go to as it builds to standing on its own two feet. But what it really needs, beyond that, is more clubs taking their women's development as seriously as Wigan are now taking theirs.

Aye, that's fair.

Douglas isn't the only forum member to have an attack of the vapours at the thought of dark, Satanic London. And there will be a chunk of the RL audience who buy into it being a dangerous city that no sane person should visit. Is it enough to affect the attendance? It wouldn't surprise me if it loses us some folk - but that's part of the reason why I think we should be working smarter to get those from the local market in.

For a modern stadium, the whole TV set-up is pretty poor TBH. There is no excuse for being built in a way that guarantees such awful contrast for daytime games - and, you're right, the main angle for broadcast coverage isn't great.

I said on the match thread that I thought this. It hasn't always been the case that is has but it did sound decent on the TV (to me at least).

Yeah. Guessed.