A lower than expected crowd figure at Friday night’s AFL preliminary final has underlined the challenges the league face in western Sydney.
Sydney’s most important home match of the year was tipped to be a chance of breaking the AFL’s record attendance for a game outside Melbourne.
However the 72,393 that attended Sydney’s clash with Collingwood in 2003 remains the benchmark – and comfortably.
The attendance figure for the Swans’ 26-point win was just 57,156, despite the league reporting on Thursday night that 57,000 tickets had been sold to the at ANZ Stadium clash.
It means the cross-code contest to draw a larger crowd at the venue in the weekend’s finals fixtures will almost certainly be won by rugby league.
Canterbury and South Sydney meet in Saturday night’s NRL preliminary final, and AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou admitted at Friday’s pre-match function that it’s likely to out-draw Sydney’s clash with Collingwood.
“There’s been a lot of discussion about whether we will get a bigger crowd than the NRL final here tomorrow night,” Demetriou said.
“Given that we’re going first, I think the NRL might get a few more.”
The weekend’s combined attendance is set to comfortably outdo the most recent time the ground hosted back-to-back preliminary finals, making it the venue’s biggest weekend of sport since the 2000 Olympics.
In 2006 over 60,000 fans went to the Swans-Fremantle AFL clash and a little over 40,000 attended St George Illawarra’s NRL match against Melbourne.