The question is often asked – Who is the best supported NRL Team? Arguments ensue, and poorly prepared and highly questionable reasoning and statistics are produced to argue the point for one team over another.
The Gurgler can certainly be known for poorly prepared and highly questionable reasoning and statistics, and as such we try to answer Who is the best supported NRL Team ourselves.
We actually did this last year, to mild interest of a dozen or so readers in 2015, and it is all new and slightly improved for 2016.
Who won last year? You’ll have to click on the above link. A cheap way of bumping up the stats we know. Who is the best supported NRL Team in 2016 according to us? Keeping reading.
Some points to note before we head into the statistics.
Where possible we tried to include a geographically corrected stat for some crowd figures. It’s only fair. Brisbane has 2 million or so to attend games, Canberra, Newcastle, Auckland much fewer. Although Sydney is much larger, it has 9 teams to share the love around. So Sydney teams corrected scores are using the total population of Sydney divided by nine.
Social media is included as a way of clubs to interact with their fans, and fans to do so in return. Some of better at it than others. But we are going for quantity over quality.
We toyed with the idea of punishing teams for having more than three jerseys for the season, as a blatant disregard for fans if they feel they need to buy one more jersey than they should.
The highest cost of a jersey on Ebay was a way to test the street value (and money) of the specific clubs.
All teams were ranked 1 – 16, with 16 points given to the best performed team and 1 for the worst. The winner has the biggest total at the end.
Onto the results then. You can argue, we don’t blame you. But the results isn’t quite as surprising as we’d like to sizzle.
MEMBERSHIP DETAILS
Probably should have been won by Souths based on pure membership figures, but reduced when comparing how many of the members actually turn up. 5 clubs had averages above their membership numbers.
CROWD NUMBERS
Hard to analyse everything here. That’s your job. But here are a few points of interest.
Newcastle are the big surprise here. Smashed the average crowd per competition point showing their fans resilience to one of the worst NRL seasons in a decade.
Broncos unsurprisingly had the highest average, but it did drop when corrected geopgraphically. Melbourne were smashed in the same comparision.
Monday Night rankings were included to reward those who are punished with more games than others.
Also new is the % Full statistic
Roosters were the worst performed in this category
EBAY JERSEYS
The only win for the Bulldogs with a whopping of $4,500 for one jersey on Ebay.
SOCIAL MEDIA RESULTS
NZ Warriors are the kings of the Social Media, with a tie for second between Melbourne, Broncos and Souths. Canberra are by far the worst comparatively.
OVERALL RESULTS
And the winner of Who is the best supported NRL Team is……
BRISBANE BRONCOS
And by half a point over the Cowboys, proving the match up off the field is as tight as the one on the field.
Channel Nein favourites Bulldogs, last year’s winner Souths and Parramatta round out the top five.
Sydney clubs make up five of the final seven showing how hard the market is in Sydney. All good for Channel Nein and their Sunday rotation too. Doing it for the fans.
Check out the specific results per category….
I was saying Boo-urns.
[…] have previously answered the question of who was the Best Supported NRL Team in 2016, and 2015, with last year’s version going to the Roar website, where one comment generously […]