The 2023 NRL season is well and truly over, and for a third straight year Penrith Panthers were the winners of the NRL premiership, but they didn’t win everything….according to our stats, they weren’t the 2023 Best Supported NRL Team.
The question of who is the best supported rugby league team was raised in the UK with a ratings system for the Super League clubs. So we thought, good enough for them, good enough for us.
Our analysis takes in Social Media Followers, Memberships and Crowd Numbers. But not just biggest, we compare them to the population and % capacity. We get the figures then rank all teams 1 to 17 then give out points 17 to 1 based on that rank. Most points overall is best supported.
This 2023 Best Supported NRL Team feature doesn’t just give a number or rank for best support and leave it there, included are some interesting points around the 2023 NRL season. And note, that three teams were disadvantaged by not having Membership stats we could find – Penrith, Parramatta and Warriors, which would have bumped them all up the ladder.
For now, read on and discover the………
2023 Best Supported NRL Team Analysis
Like the 2032 Olympics, the winner is Brisbane. Broncos that is.
Here is the result for the 2023 Best Supported NRL Team, and it probably isn’t a surprise given they have had an entire capital city to themselves for decades. Teams that have little geographic competition are high on the list, but South Sydney buck the trend with their second placed finish. So perhaps that person in a Souths jersey everywhere in Australia is genuine.
The result is a culmination of all various categories we were able to find data, and a more detailed look into those stats is below. But note, Penrith, Warriors and Parramatta are a little ripped of due to no 2023 Membership stats.
2023 Best Supported NRL Team Result
A full explanation of the 2023 Best Supported Team result is below.
2023 NRL Crowd Numbers
Here are the key crowd numbers for the 2023 season in team order.
Note: the teams with an asterisk were home teams at Magic Round, where the crowd figure was excluded.
Highest Crowd Points below is based on the top 50 NRL crowds for the 2023 NRL season. We awarded two points to the home side and one point to the away side for all of those top 50 games.
So the Brisbane clubs have great average crowds, but are they filling it like they should?
We answer that question below with the average crowd divided by the crowd capacity.
Note: where teams share mainly between two grounds we have an average of the two grounds.
Finally, it is easy for Brisbane to win average crowds due to the size of the city and potential audience. So we have taken the crowd average and divided it by a calculation of the population.
For Sydney we took the overall Sydney population and divided it by the none for the number of teams based in Sydney. For Brisbane we divided by two.
Source – NRL Wikipedia 2023
2023 NRL Memberships
The least complete data field was Memberships with three teams missing, but there are still points of interest.
Like the Membership numbers themselves and the growth of members from 2022 to 2023.
The teams that had a negative growth had competition for attention like AFL in Melbourne and crime on the Gold Coast (if you believe the news). Plus the two merger clubs that finished bottom two had a negative growth. Which is no surprise.
Source – 2023 NRL Membership Tracker » League Unlimited
2023 NRL Social Media Stats
Social Media plays a bit part of an NRL Team’s way of communicating with their fans, so no Best Supported analysis could leave it out.
We have borrowed the stats from this source – footyindustry.com/html/NRL social media 2023.htm
2023 NRL Top NRL Crowds
Excludes finals
