This post is simply a beginning attempt to draw out from crowd data how big each club’s active fanbase is.

The idea is to eliminate games where it isn’t a home team from one city state and an away team from another state. The reasoning for this is obvious - Collingwood get big crowds, but they’re helped by the ease with which many of their opponents’s fans can get to games. By contrast, Sydney or Port Adelaide can’t rely on the proximity of their opponents’ fanbases to get attendances most of the time.

Here, then, is a chart isolating just games played at a genuine home ground (ie, not in Launceston or Wellington) against teams from elsewhere in the country:

(larger image)

Home city games

Collingwood still show up as having the biggest home crowd pull at the MCG, but once we remove blockbuster derbies against Essendon, Carlton, etc, the gap shrinks. Adelaide trump other Victorian powerhouses when it comes to crowd pull, and this measure also makes it apparent that the home fanbases of the Crows plus West Coast, Essendon, Hawthorn, Carlton and Fremantle are all pretty close. It’s worth remembering that West Coast and Essendon, and to a lesser extent Fremantle and Carlton, face capacity issues from their home grounds.

Geelong, likewise, show as a low drawcard but their games at Kardinia Park are constantly sold out.

Down the other end of the spectrum, we can see St Kilda maintaining a sort of “largest minnow” status that may owe more to recent success than an actual larger fanbase. Melbourne and the Bulldogs have outdrawn North Melbourne in Victoria when the opponents aren’t from down the road. All three clubs have been victims of unfavourable scheduling so this probably doesn’t split them. What’s interesting is that the Demons, strugglers through this entire period, still get larger crowds than North and the Dogs, perhaps showing a larger fanbase or perhaps a stadium effect between Etihad and the MCG.

Away games

Interstate away crowds should tell us something about the drawing power of clubs in the rest of the country, indicating something about how much national appeal a team has.

Collingwood and Hawthorn appear to have the biggest non-Victorian drawing power, followed by Carlton, Essendon and Geelong within 2,000 per game. Collingwood’s claim to be the most popular team nationally may not be supported by facts - both the other two traditional Victorian powerhouses and the two current strongest Victorian teams are very close to them in crowd pull outside Victoria.

North Melbourne seems to draw about the same crowds outside Melbourne as Melbourne and the Bulldogs. There are two possibilities here. One is that none of those clubs draw any fans outside of Melbourne. More likely, all three clubs are drawing a similar limited number locally and via travel.

If the latter is the case, the comparison with lower Victorian crowds suggests North’s support base is more nationally-distributed than Melbourne or the Bulldogs. This makes some intuitive sense. First, North are known to have an outsized Western Australian support base due to old WAFL transfers. They also had sustained success during the 1990s, the first period of nationally-televised national competition, with high profile players such as Wayne Carey. They’ve probably attracted kids from other cities as converts in the 1990s who are now fans, moreso than Melbourne and the Dogs have done. Finally, perhaps their flirtations with Canberra, Sydney and Gold Coast relocations have left them some lingering support.

Finally, let’s talk about Sydney and Brisbane:

Sydney and Brisbane are of course supported heavily in Victoria as this chart shows. They’ve got the highest Victorian crowds of any interstate team, they have thousands of Melbourne members, and they have the most AFL members of any interstate club.

This is obviously mostly due to old South Melbourne and Fitzroy support, but is probably also partly a sign of Sydney and Brisbane transplants to Melbourne adopting their home city’s team when they didn’t previously have one.

However, we can also see a “clubs don’t play away games in their own city” effect in operation outside of Victoria. Sydney and Brisbane show as getting bigger away crowds in non-Victorian Australia but this reads as an artefact of what cities are being counted:

Adelaide and Perth teams only play away games in the other city, whereas Sydney and Brisbane play in both cities against those high-drawing teams (GWS and Gold Coast are also getting a boost from proportionately more trips west).

Similarly, Sydney and Brisbane (and GWS and Gold Coast)only play one low-drawing expansion side as a non-derby game.

These two factors make the “away drawing power” measure outside Victoria for Sydney and Brisbane a little meaningless if compared to Adelaide or Perth teams.

-S