Super Rugby crowds are in decline in South Africa and Australia, but what about New Zealand?

If New Zealand Rugby was a person, they would be lamenting the annoying parasites clinging to their back.

Super Rugby crowds are in ill health. The number of people wanting to watch live sport is waning, and the competition as a whole is losing valued numbers through the gates.

But there is a split between New Zealand and our Sanzaar brothers, Australia and South Africa. Kiwi crowds are on the improve, while our bigger siblings cling on for dear life.

Crowd figures from 2017 highlight the difference between perception and reality when it comes to attendances for Super Rugby sides over the past four years.

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Just look at the number of empty seats at the games here in New Zealand. You'd be lucky to see a stadium even half full.

This is when reality comes to bite.

The perception of poor crowd sizes can be put down to stadium size and the poor health of New Zealand's parasitic siblings, rather than the actual size of crowds in Aotearoa.

In 2017, New Zealand crowds had increased by 7.27 per cent since 2015, as the Hurricanes, Blues, Chiefs and Crusaders had a larger average attendance than they did two years previous.

The Hurricanes were attracting an average of 16,901 people to Westpac Stadium each week, more than 3000 more than in 2015. Blues crowds were up 18.27 per cent, an extra 2000 people each night. The Chiefs and Crusaders had small gains, but gains they had.

Only the Highlanders saw crowds decline in that period, down from an average of 18,500 in 2015 to 14,751 in 2017 - a drop of 20.26 per cent.

By comparison, South Africa lost almost a quarter of their crowds, and Australian audiences shrunk by nearly 20 per cent.

The Bulls' average crowd of 2017 was just a third of what it was in 2015, dropping from 26,492 to just 9347 in that period.

In total, only four teams in Super Rugby increased their average attendance over that three year period, and all four were New Zealand teams.

So, what leads us to thinking that New Zealand Rugby's live match experience is in sharp decline?

SUPER RUGBY'S DECLINE

GETTY IMAGES A large crowd turn out to watch the Crusaders and Highlanders clash.

To start, Super Rugby's average attendance as a whole is in sharp decline.

In 2015, the average crowd size across the competition was 19,163, making it easily the world's biggest rugby competition by average attendance.

Last year, that overall average had dropped to just 14,436, a 24.67 per cent drop in attendance in just two years, and brings Super Rugby back to the chasing pack.

Super Rugby remains the rugby competition with the highest average attendance, based on 2017 figures. It averaged about 300 people a game more than the Aviva Premiership in England, and 900 more than the Top 14 in France.

But those big European leagues are holding steady with their attendance figures. In England, average attendance increased four per cent from 2015 to 2017, while the Top 14 declined by 5.59 per cent. The Pro14, which includes Italy, Ireland, and now a pair of South African teams, had an increase of one per cent.

Surprisingly, the team with the highest average attendance in world rugby is the Stormers, who had 28,700 through the gates on average last year.

Bordeaux were second with 23,880, followed by the Lions with 23,606.

The Hurricanes ranked 12th with an average crowd of 16,901, while the Highlanders (14,751), Crusaders (14,448), Chiefs (13,527) and Blues (13,128) were 19th, 20th, 23rd and 25th respectively.

Seven of the top 10 were European sides, with average attendances over 17,000 each week.

Rugby is in good health in the northern hemisphere. Their competition might not have the same excitement and talent as Super Rugby, in New Zealand at least, but crowds are excited nonetheless.

PURPOSE BUILT STADIUMS

What's more, the north has stadiums that are purpose-built for rugby and suit the level of competition, and at the level at which they are playing.

This, again, plays into the idea of perception versus reality.

Watch an average game of European rugby, and the size of the crowd is always impressive. It's the lack of empty seats which is easy to see, compared to a game in the southern hemisphere.

In England, stadiums average 75.75 per cent capacity. In France, that number is 73.5 per cent, and in the Pro14 it's 62.17 per cent.

Super Rugby in 2017 had an average capacity of just 38.2 per cent for games. More than 60 per cent of a stadium was empty, and there is only so much creative camera angles can do to make that appear full.

If you take stadium capacity into account when calculating the attendance figures, it paints a different picture of which clubs are succeeding in rugby.

La Rochelle, for instance, boast an average crowd of 14,891, which is the 18th highest on average in world rugby.

But with those figures, their home stadium of Stade Marcel-Deflandre is 93 per cent full for every game. Just over 1000 seats are spare, and they'd be hard to spot.

Glasgow Warriors are the closest to capacity week in, week out, with their Scotstoun Stadium 98 per cent full on average.

But with a capacity of 7,351, that includes temporary additional seating, their average crowd figure of just 7,186 puts them 50th of the teams in the top four rugby leagues.

This is where New Zealand's stadiums look terrible during a Super Rugby encounter, as despite the impressive crowd sizes on a global scale, the stadiums are near empty.

In Christchurch, the Crusaders can boast an average attendance of 77.68 per cent in 2017, which is the highest in all Super Rugby.

The next best was the Stormers, with their massive average crowd of 28,700 taking up just 55.3 per cent of Newlands Stadium in Cape Town.

The Chiefs, at 52.03 per cent full on average, were the only other Super Rugby side with a crowd size above half of their capacity.

Westpac Stadium was 48.99 per cent full, Forsyth Barr was 47.97 per cent full and Eden Park was just 26.26 per cent full during your average week of the 2017 Super Rugby season.

To think, most of those numbers are improvements from 2015.

At that level, the Blues have the fourth-emptiest stadium of teams in the top four leagues, as Super Rugby sides take up the bottom nine spots.

The Bulls and Jaguares couldn't fill 20 per cent of their stadiums, while the Kings were 20.49 per cent full in 2017.

USING THE POPULATION

GETTY IMAGES The Zoo always turns out for Highlanders games.

The final thread to the crowd size debate is that of the surrounding region.

Europe has a total population of 741 million people. You don't have to convince a high percentage of the population to attend your game in order to get a good crowd.

But not all regions can boast a large population base to help them attract fans, in Europe or not.

By breaking down the population of the urban area around a club team, it shows just how impressive, or not, their crowd numbers might be.

Take Pau, the club Conrad Smith and Colin Slade recently played for, based in the Pyrenees.

The surrounding population is just 100,000, and yet the club have an average attendance of 11,146 to each game.

Essentially, more than 10 per cent of the local population is turning out to each Pau home game.

With a stadium seating 18,000, you could say Pau struggle to fill their Stade du Hameau home, but when you consider the surrounding population those figures are mighty impressive.

Only four rugby teams attract around 10 per cent of the surrounding population to home games, with Brive, Bath and Gloucester also above that mark.

Bath have hit the jackpot, in that they have such a big supporter base that they often have to take game away from their home ground, with a capacity of 14,500, in order to fill bigger stadiums.

Despite that, they reached 96 per cent capacity in 2017, with an average of 18,490 fans per game.

The Highlanders are the top side in Super Rugby when it comes to attracting the local population to games.

If you take Dunedin alone, the Highlanders attract 11.73 per cent of the population to each home match.

Taking into account the rest of Otago as well, they still attract 6.58 per cent of the regional population, which is almost double that of their nearest Super Rugby rivals, the Hurricanes.

The Hurricanes get 3.35 per cent of the Wellington regional population along on match day, while the Chiefs (2.94 per cent) and Crusaders (2.68 per cent) aren't far off.

All four clubs are in the top 20 in world rugby for attracting people to their games, with the Brumbies (2.45 per cent) the only other side to make that list.

For the Blues, less than one per cent of Aucklanders turn up to matches, good enough for 33rd, which dwarfs some clubs at the bottom of the list.

Take the Sunwolves, for instance, who get 0.03 per cent of the massive Tokyo population to home games. They have an average crowd of 11,646, and a population in the Tokyo metropolitan area of 38 million.

WHERE TO FROM HERE?

For New Zealand, the results are strong without being outstanding.

The big dogs at New Zealand Rugby are unlikely to be happy with stadiums that are half full and lacking in atmosphere, but they'll be smart enough to realise that things aren't exactly bad.

What is of concern, however, is the performance of the Australian and South African franchises, that are bleeding fans.

Motivating their audience to return and watch games live won't be an overnight thing, and may be a consequence of New Zealand's success.

Part of the excitement of watching sport is not knowing what will happen, but over the past few years it has been increasingly obvious that this competition is a battle between the Lions and the New Zealand franchises.

Where's the excitement in that?

It's not that it isn't worth watching, because the quality of rugby has never been higher. It's the motivation to watch in person has gone.

Television viewership figures for Super Rugby in 2017 are impressive.

At the end of the regular season, New Zealand's cumulative viewing figures hit 10,352,800. South Africa led the way at 26,625,585, which is understandable given their population base, but disappointing was Australia which had just 4,236,000 viewers for Super Rugby.

Taking in the Argentinian and Japanese fan base, the total cumulative figures were 42,561,637 for Super Rugby, and if you include European viewers through Sky UK and Canal+ in France, more than 50 million people watched Super Rugby in 2017.

Those numbers showed 370,370 people were tuning in to watch the average Super Rugby game.

The Aviva Premiership, meanwhile, averaged about 375,000 viewers per game for the 2016-17 season, the most it had gained since BT Sport took over coverage of the competition.

Super Rugby, clearly, is a great product that attracts impressive viewer numbers.

The only real area of concern is New Zealand's parasitic partners. How can Super Rugby nurture them and get them back to full health?