Whoever thinks that the drop in NRL crowds can be arrested by a $700 million transformation of the Olympic Stadium must have had their brain re-shaped from an oval to a rectangle. It's simply wrong, and it's offensive to every school and hospital in this state that is in genuine need of government funding.

We can save the NRL and the state a lot of money in surveys and tell them right here why the average rugby league crowd has fallen below 15,000 for the first time since 2004. Here are the top nine reasons people don't attend NRL matches.

The more dilapidated an NRL ground is, the better the vibe. Credit:NRL Imagery

They don't like rugby league. Not much to be done about that, although in its current negotiations with the players' union, the league has said that off-field atrocities by players are the No. 1 factor in turning waverers off the game. Baloney. Anyone who stopped attending Roosters matches because Mitchell Pearce simulated sex with a dog was just a hater looking for an exit. The league fans you want to bring back are those who stopped attending matches because of Mitchell Pearce's kicking game. They have something else on. This is not a bad thing, and indeed is to be encouraged in a general "Life Be In It" kind of way. The fewer people watching rugby league on weekends, instead spending their time rock climbing, parasailing, stand-up paddleboarding, going for walks with their families etc, the better for the nation. But anyway… The weather. As Charles Dudley Warner said (later amplified by Mark Twain), everybody complains about it but nobody does anything about it. This year, the NRL can't blame the rain, which has not fallen on the eastern seaboard since the cricket season. Your Team is rubbish. Now we're getting closer. Three of the four poorest crowds this season have been for home games staged by the Bulldogs, which as a team shares the plight of the year 12 maths students of Coonamble High School, who have only just realised that they have been studying the wrong syllabus. On the other hand, six of the top eight crowds have been at Suncorp to watch the high-riding Broncos. The Your Team factor is critical, and it's not ultimately a zero-sum game. The NRL's most popular teams in its biggest city are the Dragons, the Bulldogs, the Rabbitohs and the Eels. Only one of those four is having a good season. Go figure. If the players really want a share of rising overall revenue, they will conspire to stop the Storm, Roosters and Sharks from winning so much and put the Dragons and Bunnies on top again. Ticket prices. NRL ticket prices are both too high and not high enough. While memberships and general admission tickets at suburban grounds are reasonable value, premium seating is a rip-off and prohibitive to anyone thinking of bringing a family. As previously argued in this column, tickets to all major sporting fixtures should have a nominal or zero price, as gate money is a drop in the revenue ocean compared with television broadcast deals. Tickets are too often priced just highly enough to put people off, but not highly enough to raise meaningful revenue. Food prices. There is no price that could tempt me to eat the food at most rugby league grounds, so perhaps the price point is a moot point. To extort $6 from patrons for a handful of hot chips that are neither hot nor, by any ordinary definition, chips, is a swindle you would expect of the Commonwealth Bank, not a rugby league club. The toilets. A trip to the men's room during any NRL game, at any venue, is an exercise in nostalgia that is not to everyone's taste. That smell, that humid closeness, is something that harks back to public spaces before the world renovated itself, to the slums of the industrial revolution, indeed, to the below-decks atmosphere of the convict fleets. To take in fluid during a rugby league game, knowing what effluvia are swarming about in the public conveniences, is to risk a painful Hobson's Choice: hold it in or let it go? As the tension builds toward the final siren, it can really ruin your enjoyment of the game. Stadium location. Todd Greenberg can say till he's blue and white in the face that the Olympic Stadium isn't working for rugby league because it's not rectangular. The main reason people don't go to the Olympic Stadium in Homebush isn't because it's an oval ground. The main reason people don't go is because it's in Homebush, and their team is based in Redfern/Leichhardt/Belmore/Parramatta/Kogarah. Each of those suburbs could have a 20,000-seat stadium for a fraction of the price of the Homebush "transformation", and league would live happily ever after. Stadium quality. By all means, if the SFS has bits falling off, fix it. But spanking new stadia do not attract more people, and never have in the history of rugby league. In fact, people like the opposite. Whenever the Tigers play at Leichhardt, the Dogs at Belmore, the Dragons at Kogarah and so on, everyone from Phil Gould down to Aunt Sally raves about how much they love rugby league in its suburban spiritual home. Duh. The more Brookvale Oval crumbles, the more the fans love it. None of these grounds is incapable of containing regular crowds. And who would you prefer to share the experience with – 15,000 people at Leichhardt, or 15,000 in the Olympic Stadium?

To hear one state premier and sports minister after another announce a new stadium strategy is to lose oneself inside an episode of the ABC's excellent satire Utopia. Doesn't matter if it makes no sense, as long as someone is "Getting The Job Done''. Every year the NSW government re-announces a plan, the main ambition of which is to one-up the previous plan's budget. Can't New South Wales think of a better way to spend $1.6 billion than revamping stadiums for which there is no need beyond the need of other corporate leaders to make other announcements? But maybe if the solution were to renovate the toilets at Brookvale and rethink the turnstiles at Leichhardt, that is thinking too small for our bloated times, fattened on stamp duty from Ponzi schemes and suffering arteriosclerosis of the brain.

The good news for rugby league is that while crowds are down this year, they are still bubbling along near their historic highs that have been achieved in the past 15 years. Throughout their history, every rugby league club with the exception of the Broncos – a monopoly in a rugby league city of 2 million – has sustained average crowds of 10,000-15,000. That's a healthy number and it is probably the sport's natural level. Yet again, league risks undervaluing the strengths of what it already has, because, well, it's not as big as the AFL, the EPL or the NFL. A league crowd of 15,000, by every measure, has always been a good size, capable in the right venue of producing the tribal passion that makes this game special. It's only when you put those 15,000 into that wind-blasted Homebush cavern that they start to look sparse and feel helpless.