average attendance V local population

[saulan]

Given that you've gone and looked at all the sources, why not correct then stats, stating your sources? Including your 4.4M for Jo'sburg which I did look up.

Just because I point out that something is flawed, doesn't mean that I have to correct it. But for the city populations, here is StatSA, which is the most reliable source on populations in South Africa since they are the ones that run the Census in the country: http://www.statssa.gov.za/?page_id=1021&id=city-of-johannesburg-municipality

As for criticisms that a stadium isn't within such and such a city how's your local knowledge for other places?
Again, using Wiki as a perfectly acceptable place for this sort of basic information

I mean, it isn't really. Generally work and professional research absolutely reject anything from Wikipedia. If you are creating stats, one should never use Wikipedia. But if you are going to throw something together, at least do a bit of research and try to make it correct, right now it really isn't. I have local knowledge on South African cities, but it is available online, and the person who did create that should have done their research before throwing up something misleading (Also, you keep mentioning the OP, I have nothing against OP, as I agree, it would be interesting to look at, I just pointed out that its flawed).

"The Stormers are a South African professional rugby union team based in Cape Town"
"The Newlands Stadium, currently referred to as DHL Newlands for sponsorship reasons, is located in Cape Town, South Africa."
Google maps also calls it Cape Town. If you're being that pedantic, then few are in the city they're supposed to be.

Yes, but it's referring to Cape Town as the municipal area, not the actual city centre, so the municipal population should have been used, not the city.
Smartcooky also makes a good point there, especially for SH teams.

 

[unrated]

The you are much more deficits to this than I am.
Given that you've gone and looked at all the sources, why not correct then stats, stating your sources? Including your 4.4M for Jo'sburg which I did look up.

From my perspective the OP named his sources, I checked 3 of them, which were consistent and accurate as linked (as opposed to your 4.4M figure) and see no reason to double check the rest, if I was that interested I'd have out them together myself.

As for criticisms that a stadium isn't within such and such a city how's your local knowledge for other places?
Again, using Wiki as a perfectly acceptable place for this sort of basic information
"The Stormers are a South African professional rugby union team based in Cape Town"
"The Newlands Stadium, currently referred to as DHL Newlands for sponsorship reasons, is located in Cape Town, South Africa."
Google maps also calls it Cape Town. If you're being that pedantic, then few are in the city they're supposed to be. With that level ofmpedantry, then I would suspect Worcester tomcome top of the tree, as the stadium is just outside the city boundaries on an industrial estate, population of maybe half a dozen homeless people (who don't count as they don't have homes), average attendance of 7.8k for a reality breaking percentage that requires a "divide by zero"

Again, if you want wider urban combination, feel free; OP didn't, even if he made human error once or twice.

ETA, not human error, limitations of stats available for an easy search, wiki has 1 population stat for Melbourne, 2 for Tokyo (OP uses the smaller). OP doesn't claim to go beyond wiki for information.

You are fiercely defending the creator of the Infographic. Some of the cities and teams referenced might be completely correct. Other i immediately picked up is not correct.

As Smartcooky pointed out some of these teams are actually provincial instead of city based. Now the author is being very very selective in what stats he uses. I don't want to comment too much on the other cities and teams as i profess ignorance on them apart from the basic internet searches you can do. In some places as pointed out he uses metro area stats and others just the city ( which is basically city centre without the surrounding areas).

I will use Durban as a case study. He just uses the city centre. Now while it would be naive on my part to suggest that no one in the Durban city centre are supporters who attends home games i can say with some certainty that most of the city centre residents do not give a **** about rugby. A small minority would though. Therefore the stats being used are very selective. Yes the author states where he got his stats from but that still does not justify their inclusion. The author just decided it will be the city stats. Well that's not how the landscape here works making this very misleading.

I still reiterate my stance that i think this is a cool idea, the author should be willing to accept criticism in order to make it more accurate. But unfortunately in its current state it is inaccurate and in actuality the percentages will differ from those stated.

 

[curtbob7]

Creates a conversation I suppose. I mean most Tigers regulars are from the county itself and surrounding areas. Bath for instance have no other sports team to contend with whereas we've got the best Basketball team, a large football team etc etc. Then there's the ethnicity of the population to consider which is a subject in itself.

 

[Reiser99]

It's completely meaningless, but also completely not misleading. It does exactly what it say on the tin, badly, but that's what it does. A simple ratio of attendance to population size. That's only misleading to people who can't read. Of course, people can then use it to mislead, but that's on the people, not the stat, and is the case for literally 100% of statistics ever.
It's also fan collated, so of anyone wants more detailed stats, that includes things like weather, popularity of the sport nationally, competition from other sports locally etc etc, then feel free to collate that data. I don't see the point in criticising g someone else's stats for being the ones they were interested in, rather than the ones you wanted to see, and assumed they might have been by not reading what the stat was.

If someone posts up kicking stats for rugby players, then those will be kicking stats, no point in criticising them for not posting distance, or angle, or pressure, or tackle completion or try assists, or an analysis of how good the player is as an individual, or how good the team around him is. But none of that will make the kicking stats wrong or misleading; just your interpretation of them.


TL;DR "I don't understand statistics" =/= "the statistics are misleading"

I'm going to disagree. The statistics are misleading because the author is using data in order to create a picture, in this case which teams have the largest percentage of home support. However it makes assumptions and uses data that is not consistent. For example Bath is based on the town of Bath. Saracens though is based on the whole of London. That is misleading as London is so large that you wouldn't consider most it to be 'local'. The areas surrounding Saracens, such as Barnet, Edgware yes. Croydon in south London you wouldn't say is local, yet their population is included. Therefore using large cities as 'local populations' compared with smaller towns as 'local populations' is misleading. I'm not saying the statistics are wrong, but how the author has used them and their interpretation of certain terminology.

 

[dullonien]

There's some interesting info to garner from these 'stats' though.

Looking at the Welsh regions is interesting, because it paints a picture about how well they engage their immediate population, and their potential for growth. take Scarlets, at almost 18%, they have good support from residents of Llanelli, but there may not be scope to improve massively on their average attendance of circa 9k. of course, Scarlets draw supporters from a wider area than just Llanelli, with Carmarthen, Ammanford etc. within easy reach, but even then the population figure wouldn't increase massively. They're never going to be able to draw 60k crowds like some premiership football sides manage, regardless of how successful they become on the field. 15-20k would probably be tops in terms of average attendance.

Compare that to Cardiff Blues, who not only have a larger population on their footstep, but have a far larger population within easy commuting distance to call from (let's conveniently ignore the whole Warriors/valleys issue for a minute). Whilst their 1.6% is pretty poor at the moment, there's big scope for improving on that. Of course not all 361k who live in cardiff will be interested in rugby, with the percentage likely significantly lower than in Llanelli due to Cardiff being more metropolitan and multicultural; but with 7 times the population (and growing), the potential must be greater if they can get the on-field offering and facilities sorted.

Of course there's some useless stats in there as well. Stating all of London as Saracens & Harlequins' population base is unfair to say the least!

 

[Which Tyler]

@saulan - Had this been a journalist, or a professional presentation I would absolutely agree with you on Wiki. As a fan being interested in something and looking for close-enough information; it's absolutely fine. It's even more fine if you check the references and see that wiki is quoting the 2011 census. Interesting that the SA census office disagrees with the SA census though. I don't see any reference at all to municipal area in the OP link however.

@unrated - Not really, I'm defending the use of stats from misuse. We know that SH rugby is provincial rather than city - just like Welsh and Irish rugby, and largely like Scottish, English, Italian and French - which is why the stats are meaningless - not misleading. Misleading would be drawing a conclusion that is not supported, or cherry picking the data to represent the point desired rather than the point raised - none of which was done in the OP link (as far as I can tell). As for what data he should have used - that's down to individual preference; and the article specifically states what data was used, and is then as consistent as realistically possible for a random fan following up something that interests him/her. As far as I can tell, the inaccuracies are down to readers being unhappy that their personal preference and the author's personal preference don't match.

@Reiser99 - Nope, the stats paint a picture, the author presents the stats as the stats. The author doesn't use them, s/he doesn't interpret them, they just present them. Any interpretation is coming from the reader. Any misrepresentation is coming from the reader.


As a rule of thumb - I really don't care about the stat shown; they're pretty miuch entirely meaningless. However, a personal bug-bear of mine is inaccurate criticism of statistics. There is nothing wrong with the stats used; they're just not the ones that other posters want to see.

 

[TRF_Olyy]

Creates a conversation I suppose. I mean most Tigers regulars are from the county itself and surrounding areas. Bath for instance have no other sports team to contend with whereas we've got the best Basketball team, a large football team etc etc. Then there's the ethnicity of the population to consider which is a subject in itself.

A) there's basketball sides in England?
B) people actually go and watch them?!

 

[Leonormous Boozer]

WT has it right, the stats are correct but comparing average attendance with local population is entirely pointless for the majority of sides. If it was restricted to small one sport town sides it might be cool, no point comparing Castres to London though...

 

[saulan]

@saulan - Had this been a journalist, or a professional presentation I would absolutely agree with you on Wiki. As a fan being interested in something and looking for close-enough information; it's absolutely fine. It's even more fine if you check the references and see that wiki is quoting the 2011 census. Interesting that the SA census office disagrees with the SA census though. I don't see any reference at all to municipal area in the OP link however.

The website being referenced by the wikipedia page isn't the 2011 census page though, the page I sent was literally the page of data available from the 2011 census. The reference from Wikipedia seems to be of a page created by a guy named Adrian Frith, and is not the home page for the census. Again, this is why one doesn't use Wikipedia as a reference for things.

Fair point about it not being a professional presentation, but the points of the data not being consistent (i.e. some municipalities being used and some cities being used), as well as the ***le of the compiled data being misleading still stands. (The data does not represent average attendance vs local population).

 

[curtbob7]

A) there's basketball sides in England?
B) people actually go and watch them?!

Yeah average gate at the Riders is over 2,000 so as a Sale fan you cant really smirk at that

 

[TRF_Olyy]

Genuinely didn't know there were basketball sides in the UK.
Ludicrous

 

[curtbob7]

Genuinely didn't know there were basketball sides in the UK.
Ludicrous

Its a laugh to be fair, not a regular but ive enjoyed my visits. As is Ice Hockey.

 

[Leonormous Boozer]

I find it surprising England don't have a euro League team, you'd have to assume they'd have better athletes than countries like Turkey or Greece for it. Maybe now the NBA throw a couple games London's way you might see it grow.

 

[FrenchFan]

Criteria is a bit naff. But it does highlight that the best crowds are in French rugby.

 

[TommiG88]

Well this was pointless.