Brighton’s recent amazing achievement of attracting 3,256 fans to watch their game with Charlton at the AMEX Stadium, was also notable for the confusion about whether it was a record attendance or not.
By David Mills @aperolfan
Before the game their ‘main’ club ran a story stating Chairman Tony Bloom was challenging them to set a new domestic league attendance record of over 3,180, which was a good idea except for the fact that was not even the FAWPL record, let alone the FAWSL one. Although this could easily had been avoided by investing 10 mins online to check, to be fair to the Seagulls the FAWPL seemed to endorse their claim of achieving a record (on Twitter during Sunday), so clearly the league were unaware too.
The Seagulls were not the first this year to fall into this trap either, as if you travel back a short while to October, Man City were incorrectly said to have achieved the record attendance for an FAWSL league game.
Clearly all the clubs who make these claims, plus the leagues and FA, are all making genuine errors in good faith, but getting basics like this wrong is not great for the game’s image. There is an answer to this however and it is quite straight forward. The FA simply needs to set up and maintain a page on its website that records the attendance records for FAWSL and FAWPL games (also knowing the Club by Club record would be good too).
For what it is worth, my view is that to try and establish a level playing field for the FAWPL they should use games from 2000 as the benchmark as before then record are sketchy. For example there was apparently an Arsenal game on 28 March 1993 which got 18,196 fans but as that was part of a wider fundraising day I am not sure if the fans counted were there for other events too. Similarly, accuracy for game post 2000 should be considered as for example the Arsenal Ladies v Fulham game on 15 May 2004 had an attendance of ‘about 5,000’– but I do not think it is fair to consider games that are unspecific about the gate.
Using the criteria above, the highest attendance for FAWSL and FAWPL league games is as follows (worth mentioning that this is a work in progress, so please let me know if you know of any games I should add to the list):
Pictured – Crowd at Manchester City. (The FA via Getty Images)
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