Attendances

The following is a summary of average attendances for all seasons from 1965/66 to 2012/13.

Attendance stats are available for each season on their relevant page. There is a complete list of links here.

Below is a graph showing the average league attendance for each season. The pink line is a running average.

Only league games are included in these averages. This is to ensure a fairer comparison season to season (some seasons had bumper crowds as we had drawn a large team in a cup). Play off games are not included. One or two seasons have incomplete data (but no more than one missing in any one season) - check the individual seasons for more information. The mean average has been used. The 2012/13 season's stats have now been added.

Home & away statistics have only been collected from the 2006/07 season.

According to this article on the official Barnet site League Two attendances were down by 7.7% in 2009/10, at 3853. This is worse than Barnet's average attendance going down by 4.4% However, it is difficult to compare league averages from season to season as a quarter of the clubs change with relegation and promotion. It may be that the clubs that left league two last season had much higher attendances than the clubs that replaced them, rather than fewer people actually attending matches. If anyone has the time and inclination to collect all the necessary stats I'd love to hear from you! (info@bfcsa.co.uk)

It should be noted that the home and away average attendance figures (and last season's average) quoted in the article on the official site include cup games, while the overall average quoted is league-only (as are the League Two averages). The figures quoted in the above table are league-only - the reasons for this are explained at the top of this page.

2008/09 Further Notes

According to this story on the BBC "over 16.35m fans attended the 1,656 matches played in the 2008-09 season, an increase of 1% on the previous year." So this should be compared to the 2% increase for Barnet's overall attendance. (If you like your glasses half full then you could say that we doubled the increase seen across the league. If you like your glasses half empty then note that the increase was fuelled by the increase in away attenders, which compensated for the fact that home attenders reduced by 3%.)

I had a look at the official Football League website but their competition stats weren't working for me. However, this page (on the same site) suggests that the 2007/08 season's total attendance for the three leagues was 16.71 million, which is higher than the 16.35 million quoted by the BBC (but presumably from a press release from the League).

I shall try to clarify this over the long hot summer. Not to mention get some stats on league attendances over the years to compare ours to. (Did football attendances drop generally from 1965 and into the 80s, or was going semi-pro a really bad idea??)

If you think you can help at all (throwing some light on attendance stats) then please get in touch on info@bfcsa.co.uk

2008/09 Further Further Notes

The official club site published a related article on 13 May 2009. It mentioned that "crowds in League 2 averaged 4,175, which, in fact, was 3.9% down on the previous season." (This would be in contrast to the 1% seen across all three leagues mentioned above.)

It is fairer to compare Barnet's attendances to the League Two attendances, so this makes our 2% increase almost 6% points higher than League Two's in real terms. It goes on to say "Barnet averaged 2,137". This includes our one home cup game against Rochdale in the FA Cup; cup game attendances are left out of the figures above for the reasons given in the notes above. The home average quoted in the same article of 1619 also includes the cup game. But the 2582 average quoted for the 2005/06 season is League-only; the average including cup games was 2478 (see the 2005-06 attendance stats page).

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