Must admit, have been thinking pretty much the same.
Once upon a time in the year 1900 and frozen to death you used to look in the newspaper (anyone else remember them?) for the results and it gave you the scores, scorers and attendance for each game.
Anyone know the attendance for yesterdays game against Montpellier by any chance?

Exactly. They used to give the exact crowd at each game. Now it’s like some big secret

According to my newspaper (yes I still have one delivered) there were 89,192 folk at Wembley yesterday and 28,545 at the King Power for the Community Shield.

Attendances for all the weekend's other matches are there and as far as I can see, the smallest crowd was at Harrogate where 1,948 saw them beat Swindon 3-0.

I don't understand this thread.

Dad and I watched games standing on the muddy slope of the Holmesdale Road end. He cheered and I rattled.

Quite often back in the 80’s they’d announce the crowd at games and you’d hear laughter ringing around the ground, because it would be such a blatant fiddle it was actually laughable. (Yes you uncle Ron) The crowd was clearly a lot bigger than they announced. Going every week in a sparse crowd, you did get a rough idea of how many was there.

Being a bit of a statto I often used to scan the results and attendances at games, particularly as a youngster. I can still recall looking at my Dad's Sunday Express the day after going to Highbury to see Man Utd play (November 1964) and noting a crowd of 59,000.

One issue now is that a greater proportion of seats are given over to season ticket holders than once was the case. I believe these reserved seats are automatically counted in the attendance figures irrespective of whether the seats are actually occupied or not. As such the figure given may not be an accurate count of bums on seats.

I recall seeing the Emirates with vast numbers of empty seats during the dying embers of the Wenger reign, and the attendance figures suggested otherwise.
It was reported that Arsenal only gave their official attendance in terms of tickets sold, not taking into account the actual number of supporters who made it into the ground.

Edited by Willo (01 Aug 2022 1.58pm)