Review of the CFA's 2021-2022 attendance data

Before the new season started, the CFA quietly released the official attendance data for all the clubs taking part. I say quietly, but then APOEL and Omonia got into an argument about what the data meant.

Whose is bigger?

Photo by David Sing: https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-shot-of-two-roosters-7134976/

It was a fairly straightforward table, showing each club and their total attendance over the full season. That was it. You can see it for yourself here https://cfa.com.cy/Gr/news/44645 

So what I’m going to do is take that info, work out an average, look at the capacity of each club’s stadium and look at that as a percentage. The calculations are more straightforward than at first glance, only due to the number of stadiums involved. Last season, all 3 of the Limassol teams played at the Tsirio, APOEL, Omonia and Olympiakos played at the GSP and, Doxa and PAEEK played at the Makario.

So,

Tsirio: 13,331
GSP: 22,859
Makario: 16,000

There are also:

AEK Arena (AEK Larnaca): 7,400
Antonis Papadopoulos (Anorthosis): 10,230
Dasaki (Ethnikos): 7,000
Stelios Kyriakides (Paphos): 9,394

The total attendances as marked by CFA are as follows:

APOEL: 103,427
Omonia: 66,909
Apollon: 61,812
Anorthosis: 50,684
Aris: 23,796
AEL: 22,922
Paphos: 21,044
AEK: 12,927
Olympiakos: 10,952
Ethnikos: 5,419
PAEEK: 5,306
Doxa: 5,260

There were 16 home matches during the season, so on average, those numbers translate to the below:

APOEL: 6,464
Omonia: 4,181
Apollon: 3,863
Anorthosis: 3,167
Aris: 1,487
AEL: 1,432
Paphos: 1,315
AEK: 808
Olympiakos: 684
Ethnikos: 338
PAEEK: 331
Doxa: 328

And therefore the average percentage capacity filled at each match is:

APOEL: 28%
Omonia: 18%
Apollon: 29%
Anorthosis: 31%
Aris: 11%
AEL: 11%
Paphos: 14%
AEK: 11%
Olympiakos: 3%
Ethnikos: 5%
PAEEK: 2%
Doxa: 2%

Some of those percentages are quite distressing. But there are reasons for a lot of them.

PAEEK's normal ground when outside of the top league is the Kyrenia Return stadium which has a capacity of 2,000 and does not meet top league criteria, which is why they had to use the ruin that is the Makario stadium.

The west stand at the Makarion

Even with that though, their average attendance for their first ever appearance in the top league would have filled only 16% of their normal stadium.

Doxa, prior to their promotion to the top league in the 2011-2012 season, were not much of anything and have worked hard to become an ever present team since then. Playing at the Makario in Nicosia due to their lack of suitable ground has been a killer for a team who have moved their base from Katokopia in the Occupied side of the island to Peristerona on the free side. Peristerona is still a while away Cyprus-distance-wise, so the local population don't get out much to see the 'pride of Katokopia'. That is until this 2022-2023 season. Katokopia stadium has now been upgraded and can seat 3,500 people. Again, their average attendance from last season wouldn't fill 10% of the upgraded stadium, but you would expect with the continued improvements on and off the pitch and finally being in or close to the community they represent, attendance figures should improve.

A lot of the stadiums were not built or owned by the clubs that play in them, and instead are owned by athletics organisations (e.g. the GSP is wholly owned by the Pancyprian Gymnastic Association or GSP for short in Greek) or the Cyprus Sports Association (the Makario, Stelios Kyriakides etc) or the communities they are in (e.g. the Tasos Markou Stadium in Paralimni which will host top league games in 2022-2023 thanks to ENP being promoted). For this reason, the stadiums are oversized to allow for full views along the running tracks which encircle a lot of the football pitches, and to allow for non-sporting events such as concerts to take place. There are more and more purpose built stadiums being provided for or built by teams to suit their fan base and capacities, such as AEK Arena, the Antonis Papadopoulos or the Ammochostos Stadium. 

Of course the other issue is, the less successful teams are followed less than the more successful teams. Dagenham & Redbridge would have trouble filling the Emirates for instance.

Looks like I’ve alienated their 12 fans. 12 less people will read my articles from now on I guess.

( Photo by Uriel Soberanes on Unsplash )

Another interesting bit of data on the article published by the CFA shows total attendances during each gameweek. The total attendance for the 22nd gameweek of the first phase was the highest for the league at 20,087. That attendance would struggle to fill Craven Cottage, or Dean Court twice. But, as a percentage of the total population of the country (1.207 million as per 2020 estimates) that is about 1.66%. If this was translated to the population of England (55.98 million as per 2018 estimates), the total attendance of the highest gameweek for the Premier League should be nearly 930,000. That’s 12.5 Old Traffords.

Even the lowest attendance gameweek of 8,342 in the second gameweek of the second phase is a percentage of about 0.7% of the country’s total population. When translated to England numbers that’s approximately 390,000, or just under 10 Goodison Parks.

Bearing in mind as well, that each Premier League gameweek has 10 games, while in Cyprus, the league only had six in the 2021-2022 season.

Get me that gif of the guy pretending his head is exploding with the galaxy background.

That’s the one. Nice.

I’d say the argument that the Cypriot Sports Organisation that no one is going to games is a load of old rubbish, but what do I know?