Nepal's final league match drew a sellout crowd of 20,000. More than todays three Asian Cup matches combined. Checkout the beautiful grass http://www.NepalSport.com
What's the exact figure of the Asian Cup attendence? I know that they are very sad numbers. I mean know one cares about the tournament.
I think yesterdays matched drew 3,000, 5,000 and 5,000 It is not that no one cares. It's that the AFC/China FC have their priorities wrong when setting up these tournaments. They waste all their money on flying their members around, hospitality and aesthetics, but pay little attention to things like marketing and attendance. Then they bitch about the lack of fans.
I guess that's Asian business culture for you. It's all image and corporate hospitality, no outreach. Seriously, if they can get together with sponsors and get a good advertising/marketing agency on board, they can promote the hell out of the tournament. But like I said before, moving the Cup to non-Olympic years is a good first step.
I think the Asian cup has always had the disadvantage of the lack of traveling fans. The distances are big, and the culture of travelling with your team isn't there. So it relies on the home fans. But the home fans only care about their own team. So normally only the games with host nation get decent attendence. But what's worrying in this tournament, is that the chinese fans aren't even supporting their own team in great numbers. Still ...not as bad as Lebanon 4 years ago.
Yeah, the KUW vs UAE number is surprising since they're both Middle East teams. Did they hold KOR vs JOR and KUW vs UAE in the same stadium? Because it makes sense that the Korea match gets decent attendance. And KSA, TKM, UZB and IRQ fans all came from Middle East/Central Asia right?
IT IS SAID BY A NEWSPAPER that the attendance rate of first round is beijing :chn-bar 60% indonesia-QAtar 5% chengdu:60% jinan:80% chongqing:85% and the data on stadiums are: beijing:woker's stadium 71112 Seat chengdu:longquan stadium 30800 Seat jinan: province sports center:43700 Seat chongqing yuanjiagang olympic sports center:60000 Seat
I got the attendance figures of 3,000, 5,000, and 5,000 from newspaper articles. I think it was Reuters. I heard that attendance is going up now because Vela"shams" outburst was published in all the Chinese newspapers. Also the fact that Korea and Japan have started their campaigns help
Considering the price of the tickets and the salary of the average chinese citizen and asian population in general it is no surprise that the attendance is low. Its not likely to see thousands of Bahrain and Qatar fans flooding china the same way European fans flooded portugal.
The stadium for Iran-Thailand game looked pretty full. It was fuller than the opening ceremony and china-bahrain game!