So, Melbourne Heart City have averaged home crouds of 6815 this year, and they only got 5867 to their last game. Puts our supposed issues with croud sizes into perspective a bit. And they've got a rectangular stadium and everything.
Excellent informative article this week on croud numbers and TV viewing figures in the A-League relative to the Phoenix's stats:
http://footballcentral.com.au/phoenix-sparking-deb...
"The Phoenix have long been accused of having small crouds, although this is largely based on anecdotal evidence rather than fact. The Phoenix have averaged crouds of 8,397 in their time in the A-League, which is on par with three other clubs in the A-League in Central Coast, Perth, and Melbourne City. When you think that the attendances of Central Coast in particular are boosted by the large numbers of away supporters travelling less than two hours from other places in New South Wales to attend matches, the Phoenix figure looks even healthier.
It looks healthier yet again when you pay attention to the fact that the Phoenix figures have consistently remained in the 7,500-9,000 range across the eight years they’ve been in the league for, a period of time where Wellington’s rugby crouds have dropped away significantly (see graph below). Perth has a population of just under two million people, yet their average crouds of 9,328 over the last four seasons haven’t resulted in calls for them to be kicked out of the league, despite averaging just 1000 people more than Wellington which has a population of 393,000."