Portugal's appalling attendance levels: A look at the graphs and numbers that paint a sobering picture
Nearly 40 years ago, in the 1986-87 season, the average attendance for a Portuguese top flight fixture was 18,610, a very healthy figure representing a league that was well attended up and down the country, with 13 of the league’s 16 clubs that season attracting at least 10,000 fans per home match on average.
By the late 1990s and early 2000s, that number fell - dramatically. Indeed, in the 1999-2000 campaign, the average attendance of a Portuguese top flight league match was just 7,301, a 60% reduction in ticket sales in less than 15 years. Outside the Big Three clubs in Portugal, not a single team had an average attendance exceeding 7,000. How on Earth did this occur?
Today, the story is not much better. Last season the mean number of spectators for a Primeira Liga game was 11,621., well below the 18,700 who on average showed up to watch each match in the second division of English football last season, and only slightly higher than the average 9,890 who were in attendance for England’s third tier fixtures too.
When you also consider the fact that Benfica, Porto and Sporting make up 60% of the total attendance last campaign, the picture becomes even more worrying.
Take Arouca as an example. They finished 5th in Portugal last season, a phenomenal campaign that saw them finish as the so-called best of the rest in the national game, above historic emblems in the country such as Vitoria Guimaraes and Boavista. They even qualified for Europe thanks to their impressive exploits domestically. You would therefore be forgiven for assuming that they would bring in large swathes of supporters from the region who would like to witness what proved to be a pretty historic season for the club.
Yet Arouca’s average attendance across the campaign was just 1,836. By comparison, Maidstone United, who won just 5 league matches all season and finished bottom of the fifth division in English football, drew an average of 2,142 spectators for each of their home league games last campaign.
The team that finished 116th in the English pyramid and were relegated comprehensively to the sixth tier of the national game, attracted more supporters than the side that finished 5th in Portugal. How can that possibly be acceptable?
It is not a case of stadium capacity being a limiting factor, either. Arouca’s Estadio Municipal holds 5,600 spectators, while Maidstone United’s Gallagher Stadium fits just 4,200, yet it is the team from the Garden of England who were able to attract more visitors to their home fixtures.
This is not just an Arouca problem either. In the Portuguese top division last season, half of the clubs failed to bring in even 4,000 spectators per game, with Portimonense the other side alongside Arouca who saw less than 2,000 supporters show up for each of their home matches on average:
Taking out the attendance levels of the Big Three of Benfica, Porto and Sporting is perhaps the best way to illustrate just how poorly attended the rest of Portuguese football has been in recent times. On average, the number of spectators in each of the league’s matches without these three sides drops to around 5,000 - putting it on par with the fourth division of English football.
The graph below shows the attendance levels in the second, third and fourth tiers of the English game over the last 15 years compared to the Portuguese top flight (exluding the big Three). As you can see, it paints a concerning picture:
When also comparing the attendance levels of the Portuguese Primeira Liga compared to other comparatively smaller leagues, such as the Belgian, Swedish and Polish top flights, you see that there isn’t all that much difference in the number of spectators turning up to watch the average league game - and when you then remove the figures of Benfica, Porto and Sporting, you see that the attendance is dwarfed by these so-called inferior leagues:
This Twitter thread (below) from just before the Covid pandemic illustrates in great detail the worrying decline of attendance levels in football graphically and summarises just how stark the current situation is.
Until Portugal sort out their attendance levels, the league cannot contemplate making serious progress in European competition.
