Night games simply aren't as appealing as they used to be. Anyone that thinks lockdowns didn't have an impact are kidding themselves. I used to love going into the city at night but after two years locked down I want to be out and about during the day... waiting a whole day for a game is weirdly more tiring than it used to be. If that game were at 2pm on Saturday afternoon, 100% there's at least another 5k there.
We got 38k vs GWS in 2018 at the MCG. Closer to finals and the crowd is definitely bigger.
IMO COVID still plays a huge role. AFL Members was as dead as I've ever seen it at a Melbourne game and let me tell you the AFL Members is normally quiet at Melbourne games anyway but Saturday night was next level quiet. I'm part of an AFL Members facebook group and you're talking about a highly invested group of football supporters who attend multiple games a year as neutral supporters...if you think the clubs have stuffed around supporters with club membership, trust me they've got NOTHING on how [censored] terrible the ticketing and facilities have gotten for AFL Members. People have stopped caring. Richmond, Collingwood, Essendon supporters....all turning their back on the league.
20k isn't a Melbourne problem. It's a league problem. Confident things will pick up again though. Suspect changes in isolation rules will also have an impact. Read somewhere that it's something like 30k household contacts per day isolating... that's going to have an impact *everywhere* especially on a sport heavily invested in family memberships... one member goes down and you have 3-6 people who can't attend.
My family all used to attend every week, 10-12 people. This year no more than 3 of us on any given night have attended. A combination of night matches, covid caution and isolation rules all impacting the decision. Last week I was the only one from my extended family who went. It wasn't that anyone said they "didn't want to" attend. They literally couldn't because of either COVID, or because they were away for Easter. Easter has an impact on crowds in a normal year. Add COVID and you have double or triple impact.
The government has been kidding themselves thinking things can get "back to normal" with vaccination requirements and isolation rules still in place.
