December 20 – West Ham’s Christmas came early, topping the attendance capacity chart twice during the Premier League’s three fixtures in eight days, and taking seven points out of a possible nine in the league.
The pre-Christmas rush of fixtures showed how robust the Premier League product is with over a million tickets on sale to matches and just 60,000 seats unfilled.
Round 17 saw the total number of Premier League tickets sold pass the 6 million mark. 297,783 seats were left unfilled, many of them were likely to have been sold tickets that were not taken up.
Of the 19,564 seats unfilled in the Premier League last weekend, all except about 4,000 were in the North East at either Sunderland or Middlesbrough.
Sunderland has a larger capacity ground at 49,000 and is regularly selling over 41,000 tickets in an area struggling economically. The club, currently put up for sale by American owner Ellis Short, has been in the bottom three most of the season but under David Moyes is showing signs of improvement. That appears to be communicating to the fans who under a similar situation last year maintained their faith and still kept turning up and on occasion pushing the attendance capacity figure into the 90s.
The top eight teams above Sunderland and Middlesbrough were effectively sold out for their home matches. Most notable was the big improvement for West Brom who the game previously only sold 79.95% of their stadium capacity.
Insideworldfootball figures are based on official stadium capacities and the official reported attendances.
Contact the writer of this story at moc.l1714151996labto1714151996ofdlr1714151996owedi1714151996sni@n1714151996osloh1714151996cin.l1714151996uap1714151996