Originally Posted by
Gray77
I think Exeter and Saracens were the most expensive season tickets in 2019-20. Exeter’s most expensive worked at around £48 a game and Saracens were £70. But these were top of the pile season tickets. I think all clubs in the RU Prem have season tickets that are less than £300 or so, and most of them cover European pool games as well usually.
I think there’s actually a marked difference between professsional club RU in England and the very obvious establishment links to the game. The public school system and the leading universities very much foster a certain privileged image of the game, and there are obviously a lot of well to do types that follow the national team and get very worked up about the six nations and such like. But a lot of these people do not follow club teams. If you met a casual middle class RU type there’s a decent chance they will not follow a club side, but they’ll follow England and be able to tell you all about certain elements of the culture of the sport that they are in to.
You have a game which has obviously thrived because of establishment support, both official and in terms of favourable media coverage. But the leading club sides play in towns like Leicester, Northampton, Coventry, Gloucester, etc. The establishment never really tried to inject professional club sides in Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, York etc, because the club game worked independently of the type of RU culture that thrives in leading university towns, which some on here quite rightly talk about and get annoyed by.
I agree with Webbo and others that this culture has worked to harm and nearly kill RL over the last century, and it’s a culture that I want nothing to do with. But that isn’t the same culture that exists in most fanbases of club sides, because the two don’t actually mix that freely. The success of people like Farrell, Ford and Edwards kind of shows that the professional game holds no such prejudices against our sport that maybe the establishment wing of the game holds. I’m merely trying to show that there isn’t a monolithic Rugby Union type. Most fans who go to watch club games are not much different to those that watch RL games in general.