Ringsend, orginally.

Look- Portydown is a commuter town of 30,000 people. Do you expect it to have a Disneyworld or scale model of the Venetian Lido overlooking the lakeshore?

hold on, shamrock rovers are centered there?

Fucking hell. those areas are even more interested in gaelic games than the LOI.

Portadown is a festering swamp of hatred according to the people I know who live there.

Here and what's the story with all the orange order arches in every town with more than five protestants in NI.

And I am the Life wrote:

QUOTE:
hold on, shamrock rovers are centered there?

Well, yes. They were founded in Ringsend, and Milltown is where they played their home games from the mid-1920s up until 1987.

Milltown's a nice place to live, but a footballing hotbed it ain't. All the pubs around there are the sort of places you'd go of a Saturday afternoon if you wanted to see Drico and Rog and the rest of the goys taking on England in the Six Nations.

don't forget berj and shaggy and the girvinator

If you strip out the 4 home Old Firm games a season the attendances aren't wonderful although certainly Aberdeen, Hearts and Hibs would expect 8,000 plus most weeks. Beyond that teams like Inverness, Falkirk, St Mirren and Hamilton will struggle to reach 4,000 and Motherwell, Kilmarnock and even Dundee Utd will struggle to 6,000. In the 1st division crowds often don’t get over 1000.

Aberdeen's gates in the SPL last season (excluding fixtures against Celtic and Rangers) were all between 10,000 and 14,000, apart from a couple of end-of-season fixtures against Motherwell and Dundee United which drew 8,000. (It's a very slow day in work today.)

The attendances in Scotland are pretty good for a country of five million people. Simon Kuper said in his book years ago that, per head of population, Scots watched more live football than any other European populace except Albania.

Well that is a stat to be proud of, I thank you for it. That's because they don't have TV in Albania.

Kuper said the same thing, something along the lines of "This suggests there is less to do in Albania than in Scotland."

I'm pretty sure it isn't true in today's Albania, either (though it is rather difficult to figure just what the current population of the country is).

That said, wasn't Kuper writing at a time when Aberdeen and Dundee United were drawing around twice what they get now?

I don't think their crowds were massively bigger in 1992 (when the book was published) than now.

This site gives Dundee Utd's attendances down the years against specific opponents. The crowd figures for the early 1990s are about the same as today's.

You're probably right; I was thinking that the quote was older than that.

I wonder who the current leader on that basis is. You need a low overall population and at least a couple of clubs that draw well. Maybe Macedonia? Or one of the Baltics?

I would think that Cyprus might top that list. This season there are three clubs there averaging 6-7,000 in a popualtion of under 1 million (ie excluding the Turkish section which doesn't provide clubs to the league).