I recently mentioned in flippant fashion that League attendance was down a little at Villa Park this past season, but since we had more cup games – leading to 2 trips to Wembley – and less European matches, I thought it worth looking at overall attendance this year.

Despite falling at the first hurdle in the Europa League, Villa Park still played host to 25 games this season, compared with 27 in 2008/09. When you consider that somewhere in the region of 60K Villa fans headed down to London for the 2 games at Wembley, it more or less evens itself out. Although the cost of a day out to London is obviously considerably more expensive and it’s highly likely that a significant number of fans stayed away from less attractive matches at VP to go someway toward balancing the budget.

Overall then, the average attendance at Villa Park across all competitions was actually only 171 less per game than the 2008/09 season, which with Wembley considered isn’t all that bad. That said, 2008/09 was a couple of thousand fans lighter per game than 2007/08, but that would probably be a reflection of the current economic climate more than anything.

Number Of Games At Villa Park

Total Attendance At Villa Park

Average Attendance At Villa Park

Future Expansion

Randy Lerner confirmed just the other day that the intention to redevelop the North Stand remains and also said that some cosmetic work would start this year, but the plan was to take the overall capacity at Villa Park into the 50K region over the next 3 or 4 years.

We already knew this was in the pipeline since Villa Park was originally earmarked as an Olympic venue which would have required some expansion and ground improvements. I got the impression that we pulled out of participating in the Olympics so the redevelopment could be done right; on our own schedule and own terms. That may just be me, but I took it as a good sign.

If you look down the list of games at VP over the last 4 years and consider that the 6 lowest attendances occurred in the last 2 seasons, it wouldn’t immediately make sense to think about expansion. However, the 3 largest attendances occurred last season – Birmingham, Man Utd and Liverpool were all sold out. The flip side of that once more though is that 4 games appear to have been sell outs in 2008/09 and 5 in 2007/08.

However, take another look at the lowest attended games and the picture doesn’t look so bad. When FH Hafnarfjordur flew in from Iceland for the 2nd leg in the Intertoto Cup with the game effectively already lost, it’s understandable that only 25.5K came out to watch it. It’s less understandable that only 22.5K attended the far more important game against Rapid Vienna at the beginning of 2009/10, but we’ll ignore that for now. We didn’t have comparable games during 2006/07 or 2007/08, so naturally there are not similar poorly attended games against obscure opposition from those seasons. Nothing to be overly concerned about then.

So there’s some encouragement to be derived from what, to me, looks like ambition; clearly the intention and expectation is to bring the games to Villa Park that people want to see in numbers and have the seats available to pack them in. Obviously there’s no point putting in more seats to leave empty – that’s counter productive – and there’s no point putting them in with the ‘Field of Dreams’ style hope – if you build it, they will come. Not to watch Doncaster Rovers in the FA Cup they won’t!

A hat tip to Ian at Aston Villa News & Views for spotting that an artist’s impression of an expanded Villa Park had to be included in England’s bid book for the 2018 World Cup. This picture appeared in a slide show of stadium pictures in the News of the World:-

Nothing final I’m sure, but not too shabby. Fill in the corners, slap a new roof on and make it pretty on the outside. Whatever they do, it can’t look any worse than what we have now!

I don’t have a picture to hand of the current stadium from a similar angle, but I do have a 3D model which I can position however I like. This is pretty accurate:-

It will be very interesting to see attendances next season, especially in the Europa League – assuming we make into the competition proper this time – as that is bound to have a very real influence on how plans proceed.

At the risk of labouring the point; there’s no point expanding the stadium if you can’t fill it. So, Aston Villa versus Barcelona in the Champions League semi-final… think we could sell out a 50K seat stadium?

Yeah, so do I!

[Photo Credits: News of the World and Sunday Mercury]