I disagree entirely. The numbers your team gets when playing each away means everything about how big a drawcard your team is. What you're suggesting in effect is that the opposition has no bearing on how large the crowd is.
That's right, we don't know the proportion of supporters at each game, something that is especially difficult when two Vic clubs play each other. Another reason why it is facile to ascribe every spectator to the home team alone and ignore all the away supporters, which is what you do if you only look at the home totals.
Home numbers only is a perfectly good way to compare non Vic teams. But for Vic teams home and away games in Melbourne have become virtually indistinguishable. Every game has an abundance of general admission tickets available. Over 40% of the MCG's capacity is taken up by the MCC and AFL member areas, who don't care at all about whose home game it is. And as pointed out above, we now even have the concept of replacement games which allow free entry to away members.
If you switch the 'home' and 'away' games for Collingwood against Essendon and Melbourne this year the overall crowds wouldn't change a bit, but our home total would suddenly jump 10%. By your criteria Collingwood would suddenly be a much bigger team this year when in reality nothing really changed at all. You can run the same argument for the Dreamtime game etc.
Nail on head.
It strikes me that some Richmond fans don't want to consider away numbers because Richmond have been decidedly poor in this area for over 60 years. In fact they come in a long way behind Collingwood, Essendon and Carlton over that period and are only ahead of Hawthorn by the skin of their teeth. This holds true
even when you only count years in which Richmond made the finals. They're 22% behind Collingwood and 10% behind Carlton and Essendon even in just their successful years and a frankly embarrassing 30% behind the Pies when you count every season. Let's also not forget that for half of those 65 years (and in most of the years that Richmond made the finals) the away fixtures were virtually identical for each club.
The difference has to be mainly a combination of two factors:
1. Richmond fans don't show up to away games in as large numbers as the other big clubs
2. Opposition supporters do not show up to home games against Richmond in as large numbers as they do for the other big clubs
Whatever % you apply to each factor, it means the same thing in the end for Richmond's drawing ability.
By way of illustration of all of this over long post (can you tell it's a slow work day?), here is the % effect that each team has on the average home game attendance for every other club:
View attachment 398027
In case it's not clear you read down your team's column to see how your team affects the average home attendance for the club listed on the left.
Figures are 2000 onwards.
You can see why a lot of clubs request home games against the likes of Collingwood, and also see how little difference any team makes to WC games. Will be interesting to see how that changes with the new stadium.
As ever there are going to be anomolies in that table (home games in Tassie, NT etc) but I'm not going to accept that the kind of numbers shown for sides like my own are down to pure chance and should be disregarded.