Irb Defends Sevens World Cup Crowds
IRB CEO Brett Gosper has claimed the low crowd attendance at the Rugby World Cup Sevens in Moscow is secondary to the significance of bringing the sport to new regions.
The tournament, in which New Zealand triumphed in both the men’s and women’s competitions, was staged at the Luzhniki Stadium which has a capacity of 50,000. Organisers had hoped that with the sport becoming more popular ahead of its inclusion in the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, a large crowd would gather for each of the three days. However the majority of matches were played in front of sparse audiences.
Gosper said the attendance levels were not a disaster and the significance of hosting the tournament in Russia, not a traditional rugby nation, was of greater importance: ‘We came to Moscow to take the game to another part of the world, where the sport is developing strongly but is still in its infancy, Gosper said. We’re probably a touch disappointed. We would have liked to have seen a few more people in the crowd, but we’ve been pushing 20000 a day for this stadium.’
Gosper added: ‘We could have made a choice and put this in a smaller stadium and burst the seams of a 20000-seat stadium, but in Russia doing it in this stadium sends out an enormous signal to the Russians that this is a sport that is really top level. It has an iconic value in that representation.’
