"At a Premiership game 30,000 is a great crowd"
August 01, 2014
GAA President Liam O'Neill
A crowd of just 35,000 is expected for Sunday's quarter-final double header featuring Mayo V Cork and Kerry V Galway. This pales in comparison to the 63,446 who flocked to last year's corresponding games involving the Connacht and Munster champions.
There has been a dramatic decrease in the number of people travelling to Munster, Connacht and Qualifier football matches this summer but GAA president Liam O'Neill insists the crowds at HQ are still respectable:
"It's interesting how people view playing at Croke Park. People say that people don't want to play here but when it comes to semi-finals, that's the only place to be," he comments in The Irish Examiner.
"I'd say the only way you could play quarter- or semi-finals elsewhere would be by agreement or if it happened that you had two counties that were geographically well located to be in a different stadium and the crowd wouldn't be such that you'd justify opening Croke Park.
"You have to realise there were All-Ireland semi-finals played in front of paltry crowds in Croke Park 20-25 years ago. It's amazing now that the size of the crowd and people's perception of the size of the crowd is based on the capacity of the stadium.
"People would say 30,000 is a bad crowd here. Thirty thousand is a great crowd at any game, isn't it? At a Premiership game 30,000 is a great crowd.
"What has happened since we started moving games here is that people start counting from the top down rather than the bottom up and we had have some fantastic crowds, 60,000 was a fantastic crowd for the Leinster football final. Almost 63,000. That was a fantastic crowd but people look at the stadium and say it holds 82,000 so 63,000 is kind of down but I think that the crowds at the moment are fantastic." Tweet
