Bristol club move women’s team to main stadium for whole season after 9,400 turn up

A Bristol club has become the first in Premiership Women’s Rugby to commit to playing an entire season at its main stadium, after its opening home game on Saturday drew 9,400 spectators to a ground the club had expected to half-fill at best.

The women’s team had been due to play six of their 10 home games at a training ground with a capacity of 2,500, with the remaining four at the club’s 27,000-seat stadium. After Saturday’s crowd, which was the largest for a women’s club match in England outside a final, the club announced on Monday that all 10 would be played at the main ground, with tickets priced at £8 for adults and £3 for children.

“We have been guessing at what the demand is for three years and we have been guessing low every time,” said the club’s chief executive, Rebecca Thorn. “Saturday told us to stop guessing. If 9,400 people come to a league game in October, we should not be asking them to stand in a field in February.”

The surge follows England’s win at the Women’s Rugby World Cup last year, which drew a record television audience, and a marketing campaign built around the club’s two World Cup winners, the flanker Hollie Dunwoody and the scrum-half Beth Carragher. Dunwoody, who scored twice in Saturday’s 38-12 win over a Midlands club, said she had “played in front of 9,000 at a World Cup and I would not have believed you if you had told me I would do it at a league game”.

The move is not without cost. The club estimates that opening the main stadium for a women’s game costs about £45,000 in stewarding, catering and utilities against ticket income that, at Saturday’s prices, came to just under £60,000. “We make a small profit on a good day and a small loss on a bad one,” Thorn said. “That is fine. We lose money on the men’s team, too.”

The league’s other eight clubs play most of their home games at smaller grounds, and two have said they will review their plans. The Rugby Football Union, which runs PWR, said it “hoped others would follow” but that it would not require clubs to use their main stadiums, arguing that a half-empty large ground was “worse for the players than a full small one”.

Carragher, who is from Bristol and used to watch the men’s team from the terraces as a child, said the atmosphere on Saturday had been “the same noise, the same songs, just about us”. The team’s next home game, against a Gloucestershire side on 24 October, had sold 6,000 tickets by Monday afternoon.