Big crowds will keep coming: Bulldogs
As ticket sales for Friday night's NRL preliminary final shoot over the 67,000-mark, Bulldogs boss Todd Greenberg believes his club can notch similar figures in the regular season.
A capacity crowd is expected at the 82,000-seat ANZ Stadium for the match against traditional rivals Parramatta, with pre-match sales ensuring records will tumble.
The high mark for a finals match in Sydney - excluding grand finals - is 57,973, set back in 1963 between St George and the Eels at the SCG.
Rugby league has long been AFL's poor cousin in terms of crowd numbers, but Greenberg said similar numbers could be achieved in the NRL regular season at ANZ, where his club plays home games.
"Absolutely, certainly part of our vision is to make sure that with a strong membership program we can have the ability to jag big attendance numbers regularly throughout a season for marquee matches," he told AAP on Wednesday.
"We started this year by getting our first 40,000 game ever in Sydney for a club game (in round 25 for Hazem El Masri's farewell).
"If you work hard enough at it and you have the right strategy and you stick to it ... I think it can be done."
Greenberg said the Bulldogs hoped to average 30,000 in five years' time and felt the sky was the limit after that.
"Our membership program in that time should be 15,000-plus and then, if you sell a similar number of tickets that you're selling now, we should be averaging 30,000 and we should be aiming for that," he said.
"That's the thing about playing some big stadia, you've got to make sure you aim for the stars and you've got to try to land some big bullets.
"We've done a few of those this year, we've got to do some more of them next year."
Greenberg's vision would appear to put paid to any chance of the Dogs returning to their spiritual home of Belmore Sportsground, which they left a decade ago for Sydney Olympic Park.
The club are hoping to turn their dilapidated former home into a state of the art training and administration facility - similar to South Sydney's redeveloped Redfern Oval - and have applied for federal government funding.
Eels fans have snapped up 52 per cent of the tickets for Friday's grand final playoff, with Bulldogs fans buying 48 per cent, the NRL said on Wednesday.
More than 13,000 tickets are still available for the game and organisers are hopeful of an official sell-out.
The NSW Government have already announced the match has been given major event status, meaning all tickets to the game will include travel on public transport.
"With such a large crowd converging on ANZ Stadium, we would encourage all fans to plan their trip and arrive early as there is nothing worse than getting stuck in traffic or in a line outside when the game has kicked off," NRL chief operating officer Graham Annesley said.
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