Last season, more than 3,250,920 fans attended Jupiler Pro League matches. This is an increase of no less than 200,000 spectators, bringing the average attendance per match to 10,410, a figure close to that before the COVID-19 pandemic. In the 2019-2020 season, the average was 10,732, but the period following the COVID-19 pandemic was marked by restrictions and a drop in spectator numbers. This trend now seems definitively reversed.
Lorin Parys, CEO of the Pro League, is delighted with these figures and describes them as the best in the last ten years. He sees this as confirmation of the attractiveness of the competition, especially since television audiences have also increased by six percent, both among the young and older target groups. “Football remains the glue that binds our society together,” Parys says optimistically.
“Comparing the full seasons, these are approximately the best figures of the last ten years,” says CEO Lorin Parys. “We are also seeing an average increase of 6% per match, an increase visible among young people, older people and everyone in between. This proves, in my opinion, that football is truly the cornstarch of our society. We bring together six out of ten Belgians around our competitions, which no one else can do.”
Lorin Parys attributes these good figures in particular to the format of the competition. “With the product we offer today, we manage to create suspense. We have a competition where everyone can beat everyone and where the suspense remains present until the end,” he explains. He takes the example of KV Kortrijk, whose last match in the Relegation play-offs sold out faster than the matches against the top clubs. This shows once again that suspense is the very essence of the Jupiler Pro League – an “unscripted drama” therefore.
“On the Pro League side, we continue to work every day to increase the number of supporters in all our competitions. So, safety in our stadiums is one of our most important priorities. Those who misbehave must be excluded So we act more quickly, more strictly and more frequently In the last two seasons we have already issued 500 years of stadium ban and I see that these troublemakers are now booed by the rest of the stadium. “It’s the beginning of a cultural change.” We are also pleading with the authorities for a stricter sanctions framework.
Additionally, intensive work is underway to reach new audiences. With each club, we individually identify people who do not yet attend our stadiums, in order to identify the “Fan of tomorrow”. This allows clubs to run even more targeted campaigns for current and future fans.
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