Massaging the figures

Attendance figures are never announced at Turkish football games and so I was slightly surprised at seeing a post on Nathan's Fenerbahce blog comparing crowds at various teams.

As you can see in the table, originally published by Today's Zaman, Fener gets the biggest crowds in. The rest is pretty pathetic.

But my question is where on earth do they get the figures and also just what do some of the terms mean.

First up, lets take a look at Genclerbirligi. According to the table Gencler has had 10,238 people on average at its games. I'm not sure we have even hit a crowd of 10,000 this year, let alone be averaging above it. Then there is the figure under the title "Maximum fans". What the hell does "maximum fans" mean.

If it is the highest attendance this year then they are well wrong. As I said before the biggest crowd we have had was probably 10,000 and that includes the away fans. In any case, the capacity of the 19 Mayis stadium is only 20,000, less than what the table says is our "maximum fans".

Then there is the fact that Gencler are above Ankaragucu on the average number of fans per match column (300 less than Gencler), with maximum fans put at 13,000. The only way that Ankaragucu could be said to have had less fans at matches would be if you include the not infrequent times when they are ordered to play behind close doors, even then I'd still say they get more fans in.

The only way I can think that Gencler has so many fans is that they count every single season ticket holder as attending every single match, which is clearly a load of bollocks.

So how the hell did they put this together. As the quote says, "there are lies and statistics", not sure what which category this study should be classified under.