Critic: What about in Japan? There the Premier League is really, really popular and yet so is their domestic league. If the EPL is bad for domestic Asian leagues then why is the J League so popular?
SEPLCiA: It depends what you mean by "popular". We're not going to be totally blinkered and say that the J League isn't popular; it is – at least by Asian standards. But let's have a look at some figures. The most recent figures we can find for a whole season is for 2009. In that season, the average attendance was 19,126. Pretty good (although, remove Urawa Reds and the figure drops to around 15,000) but just under the 19, 827 acheived by the Eredivisie in the Netherlands. The Netherlands, a football-mad country, has a population of 16 million. Japan, an equally football-mad country which had the added boost of recently co-hosting the World Cup, has a population of 130 million. That 19,126 figure begins to lose some of its lustre.
So far in the 2011 season in the J League Division 1 (the top division), we find 12 of the 18 teams have recorded attendances of under 8,000. The average home attendance so far in 2011 is 15,107. Only two teams average home attendances of over 20,000.
Drop down a division to J. League Division 2 and the 'popularity' argument loses even more force. The average attendance in 2009 was 7,072, fewer than the Uzbek League. In 2011, the average so far is 6,314 with the lowest attendance of 1,273 recorded by Mito Holyhock. The best supported club in Tokyo – a city of 13 million people – is F.C Tokyo who are currently averaging 16,436. Tokyo's second club, Tokyo Verdy, averages 5,758 with a low of 2,164.
Yes, the J. League is popular compared with many in the region. But most stadiums are still usually only half full. There are clearly a lot of fans not supporting their local leagues.
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