05-05-2025
Munster SFC attendance slightly down from last year's total
The total attendance figure for this year's Munster SFC - 33,491 - was less than that which watched the drawn Munster final of 10 years ago.
In the latest sign of the dwindling interest in the Munster football championship, the total attendance figure for the 2025 edition represented a slight decrease on last year's 35,823 equivalent.
More worrying and, indeed, more telling, however, is that the overall 33,491 figure is smaller than the 35,651 which attended the 2015 Munster final drawn game between Cork and Kerry at Fitzgerald Stadium.
The replay crowd of 32,233 wasn't far off either from standing taller than the combined total from this year's five-game series.
Of the two provincial football finals played on Sunday, the crowd in Killarney was less than half the 27,137 that paid in for Galway-Mayo in Castlebar.
The Munster final crowd of 13,181, while bigger than the Kerry-Clare deciders of the past two years at Ennis (12,059) and Limerick (12,499) respectively, was still 59% down on the last non-Covid Munster football final - 2017- to take place in Killarney.
It is now seven years - stretching back to the 2018 Cork-Kerry final at Páirc Uí Chaoimh - that a Munster football fixture has drawn a crowd in excess of 20,000. The average per game attendance for 2025 equates to a paltry 6,700.
Writing in Sunday's match programme, Munster chairman Tim Murphy accepted there is a body of work to be done to make their provincial football championship more attractive than is currently the case.
'Over recent years much has been said and written about the competitiveness and non-competitiveness of Munster football.
"The Munster Football Championship received a badly needed boost two weeks ago when we witnessed an exhilarating semi-final clash between Cork and Kerry. The game, which went to extra-time, had everything that is good about Gaelic Football.
'The new rules are certainly contributing to the improvements, but it is incumbent on us as a provincial council to review and consider what we can do better to further enhance Gaelic Football as a spectacle within Munster and create the conditions and structures necessary to improve and enhance the game for players and spectators alike.
'We will be discussing this and working on what we can do to achieve the best possible outcome over the coming weeks and months.'
