Home crowds surge by 134 per cent in seven years

Take a moment to wind the calendar back to the end of the One New Zealand Warriors’ 2019 NRL season.

It’s Saturday, September 7, at GIO Stadium in Canberra, the last round of the regular season.

The Raiders are locked into the top four and will go on to make the grand final. The Warriors are desperate for an upset to provide a positive end to a tough campaign – and they deliver, coming back from 12-20 down to win 24-20 with a Blake Green try four minutes from time.

After making the finals for the first time in seven years in 2018, the Warriors had slipped to finish 13th on the ladder in what would prove to be their last match before being pitched into an unholy existence exiled in Australia for the next three seasons.

Behind that season-ending win was evidence of how challenging that season had been. It could be found in the cold facts at the turnstiles with the Warriors’ 11 games played in New Zealand drawing a total attendance of 152,144, an average of just 13,831 a game.

The best crowd of the year was 18,795 for the season-opening win over the Bulldogs, the lowest a grim 9595 when the Warriors held off top eight side Manly Warringah 24-16 late in August.

So leap forward to the here and now, September 2026, to both compare and digest the magnitude of an utterly phenomenal transformation.

The storyline has been established this week as the One New Zealand Warriors reflect on the best-supported season in the club’s existence.

They sold out 13 NRL games at four different stadiums throughout New Zealand – including the country’s two biggest venues – culminating in the crowd of 48,511 for last Sunday’s final at Eden Park, a record for the biggest attendance for a rugby league match in New Zealand (previously 47,363 for the Rugby League World Cup final at Eden Park in 1988).

Dig a little deeper and the total attendance for the season delivered two more club records for home games – the highest total attendance of 356,235 (up from 279,524 in 2025) and a club-best average crowd of 27,403. That represents a 134 per cent increase in the home crowd aggregate since the last pre-Covid season in 2019.

Combining total attendances for home and away, the Warriors broke through the 600,000 mark for the third time in four seasons moving up from 606,320 (27 games) in 2023 to 618,170 (25 games) last year and now 667,592 (26 games) this season. This year’s total marks an 82 per cent increase on the combined attendance in 2019.

Before 2023, the Warriors had only twice bettered 500,000 for total crowds achieved in their grand final seasons in 2011 (575,415 in 28 games)  and 2002 (507,410 in 27 games).

Crowds in New Zealand in 2026