Bordeaux winning the race for crowds, too

Peter Jackson reveals his exclusive club-by-club attendances list for the regulation season in Europe's major leagues

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WHEN the sun set on the 20th century only one club could bank on home crowds running into five figures on their way to four consecutive Premiership titles.

Leicester Tigers under the dual command of Dean Richards and Martin Johnson were so far ahead of the pack off the field that nobody back then, not least of all Toulouse, came even remotely close to matching their support.

During the season straddling the end of one millennium and the start of another, average attendances of more than 12,691 offered incontrovertible evidence that the biggest beast in the business had a striped Pied Piper of their own on the prowl around Welford Road every other weekend.

The best supported of the rest, Northampton Saints, lagged more than 5,000 behind. Toulouse, top of a modest French pile, had to make do with crowds barely half the size of Leicester's.

Brive, whose all-court game had left Leicester chasing shadows all over Cardiff Arms Park in the 1997 Heineken Cup final, had lost so much of their glitter that three years later attendances at the Stade Amedee Domenech failed to reach 6,000.

In Paris, Stade Francais went about their business in a state of permanent loneliness as if next to nobody in the teeming capital knew they existed. One of the few who did, an entrepreneur by the name of Max Guazzini, spotted not merely a gap in the market but one with room for a whole new ball game.

He would do for club rugby in France and beyond what Phineas T Barnum had done for showmanship in America. Guazzini's stylish jazzing of a staid old club transformed Stade from Les Miserables playing in front of fewer than 3,000 to more than 34,000 on the biggest stage in the country.