Talk:2024 Norwegian First Division

NIFS not reliable?

The attendance figure from Lyn-Vålerenga is 24,003 according to NIFS, which is wrong according to NFF. I would trust NFF more on this issue, so I therefore question the reliability of NIFS in this regard, and maybe even in general. How do they come up with their number? @Sørhaug, @SailingHobbit. Geschichte (talk) 09:44, 17 June 2024 (UTC)

A sponsor of Lyn bought 1,100 tickets for a part of the stadium that was closed off due to renovation. It is mentioned here. NFF included those tickets and NIFS did not. Sørhaug (talk) 10:00, 17 June 2024 (UTC)

What @Sørhaug said, it's also worth mentioning that NFF for some reason have gone back and forth on whether to count the unavailable sold tickets, I have seen both numbers on their site multiple times. NIFS get their numbers from NFF, it is possible they have made a decision to not include the extra tickets either way or that they simply haven't caught that NFF changed their official numbers yet again. Personally I lean towards not including the extra tickets either way. SailingHobbit (talk) 23:12, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

When it comes to NIFS' reliability in general they are perfectly reliable. They are a project ran by NTB, Norway's largest wire service who in turn are co-owned by most established Norwegian media companies. SailingHobbit (talk) 23:18, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

I remembered that in the 90s, they manually counted every attendee who passed through the tills. Later, they changed the figure from "people present" to "tickets sold" in order to include all season ticket holders automatically. This has not been entirely uncontroversial. It will be a challenge to become aware of each individual instance where extra tickets are bought. Also, in many cases when sponsors buy tickets in bulk, they are actually used by someone, at least in part. Furthermore, since the number 25,103 has been introduced by NFF, and stands a good chance of being included in various lists across the Internet, it should be mentioned in one way or the another. Geschichte (talk) 07:57, 21 June 2024 (UTC)

Agreed on the need for it to be mentioned, but the difference between this and regular sponsor-bought tickets that may or may not be used is that these seats were physically impossible to use, they were simply bought to symbolically sell out the stadium. Attendance numbers are always overcounted when counting based on tickets sold, but I feel there is a difference between counting sold seats that the persons purchasing could actually use if they wanted to and non-existent seats. SailingHobbit (talk) 02:37, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

Personally I think it would be best to use the NIFS figure in the tables with a note explaining the situation seeing as they are a) a reliable source and b) the one used for the tables (will make it more complicated to manually have to add the difference each time updating the Lyn and league totals), but I can see the case for using NFF's official numbers. In any case the competing numbers should probably be mentioned in the main text about the record being broken. SailingHobbit (talk) 02:47, 23 June 2024 (UTC)