LEINSTER HAVE CONFIRMED that Saturday’s United Rugby Championship meeting with Munster at Croke Park on Saturday has sold out.
Over 82,000 spectators will line the stands at GAA Headquarters for the 170th instalment of the sides’ fierce interprovincial rivalry, which will kick off at 5:45pm.
It’s the second time in five months that Leinster have sold out Croke Park having done the same for their Champions Cup semi-final victory over Northampton back in May.
Saturday will also mark the second time that Leinster and Munster have met at Croker, the first taking place 15 years ago when the eastern province beat their southern neighbours in a Heineken Cup semi.
That epochal fixture in 2009 broke a world record for the largest ever attendance at a club rugby match with 82,208 people jammed into the Jones’ Road venue.
While that record was overtaken by the 2016 French Top 14 final (Racing beat Toulon in front of over 99,000 spectators at Barcelona’s Camp Nou), this Saturday’s interpro will comfortably set a new bar for the URC or any of the league’s previous iterations.
The largest previous matchday attendance came in 2016, when over 68,000 spectators showed up for the ‘Judgement Day’ Welsh doubleheader at the Principality Stadium. The record for an individual league game, meanwhile, is 56,344, which was set during Munster’s URC final victory over the Stormers at DHL Stadium in Cape Town in 2023.
The previous attendance record for a URC regular-season fixture was set in March of this year when just over 50,000 people took in the South African derby between the Bulls and Stormers at Loftus Versfeld, Pretoria.
