el punal
Well-known member
I don’t know. Perhaps someone has this information. I’d have have thought, judging by the way the FA usually keep so many tickets for officials and guests etc, that it would have been unlikely to exceeed 35,000 but I don’t know.
The official attendance in the replay was 91,534. I was there and stood in the upper tier of the Albion end but remember that the lower tier had quite a lot of United fans. So our end wasn’t completely full with Brighton as it should have been.
As for the 1950’s game with Fulham at the Goldstone with over 36,500 fans, that does depend on how many came down from London to support Fulham. We can’t know that but does anyone know what the general trend of away fans travelling to watch football in the 1950’s was? From the 1970’s onwards Goldstone fixtures against most London clubs always attracted very large away followings but I’m unsure about the numbers of away fans in the 60’s and 50’s.
In the 1960s going to away games wasn’t a big deal apart from local derbies or grudge matches - I seem to remember naughtiness at the Goldstone when Portsmouth and Luton came a’calling. So, I would imagine Fulham wouldn’t have had many of their fans at the match in 1958 when we had our record attendance. Even in our successful seasons in the 1970s when I went to away games the Albion following was almost one man and his dog! Admittedly, the big matches made up for it in spades - all the London fixtures, and the League Cup games at Forest and Derby for starters.