Calling all Swans fans. Here is a challenge for you … collectively number 45,001 for Sunday week’s SCG blockbuster against Geelong. Please.

This is an attendance that would send already booming 2024 crowd figures to a new level. It would take the season average beyond 40,000 for the first time.

Better still, why not target 46,323? That’s the all-time SCG record set when the Swans, led by four goals from Lance Franklin and 29 possessions from Josh Kennedy, beat Essendon by 65 points in the 2017 elimination final.

All this comes about as SCG crowds boom this year.

Through five home games the average SCG crowd is 39,000 exactly. It’s the best season average all time, having gone past the 35,818 of 1997 – after the club “arrived” to play in the grand final in 1996.

The Round 11 turnout against Carlton of 44,047 was the biggest this year and the fifth-biggest all-time. The Round 9 derby against GWS pulled 40,337, and the season-opener against Melbourne 40,012, with 34,954 against Essendon and 35,649 against Gold Coast in between.

The other games between this year’s Carlton game and the 2017 record against Essendon were the Round 22 game of 1997 against Geelong (46,168), the 2022 preliminary final against Collingwood (45,608) and the 2022 Round 22 game against Collingwood five weeks earlier (44,659).

The Round 14, 1996 game against Geelong was the first to crash through the 40,000-mark.

Both sides were 9-1-3 after 13 games, sitting third and fourth on the ladder, before the Swans, in their first season under Rodney Eade, delighted the huge turnout with an 18.17 (125) to 11.8 (74) win.

Paul Roos, in his 303^rd game overall, had 33 possessions to pick up three votes in the Brownlow Medal, while Tony Lockett, in his 216^th game, kicked six goals. The veteran pair went on to poll 14 votes in the Brownlow Medal to finish tied for 14^th behind joint winners Michael Voss and James Hird (21).

Fifteen games at the SCG have topped 40,000. Interestingly, they were spread over seven distinctly different time-slots – Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday afternoon, twilight and night, and Sunday early afternoon and late afternoon.

For the sake of this comparison exercise, Swans games at Stadium Australia have been excluded. The biggest crowd there was 72,393 in Round 21, 2003 when the Sydney Swans hosted Collingwood – which remains Sydney’s biggest home crowd.

Finals against Fremantle (2006) and GWS (2016) topped 60,000, a 2016 final against GWS topped 50,000 and finals against North Melbourne (2014), Carlton (2010) and West Coast (2004) topped 40,000.