WE ARE FORGING A UNIQUE IDENTIFY FFS - WE'VE BEEN IN THIS LEAGUE FOR LESS THAN THREE YEARS!!!

In a city like Melbourne where Melbourne Victory is already broadbased and not from a specific geographical region you can't just simply base Heart in the "South" or "South East" and expect that region to just adopt Heart as their team. Victory has had 5 years of exclusive access to ALL OF VICTORIA!
In Sydney, even when SFC was the sole team, hardly anyone from the west could actually relate to SFC because it was always perceived as an Eastern Sydney side. Sydney IS a city which can be split into East and West and even North and South because of that big mass of water splitting the city in half and stretching it out to the western mountain ranges.
Melbourne's built AROUND the bay where the CBD IS the centre of the city (although the geographical centre has kinda drifted out to Burwood now because of expansion).

Why should Heart alienate anyone from the North or West or even East by basing themselves in the South or South East when Victory gets access to the whole of Melbourne (if not Victoria (& Tasmania))?

GIVE MELBOURNE HEART TIME. It is still an infant in the football world. With infants you will get teething issues, but as the kid starts to find its own two feet and create its own unique identity, it will continue to grow. Give the kid a chance to grow FFS before you write it off!

Let’s forget about SMFC for awhile and focus on what Heart can do to improve its situation.

I firmly believe that they need to focus on one area of Melbourne so they have a firm identity. As an example, they could target the northern suburbs. It kind of makes sense since they have set up camp there to an extent. After a quick Wikipedia search, I found out that there are more or less 1.1M people to build a team around (see image).



Targeting this will allow them to deploy their limited marketing resources to a smaller area, thus having more impact.
-They could target every school and every football club in the area and do clinics. Less schools and clubs hence they can spend more time at each of them; will be far more effective.
-All their e-marketing can be location based.

They can still play out of Swan St in the short term, but should look to redevelop Preston over the next few years (or somewhere else?), perhaps with some help from the council so it can host games with low crowd-pulling power. Over time, they can slowly improve the facility as the club grows, and build a social club so Heart is accessible to the public.

Having a local ground is important for a number of reasons:
-People will feel more connected to the club
-The small games will have a much better atmosphere than being played out at an empty Swan St stadium.
-Imagine a Heskey or a Del Piero playing in the burbs? That will get the whole joint pumping!
-More people are likely to go to the game as it will be cheaper and easier to get to.
-Get local businesses involved to provide good food on match day, rather than the expensive crap that's dished up to a captive market at Swan St.

None of this is radical; it’s pretty much what WSW is doing. And if you can’t get a decent following from 1.1M people then you are getting the fundamentals wrong. Newcastle are averaging 12,000 people this year from a population of 300,000.

Melbourne Heart need to bite the bullet and go north and gain an identity.

There's much more of course, but this is a start. What does everyone else think?

By Vince Rugari, 12 Dec 2012.

..........without Beckham, the red and white outfit might be hurtling towards a fate that was perhaps eerily dictated by their selection of a Stoke-inspired home shirt – mediocrity and irrelevance.Or worse still, extinction.

If crowds don’t pick up immediately, if not sooner, then their stadium deal will eventually eat them whole.

By jamesb, 11 Dec 2012

In effect, Heart has cannibalised into Victory’s supporter base. There hasn’t been any new supporters coming into the A-League. That is hugely disappointing.

Michael Lynch December 12, 2012

........its crowds are stubbornly refusing to increase with its growth as a club in three seasons.

Les Murray 12 Dec 2012

.............the club’s identity, its distinctive place in Melbourne’s sporting culture, is becoming more and more difficult to pinpoint

MVFC Forum

1) Ignoring the promised $15m football facility at Casey Fields in favour of the wheelie bins at bundoora
2) Wasting $800k a year on that overrated dutch tanning booth addict
3) The laughable naming competition that they ran when Melbourne Heart was always gonna be the name
4) Hiring the inexperienced John Aloisi rather than the far more experienced Ante Milicic
5) The fire sale at the end of last season
But most importantly, they lack ambition. And the fans know it.
Nothing Melbourne Heart has done says to me that they're serious about winning anything.
Until they decide that they're an A-League club, that they're serious about winning the whole damned thing and that they're willing to pony up the cash required to build a proper, long-term, title winning side, they will never grow their support base.

I'm not having a go at Heart fans. They have my utmost admiration for putting up with this sh** for so long. I sincerely hope they stick by the club.

But there are some serious changes that need to be made in the clubs direction and some serious heat has to be put on the the people making the decisions at that club. Not just for the Hearts sake, but that of the league.

NUFCMVFC
Howay Newcastle
Join Date Jan 2007

Big questions has to be asked of the FFA, no proper discernment here, they put Heart in because of an ill defined marketing logic that the Melbourne "market" is big enough for two teams, then they opted for the Heart franchise over an organic Melburnian entity which offers the only possible distinction to MVFC (which is the SMFC/Southern Cross outfit) pretty much because Frank Lowy probably has some old soccer issues with them and wants them to die or whatever

Perhaps the saddest thing of all is, as long as Heart is here (and there are political reasons for the FFA to subsidise their place - at least as long as Lowy's reign lasts), they are taking the place of and preventing a genuinely Melburnian entity that has spawned from the community from taking its place

My issue is with some non-Heart fans (better?) having selective reading. You (in general) choose to rebut and attack the less relevant arguments to deflect any attention from the arguments that have more relevance and are harder for you to argue.

Then people wonder how this thread has gone over 110+ pages - Arthuer, Chris and Benjamin keep recycling long posts and quoting them over and over again....

Then people wonder how this thread has gone over 110+ pages - Arthuer, Chris and Benjamin keep recycling long posts and quoting them over and over again....

Because those on the other side of the argument NEVER do that, do they..? Or should I say, YOU never do that, do you? Because a quick check back over the last few pages shows numerous posts, by you, repeating fairly long comments... In one case only to add a couple of smiley faces.

;)

I disagree. Here is something I posted a while back - my take on things:

Because like I said, several people including yourself have selective reading and when I make any valid and factual points you ignore them and choose to rebut other useless points to deflect any attention from the points SMFC fans just can't argue with! :d

It's not 'selective reading' - it's selective answering - I only tend to respond to posts I think are full of sh*t. You posts (I've just checked through a couple) seem to be fairly reasonable. Your general theme (correct me if I'm wrong) appears to be that Heart will grow if we give them time - my point is that WE can give them forever, but if the money runs out so do they. It doesn't matter what WE (Heart, South, Victory or neutral) think - this is a money game and Heart are losing money. So long as the investors are happy with that, it's fine.

The Heart simply need to die, the sooner the better.

If we're to have a second team in Melbourne, it needs to be a real club.

Sorry for making you read all that, the liverpool game starts at 7 and i needed to waste some time :lol:

The Heart simply need to die, the sooner the better.

If we're to have a second team in Melbourne, it needs to be a real club.

Yes, because EVERY SINGLE PERSON, mum, dad, child, infant, teenager, uni student, unemployed, etc of the 1.1M in that region will not only go for the one team (Heart), but they'll also become members and/or attend matches at AAMI Park! And ALL the current Victory fans from that region will just simply jump ship or move out of the area because now Heart is based that region! #-o

The traditionalist's answer to this statement is - if a 'real' club is what you are after as a second club then who is the first club??? Cos of you read/believe the commentary Victory are just the same as Heart but Blue and were 5 years previous.

I thank all for their interest in the Melbourne Clubs of the A-league but everything is fine... back to whatever you were doing prior to these 112 pages of drivel.

no its more just how can you appeal to the melbourne market when its obvious the market obviously targeted towards greeks and not the people living in south melbourne.

Don't get me wrong, you can still brag about your strong history, sign a couple greek players and sell souvlakis at the game but if you were to remain a greek club and join the HAL, it would undermine everything this league was built upon and that . So that IMO is the biggest obstacle to overcome in the coming years till the next expansion time is to become more inclusive to the wider market while still keeping your mainly greek base.

What a hysterical post.

Representing an area will give your club identity, which you mostly lack at the moment. If you can't garner a following out of 1.1M people then you are doing something wrong. Most other A-League clubs have far less people to draw support from and they are doing better than your club.

Heart needs to look after itself and not worry what Victory supporters do. If your club embeds itself into a community properly then support will come.

A hysterical post? Why? Because I'm picking the flaws in your argument? It's quite a logical post I think.

Why restrict Heart to a 1.1m populations whilst potentially alienating the other 3m people in Melbourne? We are MELBOURNE Heart and I prefer the catchment area of 4m+.

Re: the sentence I've highlighted in bold - Heart IS looking after itself and it IS gradually (albeit slowly) embedding itself into the Melbourne community and yes, I agree, the support will come ;)

How's that working out for you?

Quite well actually. The two season-opening rounds where Heart had the home game we got around 11,000k and that was against CCM and NIX so we know there are plenty of Heart fans out there

How's that working out for you?

Hard to disagree and politely put. To the layman, South Melbourne Hellas continue to be a mono ethnic club. It has on record ethnic tensions supported by a community that preferred to chant Hellas and selfishly cater for their own.

South Melbourne Hellas (as their supporters prefer to be called) still find it hard or unwilling to leave their mono ethnic enclave and as the riots of 2005 with Preston Macedonia confirm, still have ethnic tensions amongst its group of supporters.

As you rightly pointed out it would be at least a couple of more TV contracts away before Hellas is ready for mainstream (providing the commence to broaden now), and with the time lost to date that would make it about a generation. That's what I've been saying all along, at least another one or two generations before its ready to join rest of Australia. But I am being a bit optimistic about the Greek club.

Nope. Victory had a definition. They were the Melbourne A-League side - representing MELBOURNE.

Heart on the other hand have no such definition - they are a Melbourne A-league side, same as the already established Victory. They represent... Melbourne, an area already represented by Victory.

Victory, whether we support them or not, don't need any more of an identity than they began with - and the best attendances in the A-League are all the proof you need. Heart, on the other hand, with one of the worst average attendances in the league, need something to hang their hat on.

This, heart fans need to stop deluding themselves. They have made an abortion out of a second club in melbourne, which should be a big team in a catchment of 4m, every other club in the league get's signifigantly better crowds per population than them. Stop whinging about Victory having 5 years head start or that you just need to start winning, what happens after this mythical series of results and all the crowds plummet again? Until Munt ends the fantasy of being a team for 'all of melbourne' which isn't and will never work and turns into a source of pride for a specific part of melbourne, nothing will improve.

First ever game and double header with the VPL GF

Smfc will assist with the next tv contract if it is tier 1

It will obviously add more content
It will provide diversity and a new market
It will be the collingwood of this game attracted ring new viewers
The brand is nationally known and will generate awareness

In my view rust smfc will add more value to the net tv deal than what the game would achieve without smfc

Like i said - in a market saturated with New Franchises across many sports - the re introduction of a familiar brand would be a welcomed change

The franchise model has been cheapened dramatically recently