The code battle in Sydney’s West:

So far it’s a very even battle ----

2012-13 Western Sydney Wanders 9 games total 102,141 Average 11,349

2012 Parramatta 9 matches total 113,344 Average 12,594

2012 GWS 11 matches total 119,073 Average 10,825

And in the free tickets battle:

2012-13 Western Sydney Wanders 9 games total 102,141 Free Tickets 0

2012 Parramatta 9 matches total 113,344 Free Tickets 0

2012 GWS 11 matches total 119,073 Free Tickets 118,825

Crusader - thats a good point !!!

There is no code battle. Nobody has been asked to follow one team to the exclusion of others.

and incredibaly inaccurate

I support all 3 actually, however I am no longer the passionate parramatta fan I use to be and I'm fully behind football and the wanderers in this 'battle'

It is a battle - do you think GWS would love to sign Ono !!! They blow $2M on Folou...

even with ffa handouts and free ticket giveaways, wsw still struggling in the supposed "heartland of football"

You included GWS games played in Canberra and missed the eels games played at ANZ.

2012 GWS 8 matches (excluding 3 at Manuka Oval) - Total: 93,781, Average: 11,723
http://stats.rleague.com/afl/crowds/gws.html

2012 Eels 12 matches - Total: 201,633 Average: 16,803
http://stats.rleague.com/rl/crowds/parramatta.html

Using the average crowd of Parra seems a bit disingenuous to me. Not only were the Eels the wooden spoon, but if we are going to be accurate we would need to add the average crowds of Parra, Canterbury, Penrith, and Wests minimum to show the amount of people attending NRL matches in Western Sydney.

It's a stupid thing we football supporters do (not talking about Roberts here). We see the average of our 2 teams in Sydney, or our 2 teams in Melbourne and think they are going alright compared to the other leagues - not realising that their supporters are diluted over upwards of 10 teams (NRL in Syd, AFL in Melb). I love the A-League and it is going amazing, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Moreover, as f1 and william said, it isn't a battle for Western Sydney residents. No-one I know (and I know diehard supporters of all codes) feels they have to embrace one over the others. If we buy into it it will only hurt football, not help.

If you do not include the Canberra crowds for GWS, should the members on 3 games memberships in Canberra also be excluded from the GWS memberships? I would have thought you would need to include all "Home" games. I am not sure why they play out of Canberra if they are supposed to represent Western Sydney, besides financial gain funded by the government. North Melbourne & Western Bulldogs were doing this previously.

It would have been interesting what the WSW average would have been if the first (and even the second) derby were played out of ANZ instead of Parramatta. It appears WSW are using a strategy of sticking to their core market at their home ground to build a loyal supporter base.

NRL is the established code in the area but it will be interesting to see what becomes the second code. Early days yet for both new teams.

Edited by justafan: 9/1/2013 09:56:35 AM

The FFA-owned WSW are on track to win the championship in their very first season - and I say good luck to them - but if you can't pull a crowd in soccer heartland when you're going that well, you never will (e.g. SFC).

As for the Giants, the Australian game is relatively foreign in many parts of greater Western Sydney, so no surprise that they are rock bottom in every sense of the word.

Nevertheless, there's a glimmer of hope. Despite getting thrashed most games last season, their memberships in 2012 were 10,241.

Early January, their memberships sales for 2013 are already 6,888. So I would suggest that they are on track to surpass the 2012 number - an excellent result for a bottom team that got thrashed most games last year.

Source: http://membership.gwsgiants.com.au/

While we are excluding things....

they are all 0

also,

@misterfootball, would be good to see a breakdown of how many of those memberships are where and what type. I suppose I ask too much though.

Edited by Blackmac79: 9/1/2013 10:04:59 AM

the fact that we are in the local papers, in the daily telegraph, that parramatta know about us, that if you wear your jersey your bound to have a chat with a fellow western sydney supporter, shows that we are doing very well.
it is only our first season, so we had to get our name out there. not only have we done that, but people are still becoming members this late in the season. we are still growing.
an average over 10k is great, that was our aim, and should be every clubs aim. so we are on track for that.
got to remember that the eels have 50+ years of history here. it shows that we are doing very well when the eels players come to our game and post on twitter about the passion and that they want us at their games.

we are doing very well, and should aim to grow every season

This. But WSW progress has been very encouraging

Football heartland can only be measured when you are measuring the best/famous. Example Manchester United sold out a 80K stadium in 3 minutes playing a practice match against a team that does not even exist. Collingwood the AFL equivalent to Man U playing the lowly rank GWS, but in the best AFL competition in the world & you get 15K if lucky.

Now that is comparing football heartland.

To compare WSW to GWS is comparing the A-League (not even close to the top 20 leagues in the world) to the AFL (the best competition in the the AFL world).

You need to be very careful about comparing football to Australian rules football (AFL as promoted in Sydney) as opposed to A-League to the AFL.
In the world game, there is more than just the local product as opposed to AFL, where the local product is all there is.

Edited by robbos: 9/1/2013 10:39:50 AM

I would gladly give it if I had the details on hand.

But I recall various articles on this over the past 6 months or so.

I recall that around 1,000 members were outside of Sydney and Canberra (i.e. from Southern and Western NSW and other parts of Australia).

From memory between 3,500 and 4,000 were from Canberra, and the rest were from the Sydney metropolitan area.

Sounds like a nice way of saying ~ Half. :)

As an aside, all of Wanderers members are counted as full season ticket holders... of which there are around the number you have mentioned. So for all of GWSydneys' push and $ promotion and cut-price memberships, they haven't been able to grow far beyond what a football club, set up a few months before the season with F/A promotion and some negative press and competing against ADP across town for support, has done.

Edited by 4wanderer4: 9/1/2013 10:49:00 AM

they key thing here is to remember that the afl have planned the giants for years and have pumped a ridiculous amount of money into the project.

wsw was put together on a shoe string budget in the space of 3 months.

yes the on field success has assisted the wanderers and has hindered the giants, but all things considering, i think the wanderers are far and away the success story of the two and the afl will have a tough battle if it wants to truly make inroads in west sydney because at the end of the day, there is a limited genuine underlying supporter base to tap into and hence they have to convert new supporters to follow them.

would be interesting to see what kind of crowds the giants could pull when they start becoming competitive on the field.

Yes, when it's all said and done, the Wanderers are a success story - but don't kid yourself the AFL would have the slightest care about that.

You honestly don't think the afl would care when they have spent over $100m on something that Wsw did better with a $5m budget?

I don't understand these posts and I mean no offence by it but the A-League doesn't compete with NRL, AFL or RU. If it did, the league would be played during Winter and all teams in the HAL would have terrible attendance figures. The only sport we compete with on this scale is Cricket which is played on a different format (20/20, 5 Day series, One Day series, etc.).

No, I don't, not the least bit worried.

Why would they be worried?

They have a $250 million per annum TV deal locked in (four years to go).

They have already been able to set up their media arm, it's already turning a profit.

GWS already attracts the 3rd larges sponsorship dollars of any sporting team in Australia.

They have set themselves up in a fantastic stadium, and only need to become competitive to regularly attract 15k to games.

Why would they be worried?

Yes, I agree with that, very true - but we can't help ourselves.

Ahh yes, statistics form the same organisation that assured us there were 760 kajillion VFL players in Balmain, so no other codes should have access to playing fields. Excuse me if we all take that with a grain of salt.

What I find laughable is that the GWS VFL side actually drew better crowds in Canberra than West Sydney.

+1

Terrible comparison with NRL and regarding free tickets didn't children get in free for the CCM game? So that figure should not be 0. I think the comparison with GWS is fair and hope WSW continue to do better.

Just on a side note, Eels are well on track to get 20k membership again

Those who take the rubbery figures espoused by our resident VFL troll seriously need to remember the Birchgrove Oval fiasco

In the local AFL body's original submission to council, it was claimed they had 1644 registered players before later reducing the total to 238.

http://www.smh.com.au/rugby-league/league-news/afl-drop-birchgrove-bid-after-uproar-over-player-figures-20120724-22ntw.html

Moral of the story - All VFL figures are exaggerated by a actor of 7.

they would however be concerned that their crowd averages have significantly dropped as a result of gws and gold coast
2010: 38,417
2011: 36,933
2012: 32,748

and 2011-> 2012 with the addition of gws giants saw the net total crowds drop by a total of 460,000 even though there were 11 games more than 2011.

the afl would also be concerned that their is a growing gulf in class with clubs such as gws, gold coast and demons recording regular thumpings against themselves. they have publicly mentioned the impact this has on their tv viewership

and finally, the afl will have to continue commiting large sums such as $100m to make any progress in membership numbers for gws from a marketing budget which will be pitless. something wanderers can do on a shoe string

Edited by williamn: 9/1/2013 11:43:49 AM

Wouldn’t mind betting that a good number of all three of those crowd figures are actually the same people. Particularly with football now played in summer, and all those clubs genuinely based locally, meaning it’s easy for locals to get to games.

Sports fans are obviously the lifeblood of any professional game. There’s not many genuine sports fans around who follow one sport and one sport only. I think the “code war” thing is overblown and pretty inaccurate, any league that thinks they can completely pull a serious fan to their own game to the point where he won’t still follow other sports is pretty misguided.

WSW have made a great start. The atmosphere at the games looks electric. GWS games look underwhelming, but you can be sure about one thing, the AFL are there for the long haul. They don’t go back on expansion. They can and will underwrite the Giants for decades. They’re still doing so with the Swans, albeit now on a smaller scale. This year marked 30 years in Sydney for the Swans and they won the comp. Recorded just a $200k profit (includes AFL handouts).

The core support for GWS in western Sydney is best gauged by attendance against out of town sides played in western Sydney. The average of these games is around 8k. Even then from anecdotal reports a significant part of this 8k was away team supporters with similar numbers to those at Swans games over the years. These supporters do help the bottom line but the quantum of them is unlikely to increase over time which leaves GWS the task to build on the say 5-6k core club supporters in a market that traditionally has had virtually no interest in the code they play. 5 years of $10m a year investment in preparation for the club and 2 years of intense marketing resulted in the local support they have now. A year of good performances is unlikely to have significant effect on crowd size because the demand for AFL in the Sydney market was already satiated by the Swans. The AFL have said they see GWS as a 20 year project and they are right in that. The work they continue to put in to the grass roots will eventually pay dividends both in player numbers and fan support but it will take time to get GWS to its optimum level of support which in my opinion knowing the Sydney market will be less than Port Adelaide get now and even that will take all of the 20 year project time to achieve.