AFL must cash in on soccer rip-off
May 2, 2015 - 8:00PM

Jake Niall

Next to my local high school, there's a large public space, twice the size of two footy grounds, where the kids gather during their breaks. The demographic of this inner suburban, co-ed school is reasonably broad and increasingly educated middle class. Once working class, turned Tofu territory.

Lately, when walking to the train station, I've counted the number of soccer balls scattered across the park and compared it to the oval-shaped footballs. Disturbingly for the AFL, the ratio was almost 10 to 1 in favour of the round ball.

While this disparity doesn't completely reflect the reality, which is a more-even contest between the codes in this territory, what it revealed - or reiterated - was how easy it is to play casual soccer.

The contest between the AFL and soccer at the junior level isn't a level playing field. Soccer doesn't need as much space, nor as many players. The fact that it involves scant physical contact makes it appealing to parents in our almost hysterically safety-conscious culture. It's also easier to get girls to play soccer, which also is the game of choice for many migrants and their children. Footy, despite its multicultural and indigenous successes, is still more pale and male.

But if the demographic tide favours the global game at grass roots, there is one factor that the AFL - and the native game - can and should capitalise upon in this pitched battle. Cost.

Depending on where you're based and your aspirations, junior soccer can be a dead-set rip-off.

My youngest daughter recently joined one of the local soccer clubs, which has successfully enfranchised local girls, and has started playing for the under 12s. Watching many of these girls learn a game - acquiring skills, competitive ethos and a notion of team work/camaraderie - underscores the uplifting nature of team sports. Soccer is a brilliant game for girls.

But there was a minor minus - a small cough - when we received an invoice for the season's fees. It was just under $600 for a season with the under 12s. This is a touch steep. I don't mind paying it and can comfortably afford the slug, but this led me to wonder how the soccer economy operated, because I know parents, such as my soccer-inclined Somali neighbours, whom I'm sure would struggle to find that kind of money for one, much less for five kids.

Friends whose boys and girls play for the local junior footy club, by comparison, pay a uniform fee of $250. This is pretty typical for a junior footy team, which even if they are entirely self-sustaining, don't have to subsidise higher levels of the sport or fund the senior club. If a family can't afford the $250, this local footy club quietly offer a discount.

To play for another nearby junior soccer club - not my daughter's - requires a serious investment. One parent I spoke with, Vince, is forking out $1100 for his son's registration, the fee for most under 12s at this higher-echelon club. If his kid was assigned to the lowest of the three under-12 tiers it would still cost $800 per season. If you don't cut the mustard and make the single "elite" squad after under 12s, you have no choice - despite the money spent - than to leave and join a less-competitive "community" club.

This particular club, like many junior soccer teams across the country with unpleasantly high fees, has a senior club that competes in a high-level competition - in this case, in the National Premier League, the state league that is the second level behind the A-League. So it offers higher-quality coaching, more training and a pathway for the best players. Vince wants the best for his kid and pays. But, regardless of what's on offer, $1100 is a ridiculous amount for a team sport. This is soccer, not polo. It shouldn't be so expensive to kick a bloody ball. Who's coaching them, Jose Mourinho?

Vince's story is one you'll hear frequently from soccer parents whose kids do more than merely dabble in the global game.

Often junior soccer clubs cross-subsidise their senior teams, who pay players and have paid coaches and/or administrators. In grass-roots footy, it is almost the reverse - the money trickles down from the AFL to support the grass-roots and local leagues. Soccer is bottom-up, footy top-down, in terms of the money trail. If you progress upwards on footy's pathways - eg TAC Cup - the fees remain moderate, at $300-$400, because the coaching and infrastructure is funded by the AFL.

Football Federation Australia, conversely, receives about 10 per cent of its funding from underneath, but relies on the modest $40 million it gets from television - a fraction of the AFL's hundreds of millions.

This doesn't mean that Vince's son's dues are paying Kevin Muscat's salary - the Melbourne Victory seem relatively solvent. No, a small amount is travelling to head office, which is providing props for some A-League teams. But as an FFA insider explained, the real concern is that SOME - by no means most - junior teams have to subside their cash-thirsty senior clubs. FFA reckons the average cost of junior registration, nationwide, is $160 for juniors and $240 for seniors. Only $12 goes from each junior registered to FFA ($23 per senior rego), but soccer's state bodies also grab some cash - estimated by one insider as about $50 per registration.

Parents most vulnerable to rip-offs are those who think their moderately talented kid is going to become Harry Kewell or Tim Cahill and pay for the supposedly elite local squad - often a four-figure sum.

FFA says it has around 1.96 million participants across the country. The AFL claims about one million. All evidence points to soccer garnering more kids than the Wiggles. The AFL has identified the enormous potential of girls, knowing that this is a battleground it cannot concede. If soccer doesn't do something about the rip-offs for certain junior teams and leagues, it will hand the AFL - and NRL - a free kick. The pricing already constitutes an own goal.

Footy's mission is to convert followers of the game - nearly half of them being female - into participants. Soccer has the reverse equation, having to convert that vast army of kids and parents into consumers of the A-League.

FFA is well aware of the pricing problem, though it reckons the sport is largely accessible. On Tuesday, FFA will unveil its 20-year vision for the game. The benchmarks it has set are ambitious - to be the most popular sport in Australia, including spectators, by 2035, with 15 million, or half our projected population, having some involvement in the sport. The price of playing - and the messy thicket of fiscal arrangements between juniors, state leagues, senior teams and so forth - is on the agenda.

Soccer's problem is footy's opportunity. Don't ask for whom the ball tolls.

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/afl/afl-news/afl-must-cash-in-on-soccer-ripoff-20150502-1myjj8.html

The butthurt is strong with this bloke :lol:

Stood out for me too.

Besides that, it thought the article is accurate with only small bias towards the AFL (primarily the use of 'footy')

If FFA can sort out the price mess (football MUST be similarly price to rival codes) and make further inroads of converting participants into loyal HAL fans, football will have an unbreakable hold over the Australian market.

i couldnt make it too far into that article, painful to read

From the headline thought it was a roar article.

A new low for fairfaux ?

You might not like it but this comment is true, and we need to do more to harness this potential...

football is also a brilliant game for boys by the way, and we need to do more to harness this potential...

N.B Fees are too high...

This is an amazingly poorly written article. There's no real argument put here, it simply wastes a bunch of people's time by saying 'the AFL should probably take advantage of soccer being expensive' without outlining how. Given the reasons for parents choosing football over AFL are outlined in the article and are, largely, immutable it seems to make very little sense.

Appears to be an article written about football , with no clear contention, that's trying to be about AFL just so that it can be an article about AFL because we need more articles about AFL. Desperately.

Fucking weird.

"multicultural and indigenous successes"

Yeah righto pal. You only have to go to into the great southern stand on a Saturday and start counting how many times you hear shit like "Black Cunt" whenever a coloured lad is on the ball or go back and read about the ridiculous outrage to the MCG building Prayer Rooms to really see how little AFL has progressed in that aspect.

Edited by melbourne_terrace: 2/5/2015 10:46:45 PM

Both the FFA and AFL have to find a way to make the state leagues work, IMO. If there was a way for the FFA to monetise the second tier, even a little bit, it could go a long way.

The playing and coaching fees and the biggest hurdles in our sport, if the FFA can fix that then watch out!

Were the standards ever that high tho

So its cheaper to play football than AFL in Melbourne then, this bloke seems to have found a top levelclub. AFL must subsidise Sydney to the hilt, the funny thing is that one Muslim family they have that plays the game they mention somewhere else the father is actually employed by the AFL. I think the AFL is run like a cult, the exisiting members are like those Hillsong people that donate up to 30% of their salaries, The execs are like the rIch pastors who are the ones getting the big money out of everything, because the players are not payed that much and the execs are there longer. Melbourne is the Salt Lake City and Demetriou is the L ROn Hubbard.
The article is right about one thing the clubs that are the biggest problem is are not the grassroots, not the A-league but the state league clubs. They arfe the ones where the seniors are paid off the proceeds from the juniors.

yep I couldn't go past the first paragraph without thinking my head hurts

Believes climate change is a hoax by scientists

Believes unions are to blame for the Liberals having no idea about the economy

Belives that marriage should only be for heterosexual couples

More worried that Fairfax is more biased than Rupert Murdoch

Is this a new low for lukerobinho?

Is lukerobinho in trouble?

a mind numbing article, avoid it like the plague

The agenda of the author is very clear, and the grammar and idiomatic language have been sent back for rewriting by a year 9 English teacher, but his point is 100% valid.

It is entirely unconscionable that money paid into Australian Football by parents of kids from poor Melbourne suburbs ultimately gets distributed to Matt Simon. Solving this cost crisis for juniors should be the number #1 priority for FFA, no matter how many "plastic" friendlies and finals need to be held to pay for it.

Imagine all the talent Australian football has lost from mothers quite reasonably putting rent and groceries higher up the priority list than quadruple digit fees.

Are we the game of Australia's 21st century people, or not?

Unfortunately, not all people want to play "AFL".

Its easy to make that conclusion isnt it , to blame NPL clubs for charging high fees. Let me offer you an alternative view.

NPL clubs dont receive a tv grant from the FFA, they get little sponsorship, they get low crowds, they arent getting transfer fees for developing players. They would get little assistance from the FFA. They still have to pay for their licenced youth coaches and fund their youth teams from at least u12 up to seniors. Something which the A-league teams are not doing. Why? Because its expensive.

Meanwhile A-league clubs dont have academies, they pinch these players who dream of playing in the A-league for next to nothing. The A-league clubs pay nothing for this development. How are NPL clubs supposed to survive if the FFA is denying them a legitimate revenue stream to help in their operations.

Also, its not like parents can take their kids out of the NPL clubs and go to a cheaper option like an A-league club, because they dont fund youth teams, and if they did it would be a similar price point. Its tragic. What is more tragic is blaming NPL clubs for something all A-league clubs should doing, but they dont, because its expensive. They will happily allow NPL clubs to shoulder the load and then suck them dry when the player finishes his youth league career.

Lastly NPL clubs wouldnt be charging high fees unless it was necessary. It is expensive to fund youth teams and if you get no money from a tv deal, small sponsorship, low crowds then I am scratching my head wondering how else you are supposed to pay your senior team. Its not right I know, but while you are happily taking aim at struggling NPL clubs who would be stretched in their budgets as it is. I am taking aim at A-league clubs for not shouldering more of the burden and offering parents a cheaper alternative. I know you mean well but your criticisms I feel at directed at the wrong tier. The A-league teams need to do more.

Just spat my cornflakes! =d> You are right though, I have enough trouble coping with the fact he gets my ticket money.

It is the variability of club pricing that makes me wonder about these things. The article talks about a flat rate for AFL? One of my boys plays for a local CCF club and that cost about 220 dollars. I have another boy playing up in Newcastle paying a bit over 600 for NPL. Central Coast NPL juniors team cost roughly 1600.
I am guessing the majority of the price difference goes to paying coaches?

The article hits on the biggest issue for football the cost of playing the game, no matter how it is written, in particular NPL level. Has been for a long time and will continue to be. The AFL put a lot more back into grassroots funding the costs at this level. Their players do a lot more at school level with Auskick, even my son has been involved and he does not even follow AFL that much.

I know plenty of parents who want their kids to play football but move to AFL because of the cost and they understand that their child may not make the elite teams in football, so cannot justify the cost of playing the game. These are the players being lost to the game.

This is where the AFL wins the future fans, by investing in them at a young age.

It's better if the migrants play AFL, that way they can integrate into the Australian community. Otherwise there is a high probability they will become terrorists.

Funny you should say this because the head of gws said they were combating terrorism by getting Muslims to play afl.

As this site said "sorry, which was the one that was full of ethic hatred?"

Hard to get past the Tofu territory jibe lol.

-PB

MEDIA BIAS!!!!!!!!

If we can all stop screeching for a moment, and read the article (without just searching for the bits that outrage us), well see that most of what this guy says is true:

- football is the perfect sport to play in a park (arguably the easiest sport to play socially)
- junior participation is sky high and demand is dwarfing supply
- football is especially attractive for girls (as opposed to AFL or rugby)
- all that said, the costs for juniors are far too high
- the whole structure of revenue for football is bottom-up, for AFL it's top-down
- converting juniors to ALeague fans is arguably our biggest challenge.

Personally, I agree with every one of those points.

Edited by footballer: 3/5/2015 10:31:53 AM

Why did these clubs want to stop A-league clubs from joining the top level in each state if its such a burden, they wanted them to have the level below and why are they so afraid of A-league clubs coming in. Its because its a gravy train, and they get exclusive rights to the top youth levels, not by doing any youth development, not by ever investing money into youth facilties, not by paying good money for youth coaches, not by the performances of their youth teams.
They get that by their senior team performance.
The way they get exclusive access to the top level youth competitions is through paying their senior team and coaching staff.
These clubs do get compensation for developing players, a lot more than clubs in Scotland and Ireland do.
The A-league clubs were made for the top level of the competition to earn money for the sport, they have done the job the NSL has never did. The way it has been doing that is by ripping off the owners up until recently.
The A-league has the national youth league which is an expensive and unecessary exercise in my opinion.
Any grassroots club could do a better and more efficient than these NPL clubs or an A-league team because they don;t pay their seniors and seniors coach. SO the solution is let every club compete for access to elite youth competitions, and stop it being linked to the performance of the senior team.

I have no idea what your on about because A-league teams dont have youth teams. Why would a parent take their kid to an NPL club if an A-league club offers the same kind of coaching. The reason is they dont, but they should.

Edited by RBBAnonymous: 3/5/2015 11:44:18 AM