Every time we played White Eagles I would remind them that my boss (who played in midfield) was a Croat. Loved watching them smash him.

Difficult to compare really. One is a semi pro league with little marketing and funding. The other is a professional league with marketing and money never seen in australian football.

Top thread. Now let's do a comparison of superstars the shitty old NSL produced in the 90's by all those woggo clubs averaging 1,500 old ethnic men compared to all the bright new shinny HAL franchisers have produced over the past decade.
Viduka, Tiatto, Simunic, Zelic, Okon, Bresiano, Kalac, Emerton, Chipperfield, Horvat, Kewell, Neil, Cahill, Bosnich, Lazaridis etc......all these players played consistently in some of the big leagues at big clubs. The only 'HAL' product that can be compared to those mentioned is Matt Ryan. I suppose Rogic is finally doing OK in an average league but still miles away. Most others have gone over with an inflated sense of worth and ability, never to be heard off and/or sit on the bench and eventually return with their tales between their legs.....Oar, Burns, Rojas, Taggart, Theoklitos, Leijer, Djite etc. This is probably a more relevant discussion than crowd numbers and composition between a fully professional league in the modern world and a league that was basically volunteer based and had no favours form anyone at all. Why can't our professional franchisers produce world class players anymore?

Three pages tops.

this thread is taking a predictable course...

I swear this thread was about crowds.

Attendances for 98-99 for South Melb were very high during the regular season, they got 15,000 in their home grand final win over Sydney United, interesting nNorthern spirt got 17,200 in a home semi against Marconi
Sadly for South Melb in the final year they dropped to 3,500 average and across the league it was really poor

Wollongong averaged a solid 2-3,000 in their final 2 nsl years. It's a wonder they they didn't enter the a-league whilst the Central Coast with no nsl history did

:lol:

Violence is ok as long as it's the silverspoons vs the fibros.

But the moment you realise one bloke is Greek and the other is a Croat then it becomes bad.

Sound logic.

Wollongong suffered financially when the world club championship they qualified for was cancelled, combined with the NSL being completely taken off TV in 2001 that was pretty much it, absolutely no way a Wollongong based team now would draw that low, in the championship years they were getting crowds around 8k.

My memory when I was young is that many of the NSL venues were small. My knowledge is mainly based on Melbourne teams but grounds like sunshine George cross could only fit 3,000....Preston was about 6,000 from memory, these grounds would often look packed.

When people go back and look at NSL crowd averages and mock them it feels like they believe these games were being played in huge empty footy stadiums, it wasn't like that, the grounds were small, compact and often reasonably full, you certainly could not count the crowd in 30 seconds and these games looked good on TV.

Last season of NSL average was 7,000, our lowest crowd was 3,750 against Newcastle, we had 12k against Perth, 10k against parra power, 8.5k against Adelaide United and 7k against Wollongong. We were clearly 3rd highest attendance behind Adelaide and Perth and daylight between the rest. Our last NSL match in Melbourne against Marconi in the elimination final was about 9k.

I think the fact we were still pulling in crowds then meant it was an easy transition for a lot of our fan base to move over to victory the following year, the vibe I got at the time was that most south supporters were ready to follow a professional competition...either with or without Souths involvement, unfortunately we know how it went:lol:

As for the grand final in 1999, the tickets South were allocated sold out in one day. It's a shame Etihad stadium didn't exist then cos those grand finals could have hit 30,000.

Edited by southmelb: 6/11/2015 08:13:43 AM

Interesting questions - I'd say the reason is partly due to the fact that the A-League is only in its 11th season. The clubs have focussed their resources on trying to be viable, rather than youth development. Most clubs now have a youth team and an academy team in the local comp.

Add in the overhaul of the coaching framework and the whole of football plan and I'd say youth development has only been focussed on again in the last 5 years or so at a club level.

So I think it will be another 5-10 years before our clubs are good at developing youth talent at a comparable level to the NSL.

The other thing to remember is that the 1990s was our golden age for talent - abnormally strong. I don't think it is fair to use that generation as the baseline.

The two most successful clubs in the NSL

So your crowds were great in the final year what happened to the money. of course there was no government financial lifeline to fund the club, but you had the phones cut off.
At that point in time there was no team with the money to secure an A-league spot.
Victory had some money but the FFA had to get otherts to join in and provided a million themselves.
SOuth Melbourne didn't bid because they didn't have two pennies to rub together.
if they had money at that point they would have been straight in.

:lol: They couldn't even fill Olympic Park...........

1998–99   South Melbourne   Sydney United   3–2   Olympic Park   15,194

Yet the year later...........

1999–00   Wollongong Wolves   Perth Glory   3–3 (7–6 on penalties)   Subiaco Oval   43,242

=d>

15K is almost full for OP 43 is full at subi and it's a much bigger venue completely stupid to directly compare the 2.

Olympic Park was 22,000/23,000 capacity then. Should have been least 95% full capacity like in Perth or in Brisbane 1997.

So 50 years of NSL produced your list - let's see how many players 50 years of HAL will produce.
No doubt it will be a vastly bigger list.

If you took away our broadcast deal, played during the winter, and clubs were semi professional....what would our attendances look like?

Wrong, Olympic park capacity was reduced to 18k in the mid 90s, as I said the tickets allocated to south supporters sold out, a few thousand watched the game back at the club as a result. If you watch the footage of the game on YouTube the empty spots are in the Sydney United end.

The NSL did move to summer.

The problem was we didn't have the platform in those days to promote the game, no social media and Internet was very limited, when the NSL entered the pay TV market in the late 90s very few people had it and and those that did were already split between Optus and Foxtel. You were borderline considered rich if you had pay TV in 1996 lol.

Nowadays I can put it on channel 500 fox sports news and see training footage from every A league club every week, press conferences etc, in the old days sbs would send the cameras out to your clubs training session once in a blue moon. On pay TV all you would get was 3 games a week and a tiny highlights package, you didn't have a sports news channel and football related shows. Everything now globally is at our fingertips via TV and Internet.

Does Heidelberg get almost 12,000 to an ffa cup tie without the fox promotion and the social media build up? No chance, we are fortunate to have these things now, back then we didn't have much to go on.

Very true. The crowd concerns were rarely attributed to the traditional teams, it was start up teams like Northern Spirit, Parramatta Power, Carlton etc. that would get bumper crowds for a few rounds and then quickly those fans would disappear. Sydney United, South Melbourne, Knights, Olympic, Marconi etc. games always looked packed on TV.

Joffa this is your worst comment-- that's the point the FFA have done wonders,

There were so many attempts to lift football - but all failed

The creation of the NSL
AFL adding teams (Carlton, Collingwood)
NRL adding a team (Parramatta)
NSL going to two tiers north/south
Attempts to Australianise teams - (Marconi told to change logo, team name changes)
Stuck in Oceania

We knew the game had a future and finally a FFA Administration delivered

League based on geographical location
Bigger and better confederation ASIA
Great TV rights deal funding 10 teams salary cap
etc etc

Its funny when pundits shitcan the NSL to try and convince themselves/others that the HAL is very successful.

Pretty much, for all the crap that's thrown at the NSL it essentially had 9 teams that were consistently viable until the end (Olympic, Sydney United, Marconi, South Melbourne, Melbourne Knights, Wollongong wolves, Brisbane Strikers, Adelaide City and Perth Glory) and the rest was a churn of different teams that fell over every few years (ironically Newcastle was consistently one of these), so what has really changed?

Positives:
Genuine professional league so players can make a career of it.
Greater market penetration that may pay dividends into the future.

Negatives:
Fewer teams and more foreigners (as we can actually pay them now) means that conservatively (if you assume that three out of five foreigners play each weekend compared to almost zero in the NSL) there's 70 less outfield positions for young players to potentially play in, meaning there's roughly half the opportunities for aussie players that there were in the NSL. That's not taking into consideration the places that are taken by reasonably accomplished players (Mooy, Milligan, Archie etc.) take that they wouldn't have in the past as it simply wasn't viable.Not getting those chances more often, younger could be part of why we aren't seeing as many of our youngsters going on with things.

I really think it's a bit of a mixed bag in terms of outcomes.

NSL splitting into two regional conferences in the mid-eighties wasn't an attempt to "lift football"...

It was a desperate attempt to save the NSL- as attendances were plummeting and the idea was to produce more local derbies and reduce travel costs.

It wasn't a success- the NSL almost died during this period. What saved it was the switch to summer football in 1989.

Bingo.

Good old passive aussie racism.

Another good one... you can ram cyclists with your car, vilify an opponent's mental illness, make train noises as the bowler delivers to a batsman whose sister died in a train accident...

But don't be Nick Kygrios and sledge an opponent about his mrs because that's suddenly against rewl true blue aussie values.

Moral of the story be Warnie, not a wog.

I'm not familiar with cricket, but that was way to specific to be made up.