Only someone who is either trolling or has no fucking idea would try to argue that AFL is more popular than football In Western Sydney.....In your case I'm going to suggest both.

Strange there are so many inbreds willing to put in so much money into a club that has lower attendances than the football club down the road.

Especially when that bigger clkub has been on the international stage and the ALF team will never be.

Strange, strange, strange.

That's interesting, because going by attendances and TV ratings, the ratio looks closer to 1.5:1, and that is being extremely generous to the Wanderers.

If we go by sponsorship revenue, the Giants would be quadruple what the Wanderers make.

It's strange that their sponsorship revenue is quadruple that of the Wanderers, but according to you, the Wanderers are meant to have six times the support. Those big corporations must be stupid.

Strange days indeed.

Same could be said in Brisbane I have noticed. Cairns have an ALF stadium now but it's nothing more than a park an gets zero mention up north. Its interesting how places such as Cairns, Townsville & Hobart present their mainstream news compared to Melbourne.

Anyway. Keen for ALF to invest in football stadiums :)

Typical Sydneysider here, couldn't care less about AFL (hell, I can only name one player in the whole comp), though I have always found it strange that despite the considerable attendances and viewership stats, which I'm not disputing, there's so little visibility of it outside of gameday. Rarely see anyone decked out in Swans gear in public and never once overheard a conversation about AFL in public or at work, in contrast to RL and football in that order. It's as though Swans supporters retreat into hibernation between match days. 

@melbterrace

Aswell as screwing the swans over with a women's team.

I know it's not in anyway popular, I just think it's fucking stupid the way they've been trying to change it. 

Throwing West Sydney under the bus and moving from Blacktown to homebush.
Playing half their games in Canberra
Faffing about with a stupid Netball team
Pushing to play games in China and India

Their only reason for existence is to get more people west of the Homebush interested in professional Mens AFL and they can't even focus on that.

I can't believe he actually tracks Pepper Pig ratings - apparentky uses a massive spreadsheet so he has an accurate bacon report each day 😂

Pippy in his element here 

I had moved to Tassie by the time the Super League split League apart but I have family that stopped supporting their League club and gave AFL a try.  Thousands left League either disenchanted or out of principle and never went back.  Up until then the Swans support in the main was expats from the southern states and growth was very slow.  Once the Swans broke into the local market attendances grew significantly.

At the end of Wanderers first season polling of the market showed that 10.2% of the 2m population in Western Sydney supported the Wanderers while for GWS despite a multi year marketing exercise and having a years start only 1.6% supported them.

The ratings figures are a guess at best

Brisbane didn't play in the NRL last night so how is that a point of reference?

Go to bigfooty

I would certainly defer to your knowledge of the Sydney market.

All I can do is look at Friday night's game, and the numbers look all right:

Attendance:  34,575
FTA Sydney ratings on 7Mate:  63k.
Fox Sydney ratings:  46k.
Total Sydney TV ratings:  109k.

It seems to me that 109k watching in Sydney is pretty good.

As a point of reference, the NRL ratings in Brisbane on Nine were 138k.

So I hear what the Sydney residents on here are saying, and with all due respect, the attendance and TV figures seem to suggest something else.

Nice post mate. I've lived in Sydney and know the score with AFL. But you will never convince Pip... as he is an accountant/TV executive who knows all the facts and figures- that's what counts, apparently.

I thought rugby league was the greatest game in the world?

I never put up posts about which sport is better, I enjoy watching all types of sport.  I mainly focus on the business of sport and governance issues.  I observe what's happening and comment on it, nothing more than that.

I'm not putting anyone down, I'm just looking at the numbers - we should never be afraid to benchmark against the very best in the business.

Re growth, let me give you another comparison.

For the start of the 2006-07 season, the A-League entered for the first year of its $17 mill per annum TV deal with Fox.  In 2006, the AFL was in its final year of a $100 mill per annum deal.

Eleven years on, and the AFL has a $418 mill p/a deal and the A-League deal is around $50 mill per annum.

Football will continue to grow, but every other part of the economy grows as well.  Whereas ten years ago, on this very board, we all would have been talking about bridging the abyss which exists between the A-League and the AFL, ten years on, it's pretty clear that that abyss will never be breached.  To state that is not the equivalent of putting one or the other sport down.  Note that one of our number, someone who has been on this board for as long as I, has an alternative view, to him all the figures show that football is about to grow exponentially, it's about to go bang.

Some will agree with that poster, others might choose to disagree, and so be it, no one should get offended.

Why are these posts always turned into a dick measuring contest? I realise you turn away from reality when AFL is mentioned on this site, why?

Actually as everyone I know who follows Aussie-rules enjoys going to it and everyone I know who follows football enjoys going to it, the only problem I have with it is these stupid outrageous claims that AFL spin doctors projectile shit out their mouths - like "Fast, technically gifted playing the best game in the world"

@ pippinu

That's where your warped AFL-biased reality kicks in. Why don't you post on AFL boards instead where you'll get more sympathy??

SBS average for the HAL is about 50k and for Fox 70k. So that's about 120k per Friday game, that's before regional is added in (as you say for AFL and true for football). So maybe 150k compared to say a million for AFL, BBL or NRL .... that's about right, 15%, based on the relative popularity of the various sports.

Big games swing well over 150k towards 200k and it would seem reasonable to assume football can get 250k+ audiences in the next year but expectations need to be tempered as Socceroos games only hit a quarter of a mil and it's unlikely the HAL will blow them away.

Meanwhile NRL and AFL will continue to hit 1m.

But comparing football to those is rather pointless, as is your Pepper Pig report, the comparison for football is 20 years ago football. Average attendances then were 3k and they're now 13k, tv viewing then was too low to measure today it's a healthy 70-150k. Care to guess where they'll be in another twenty years?

I'll leave you with a Waz report - saturdays is pretty much all day at my junior club. The AFL Oval next door plays one game a week max, for the second weekend in a row a junior game wasn't played because one side couldn't raise enough kids. Thankfully we were able to use the kid-free AFL grass to warm up hundreds of soccer loving kids this morning.

So while you crow on about your big viewing figures and the size of your cock, sorry I mean tv deal, all is not well in your code of choice. And people like you are fighting the wrong battle ..... you shouldn't be fighting against the sokkha you should be fighting for the footy.

Your efforts here and elsewhere to put soccer down at every opportunity do nothing to diminish our codes progress, meanwhile your assumption that all is well in AFL is misplaced. It could do with some help. And your enemies should be glad you're on these pages making no difference whatsoever and not elsewhere making a difference in AFL.

My Grand Niece loves Peppa Pig. 

I mostly agree with what you are saying, but it's pointless getting into the coodabeen, shoodabeen types of discussions - this is where things are now, rightly or wrongly.

One can either look at the Swans' experience in their first 15 seasons in the harbour city and conclude that GWS will fail, or one could take the oppposite view and conclude that maybe it will work if the AFL remains patient for 15 seasons.

Who knows what will happen - it's part of the charm of sport.

Well, it would appear that for A-League and AFL at least, Peppa Pig is as good a yard stick as any as to how things are travelling on the secondary stations.

As I once said, unless the A-League can consistently defeat Peppa Pig in the ratings, it can never hope to get a big TV deal.

@melbourne_terrace The simple reason they are moving games is that nobody in Western Sydney gives a shit about AFL, or if they did they'd already follow the swans. A lot of AFL fans in Victoria just don't get that there is zero interest in AFL in Western Sydney.

Even the Swans weren't that popular for their first 15 years in Sydney, and only got really popular due to an unusual set of circumstances in Rugby League in the 90s. Super League, team mergers, scandals, moving games to bigger stadiums and the attempt to kick out Souths all caused huge disenchantment with league. My father was a rugby league fan but when his team (Wests Magpies) merged with the Balmain tigers he never went to another NRL game.

At the same time this was going on, the Swans made the 1996 grand final and started getting good. Some of the disenchanted middle classes switched to AFL and never went back to league.

If not for those factors I don't think the Swans would be as popular as they are today.

How many times will pippinu introduce Pepper Pig in to debates??? It's almost like s/he is surprised five year old kids watch TV 😂

Amazing, Australia's premier sporting competition in Australia's premier city, with Sydney's biggest club in any code up against one of Melbourne's (Australia's) biggest club, if not biggest & it's on a secondary channel in the premier city & beaten by Peppa Pig & the TV viewing in less then 2 times attendance figure in the Australia's biggest city.

100% correct bluebird

This AFL blueprint has also been replicated at NPL Level

In a way its like the FFA sending A League games to Canberra, Geelong and Tasmania for points

The travelling circus rolls into to town, people see an exhibition game of something they will never be a part of, empty their pockets, and the circus moves on

As critical as people are about the stupid things the AFL do, they are merely adapting to being a stand alone league that has outgrown its resources. Its only stupid when we take their way of doing things as a blueprint for our game

Although interestingly, last night's game at the SCG had an attendance of 34,575.

The FTA ratings were 641k (meaning they will end up at over 1 million with Fox and regionals included).

The game was on 7Mate in Sydney and had ratings of 63k.

Is that good or bad?

Well, put it this way, the national A-League ratings on SBS2 rarely got above 60k - that's nationally.

I was just checking the highest Sydney ratings for last Friday on the secondary channels, and it was Peppa Pig with 65k.

So using the Peppa Pig scale, I would conclude that ratings of 63k on 7Mate in Sydney are pretty good (and there would be more watching on Fox as well).

Who needs to conquer your own country when the 1.3 Billion people in China are in awe of the game seeing what a massive success it was. /s

Omg India now.

These attempts are so delusional you wonder if they're only doing to a- blow handout $ b - gimmick for Victorian tv ratings

No matter what they say the game will never take off anywhere in the world. It hasn't even conquered its own country in 100 odd years of existence (or however long they claim it's existed)