@ Midfielder

Lowy going isn’t enough, but if it comes with a commitment to some simple principles that are already in play that will be enough for a bounce.

Expansion, a division two with aligned season and running the competition as a competition not as a tv show will be enough. At least to start with.

The decline IS lowy and the way his organisation has been grinding football supporters in to the dust, it is nothing else.

##ALeague: Sydney v WSW FOX SPORTS 61k

Thats a really good number considering that WSW are playing badly, it was raining sideways and on a Sunday Night.

The fact that it was raining sideways might have been a reason for the relatively "high" rating.  We are about to enter what is normally our worst period for ratings so it will be interesting to see what happens.

god things are bad when we try to convince ourselves that 61k is a "really good number" for our biggest game on Sunday primetime.

It was raining sideways....

You have to get rid of Lowy and his croneys .If he stays in charge the HAL will be dead.
One golden rule in business is if you have a crap manager that keeps driving a business backwards,you get rid of that manager.You NEVER leave the manager in charge to turn things around.
Lowy has run a business that buys properties and leases them out.He may have been good at that.But he isnt good at running football.
I remember a story about Packer some time ago.Someone asked him about advice for a new business venture.Packer said rule one stick to what you know.

The solution for our ills is to purge ourselves of the cancer that is Lowy and reboot the whole competion. AGAIN!...This time with the proper foundations...Proper governance!
A reboot with expansion and a road map to a second division and p/r will get people back.
We have five years until the next media deal.If this isnt fixed well before then,I doubt it ever will in my lifetime.

Yep thats the answer... yes and double yes for the road map..... too many think it will be easy ... it is not going to be easy...

Lack of due diligence will make it fail.. 

What also we need to understand however hard it is to except is that FFA did some things very well .... the two that stand out for me are the education [school work they did] and the hhhmmmm reduced the number of attack articles from the non Football media, and the general promotion of the national sides which resulted in a massive increase player numbers. Resulting in Cricket, AFL, Union and Netball all creating new competitions in many ways to defend themselves against our growth in player numbers.

So we need to ensure we create whats needed and not something that we would like to succeed....  we need broadcasters in particular to bye in to what we plan to do... 

Going back over the last 12 months or so we have in key stakeholders disagreement on key aspects ... eg the PFA believe a second div club will need 6 million to successfully operate... the clubs believe the figure is 2.5 million... 

Its also  worth remembering [and its not an excuse for FFA incompetence] but from about Hal 8, we have had BBL, Rugby 7's, Rugby Women's, RL Oceania end of year test series & talk of a NRL women's, AFL women's and AFLX. Netball an national domestic competition and finally Basketball starting to get its act back together. 

An elephant in the room is when the AFC took over the media rights meaning FFA cannot sell Socceroo media rights and that creates a shortfall in FFA  revenue.

So we need level headed Football people in charge who understand where we need to go .... but don't rush the process ...  build the Road Map... Explain it and put realistic time frames on it.

FFA have gotten us into a very poor position and recovery will be nowhere near as easy as many assume .... we need clever Football people in charge.. 

@ Midfielder

“What also we need to understand however hard it is to except is that FFA did some things very well” ... like what?

Participation rates are not a function of the FFA but efforts by local clubs and maybe State Federations.

When we run a mini-Roos coaching program we pay football Queensland to do it, not the ffa. Everything we use in fact is FQ not FFA. So the FFA aren’t involved in grassroots at all really.

And the deal with the AFC is more lucrative than what went before - $1m per away game and keep your domestic income. There’s no way that generates a shortfall ...

If you want a sensible discussion have one, but stop trying to promote the ffa by stealth ... they have nearly ruined the professional game in this country.

And the VNPL was on....I think they got about 6 million viewers on the ort cloud dark web, which is still pretty good considering it is the second division.

Waz

FFA did an excellent job on the education area and they broke into the southern states schools very big time because of it ...

Not everything FFA did bad ... if you assume that the good things they did will be lost .... 

Waz on the national teams we play roughly five away games a year thats about 5 million...

We have 9 national teams.... each play roughly 8 games a year and many overseas...

So FFA can fund this 9 national teams by 8 games or 72 matches .... plus scout, train and coach...

I get the impression you think FFA can be run for next too nothing and we can get a CEO to run it well for a very low wage.

Just think... 9 national teams thats 9 lots of coaching staff ... lets assume with coaches and doctors etc a match has 30 people and each game we need a week together...

so 72 matches by 7 days by 30 people is 15, 120 nights accommodation.

Each member  needs 3 meals a day that's 45, 360 meals.

72 matches by 30 members by 2 plane flights ... 4, 320 plan tickets.

Player wages ....

Cost of scouts

Cost of coaches

My guess is this costs  heaps more than 5 million ... 

61k was probably due to the increase in online viewers.

Online viewers aren't included in the ratings figures.

Actually Waz, FFA created the professional league, NSL was semi-professional at best. 

No. There weren't 6 million viewers. Please stick to truth and stop being ridiculous. 

Waz on one end. Middy on the other. Truth lies somewhere in between. It’s gone to the dogs under Stevens watch, as I said frank must be fuming. But we’re ok, whilst backwards from previous years we still have a pro base at 12 years to work from and the beginning of one generation support. Post June and the working groups tor being established, hopefully with ffa removed from the process we’ll be fine. The November agm we’ll have a new Congress. Hopefully two new teams announced before then, a decent wc showing and a new ceo and chairmen.

Yeah - so less people are likely to attend the match and watch on tv from home.

FFS what is with all this FFA have to be acknowledged for the good things they did bs.What next ,Hitler did good things too?
If FFA want to spend their time patting themselves in the back for what they did,they have lost the plot.You live and die on what yo u do now ,not what you did in the past.
When you are sitting in your rocking chairs you can pontificate about how good you were before you stuffed everything up.
The Sydney derby used to get 100k + viewers,now we are struggling to get half that on a day it was too wet to attend the ground for the once diehard supporters.It was only a year ago we had sellout games and we now have the CHASE! Lol.
What excuses will be rolled out?
When will FFA acknowledge they have pissed off the fans and subsequently they have pissed off?

Clearly my joke has gone over heads lol. 

Whoosh!

Refer to the excuses about the rain for the attendance.

Crim 

FFA are / is a body that is the senior body in Australian Football today ... its structure is that of a corporate company....

The head of the company has been first Frank and then Steven Lowy...

At some time in the future the lowy family will have gone .. FFA as a corporate body of some kind will still be there.

We need to rid ourselves of the Lowy's and restructure FFA's governance procedures ... FFA is not the enemy what do people want to do hang the company certificate put the company seal in jail...

What we need is to re structure Football, and that includes the state Feds as much as anything else...

What I want and have been arguing for for some time is that Hal is run by the clubs... that we move quickly to 16 clubs and we create programs for both a second division and P & R in time... but as of today i.e 26 Feb 2018 we are not ready for them... but hopefully between 4 &  6 years we will be.

Now back to FFA... as I said its a corporate body run by a family.... and not everything that FFA did was hopeless .... like did they bye the right pens, use the right light bulbs, the chairs they use etc ... how far do we want to go ... all I have said is not every commercial decision they made was wrong nor bad and if that somehow makes me a Lowy supporter I am amazed at the call... what is important is to separate FFA the body corporate  from Steven Lowy ...  The education thing I pointed out got very little media time but from what I am told was an amazing success and left all other codes for dead if anyone wants to explain what they did ask...

What I also want is FFA to be funded for what they do and given their major source of funding has been removed we can take it from the park teams, take it from Hal revenues or not compete in tournaments which I think is in breach of AFC regulations. 

Back to one of my main points we are rapidly approaching a number when recovery will become very hard... The Lowy's reputation is today so bad its difficult to imagine it could be made worse.... so just maybe its time to start to push the positive because no matter who is in charge or what system we have the job of rebuilding from the position we are now is a lot harder than most assume...

Really? How then? Because the game has been trying to oust him and the board for a while now. Yet nothing has happened. I'm not going to continue watching the league to give them belief that things can continue as usual. If we have to continue to go backwards to finally get it right so be it. The game will pick itself up again. It can be done, and relatively quickly too, once the right people and mechanisms are in place. 

Pressure to remove Lowy will become too great at some point. Fox have invested for 6 years, and you can bet they will be having a quiet word up high if another season like this is to occur. The clubs, PFA and at least 2 state feds not to mention also the AAFC wanting Lowy gone! It will happen, just a matter of when. Either way, I have much less interest in the league at present. 

Youve been MIA for awhile.

I think you owe bluebird an apology just quietly.

Pretty sure any marginal increase in ratings from moving to a secondary FTA channel was very much easily absorbed with the million issues the game is facing at the moment. I have always maintained that there are many factors that make up the ratings, not just one single factor. 

We are arguably in the worst state the A-league has ever been in, so if people think that by just being on a fta channel that would fix things then clearly they are confused. I have maintained a belief that a shift would cause a marginal increase of around 20% - 30% shift up. Not a doubling like some others think it would achieve. I also believe that any such natural increase would have more than easily been counteracted by the hardcore fans that have decided to switch off for the billion reasons that the game is in turmoil. You can't surely compare the situation today to what it was 12 - 24 months ago. And the fact that Foxtel ratings have dropped so much would indicate a natural slide in the support of the game as a whole, hence fta ratings are going to slide too. If ratings for Foxtel had remained strong, with FTA showing a drop or stagnating on One, then a fairer argument could be made that the channel has no impact whatsoever, but you can't claim that the selection of the FTA channel has zero impact if at the same time on Pay tv ratings have collapsed.

Around year 5 was probably the worst state we were ever in.

@ Midfielder

You really demonstrate that you don’t understand what is going on sometimes.

You say “FFA as a corporate body of some kind will still be there“ ..... it’s NOT meant to be a corporate body it’s meant to be a NFP MEMBERS organisation - it’s not even set up correctly for FIFA membership ffs.

@Waz, hate to break it to you and the other conspiracy theorists, but FFA is recognized as an association by FIFA, ref link below. So while the personnel may change, FFA will still be around. 

http://www.fifa.com/associations/association=aus/index.html

@ AJF

Hardly a conspiracy theory lol

They should be structured as a NFP Members organisation. It was even raised as a complaint to FIFA last week.

So the ffa will be around but it will be restructured

Spot on Waz.

Midfielder provides doozies like - “FFA are / is a body that is the senior body in Australian Football today ... its structure is that of a corporate company....”.

Well fuck me. There it is.

The FFA is a “corporate company”.