I blame WSW and City fans. we will probably get a big spike from WSW initially next year, but that won't last unless they are closer to the top than the bottom. As for City, I'm expecting them to drop further with the addition of WU. 

How is it their fault. I'd love to stick the boot in but blaming two clubs for the drop is ridiculous. 

I'm not saying that at all.  I am explaining as someone who lived through it all that in Sydney through the take over of football governance in 1957 the migrant clubs effectively took the elite game away from the masses of players in the District Associations and it is this divide between the elite competition and the DA players that still manifests itself in relatively poor attendances in Sydney today.  Starting the NSL in 1977 and requiring the clubs to change their names made no impact on the divide.  Similarly tossing out the old clubs and replacing them with broad based clubs in setting up the A-League has made little difference.  Total attendance at A-League games in Sydney now are very similar to total attendance in the NSL days despite the massive increase in population.  Fixing the attendance problem is not quickly achieved.  The clubs who are now privileged to be the elite here need first to value the fans they have and then market themselves to existing footballers beginning close to their club's home and radiating out from there.  They need to develop strong relationships with the District Associations in their immediate vicinity and the clubs in the DA's competitions with specific intent to develop strong relationships with young players so that those players identify the club as representing them.  etc., etc..

How the code is run is a separate but important issue but in my view the clubs need to do their job in actively valuing their people, their fans and their future by majoring on strong relationships.  Belonging is one of the most basic needs there is and it is a powerful motivator to commit to being together.

ok i would say the pass mark for this week is 

adel vs city 13k 

victory vs wellington 23k

anything less would be disappointing 

How can the elite game be taken away from the masses of players?
By definition, the elite game was, is and will always be separate to the masses of players.

WSW should be pushing 20,000 every week. No excuses next season, thats for sure. City make no effort to find new fans. 


sounds about right. Friday night in Melbourne in a season where we've played minimal friday night games should bring a good crowd. the partial clash with an AFL game in Adelaide might hurt the numbers there though. 

Wow, that is certainly good news. I expected that it would have been much higher. Gives us a good base for next year. I suspect that we have reached the bottom.

It shows the state of the game when we’re happy it’s only 2.4% though. The bad news is it’s the fifth consecutive season attendances have fallen so, at the very least should be a warning to everyone involved. 

Prior to the 1957 split the majority of the elite clubs in Sydney had a relationship with the clubs in the District Association and therefore the players by being in and representing a district.  With the take over by the migrant clubs and filling of a lot of the two top divisions with new and existing migrant based clubs that relationship between the elite clubs and the masses in the DAs was broken.  The new elite clubs understandably represented their ethnic base and did not try to develop relationships with the DAs or the players at that level especially in the early days.  Fortunately not all the football loving migrants jumped on the elite club bandwagon and many tens of thousands over the years got involved in the District Associations clubs.  Some were even involved in both.  What resulted was a massively growing player base at DA level with no connection with isolationist elite clubs.  In effect the actions of the migrant based clubs took elite football away from the football masses and they didn't and don't support it.  What needs to happen is for supporting clubs in the elite competitions to be seen as the natural consequence of playing football.  With 45 years of isolationism and 15 years of just expecting people to turn up because an elite club exists there is a lot of work to be done in Sydney to re educate the  football masses and grow the attendance base for elite club games.  

The new elite clubs understandably represented their ethnic base and did not try to develop relationships with the DAs or the players at that level especially in the early days.

So very true but I would also add the ethnic clubs did not want to establish a relationship with football followers outside their community.

Lose the attitude and you might get an actual debate going

Citation missing. 

*Citation doesn't exist

I don't really buy any of this.

Firstly, if the clubs which had a relationship with the DAs weren't good enough to continue playing at an elite level, well, you know, that's how it is meant to work.

Secondly, you can look through all the biggest clubs in the world, and the link back to grass roots is tenuous at best.

The biggest club in Australia is the Victory, and I'd suggest to you that it has next to no link to anyone.

It sounds idealistic that elite clubs have a fan base because the fans are playing in clubs which are linked to it (or it sounds like a recipe for developing an extremely small fan base).

In fact, I'd argue that the capability of an Australian club to create a fan base is at the polar extreme of what you are arguing.  A club like the Victory is the biggest in the land because a great variety of people follow it, many of whom may have never touched a football in their life.

I just can't understand how anyone can blame anyone other than the FFA for the state the game which it is currently in. 
In active support across the league the FFA had one of the best marketing tools other codes were jelous about. At the time active support was at its strongest clubs were getting decent crowds and the FFA set up some of the harshest punishments for fans misbehaving. They wanted a so called family friendly atmosphere ( even though more families attended then ever before ) and banned over 100 die hard fans, upsetting thousands of others, and created this family friendly atmosphere that hardly no families wanted to come experience. 
Then we have the issue of failed expansion clubs, and again another shit choice in my opinion of the next clubs to join the A-league. After over 10 years of A-league football we really should have had 14 clubs by now with 26 rounds home and away, and ready to expand and go to 16 at this point. Instead we're currently still at 10 clubs which is embarrassing. What's more embarrassing is the fact WSW only came into existence because Clive Palmer and FFA having a huge fallout 6 months before the season started. The fact WSW became so successful, yet the FFA never had intentions of adding us to the league earlier speaks volumes of how mediocre the FFA is in understand and running football in Australia. 
The reason crowds are down is simply because fans are sick and fucking tired of clowns like Gallop and the many idiots before him, not to mention the biggest flop of all in Steven Lowy destroying football in Australia. 
I have hope in the future that things will get better but only once those cancerous people like Gallop are either sacked or finish their contracts and fuck off.
The first and most important requirement to be the head of football is you need to understand it, if you don't understand it then you'll fail and that's why many like Gallop and others have failed in taking football to the next level in Australia. 
We have an endless list of present and past fuck ups from FFA.
The good news is that so many of the changes needed to make football a success are simple fixes, where if we had the right people in place all we'd need is one season to undo all the damage done so far. 

It's quite clear that you don't understand the ramifications of the 1957 split in Sydney and how the migrant clubs effectively locked out the non migrant football fans from local elite football.  That non migrant football base was large at the time in fact it represented the large majority of the fans of football in Sydney.  No matter what they tried after the initial years of good attendance from their ethnic base the migrant clubs could never grow attendances and failed in their corporate attempts to be leaders of football other than in name only in Sydney.  The real leaders of the game were and still are the District Associations which found no trouble including the many migrants who because of their love of the game couldn't help themselves in sharing that love with the kids in the DA clubs.  The result of that unified effort today is a community football presence four times bigger than in any other city in Australia.  The result of the isolationist policy of the elite game in Sydney is low attendances in a large population city.  It's up to the A-League clubs in Sydney to do their bit to build relationships with football fans in all parts of the game and the major part of that is to see themselves as the servants of the game and the fans not its masters.  It's up to the A-League to show the rest of the game in Sydney that they understand their privileged position in the football ecosystem and their need to support the whole game not just take from it.

PS.  I make my comments on this issue from a first hand position having been a fan of an elite club in Sydney before the 1957 split.

By non-migrant do you mean aboriginals?

Or perhaps you meant non-anglo, which is most likely as pre-1957 was the period Australia had the very racist "White Australia Policy" so its really not surprising that there was a majority of Anglo's in society. Funny how racists can always find a way to blame the funny looking greek, ital, balkan, turk, asian, jew, sudanese (insert race as appropriate) for their own inadequacies and failures.

Me a racist?  

I'm third generation Australian of Prussian and Anglo heritage with both sets of great grand parents leaving their homeland to find a place they could survive.  The Prussians to escape religious persecution of protestants by the catholics when the prince of their small state changed allegiance to the Austrians and the Cornish to get employment after the tin mines shut down leaving them and their kids destitute.  I learnt football from migrant kids that I met when my dad went to interview their parents on arrival in Australia to find them employment.  I sought out migrant kids in class at school because of the great time I had with others I'd met and played with on my dad's regular visits to the migrant hostels.  I learned football from them and introduced them to cricket.  When I started work in the engineering field an ever increasing number of my workmates were migrants and I enjoyed their company and often was taken into their parents or their home to share a meal and invariably talk came to their journey to Australia and their experience of the place.  One memorable time was being introduced to my friend's parents who were Polish Jews and survivors of Auschwitz.  To see such joy to be free in a free country but at the same time such sadness because of the loss of their entire family was totally challenging and they were a privilege to meet.  I could go on but suffice to say I accept all people as my equal without question no matter their ethnicity, their religion, or any other measure that is used to classify or divide people and I seek out people with a love of football which is why I post on here.

Your suggestion of Australia as Anglo prior to 1957 shows a lack of understanding of migration over the previous 120 years.  German migration to Australia began in 1838 with a large number of ships bringing migrants to Adelaide.  Similar groups arrived at various times over the ensuing decades with Germans making up the third largest ethnic group behind Anglo and Irish in the country by the turn of the century.  Similar groups came from all over Europe during C19th and before and after the First World War and when you add the migration driven by the gold rushes between 1850 and 1870 you have a very cosmopolitan Australian population.  The post World War 2 wave of migration is of course the largest we have experienced but to say that pre 1957 Australia was Anglo and post 1957 it was cosmopolitan is sheer nonsense.  Just thinking now the current wave of migration may in time pass the post World War 2 period as our greatest period of migration.

The White Australia policy and the Assimilation policy that followed it were both wrong in my view.  The celebration of one's cultural heritage while at the same time celebrating the shared culture of our Australia is by far a better way to go.

In my previous post migrant referred to post World War 2 migrants and non migrant meant those that weren't post World War 2 migrants.  I should have been clearer.

This post has gone on long enough but I can't leave it without touching on the similarity of the events of 1957/62 and the events of of 2003/5.  While a change in governance in both cases can easily be justified the institution of a brand new competition system that excluded the participants in the existing system was wrong.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, anglo's were 95.5% of the population in 1954, which is a big improvement over the 99.5% anglo's in 1947. Talk to me some more about immigration nonsense.....

Sources below:  https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/1301.01957?OpenDocument

I don't want to get into name calling, and I understand there was some bad blood between the new ethnic clubs and the previously predominant British clubs by the late 1950s, but it's quite clear that the largest immigration category of the period was the British, and by a huge margin, so there is a missing piece to this history that the ethnic clubs could just take over when their total numbers were tiny compared to the number of British of the period.

Give me a break will ya.  lol

Maybe if you understand the categories in that table you will understand where you just might have gone wrong in your calculations.

In the figures:-
"British - born in Australia" also includes all the Australian born children of non British migrants who acquire that nationality by right of birth.  So it's not just Anglo.
"British - born outside Australia" also includes all non British migrants who acquired British nationality.  Again it's not just Anglo.
"Foreign" includes all the non British migrants who haven't acquired British nationality.  It's not a total of non British migrants.

In the articles I have read it is generally accepted that at any time between 10 and 20% of migration was non British.  With marriage frequently crossing ethnic lines the effect on Australian culture of non British migration is way bigger than the pure migrant figures.

Looking at my family situation if my Prussian great grand parents had been alive for the 1947 census there would be 2 extra in the "British - born outside Australia" category and 200+ of the "British - born in Australia" figure would be their descendants.

Oh by the way when you have a look at the 1954 figures you will need to note that the 1948 Act that established for the first time Australian citizenship made it harder to get than British nationality was under the 1903 Act that applied in 1947 so as well as reflecting the increase in European migration it reflects those migrants staying longer in the "Foreign" category because they couldn't be classified as British nationality before they got Australian citizenship.

An alternative source for migration data from the Australian Parliament website. https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/BN/1011/MigrationPopulation#_Toc270677569

In 1947 census, UK/Ireland/N.Z. made up 79% of immigration. In 1954, UK/Ireland/N.Z. made up 55% of immigration. In past censuses, share was between 80%-85%.

I think most would agree that there seems to be a disconnect between "elite ethnic-based professional clubs" and district associations and that neither the governance change in 1957 or the governance change in 2003 managed to eliminate this divide.  I wonder if this could be one of the greatest intangible benefits of promotion and relegation.  After all, in this paradigm, the historical roots/geographical location/number of supporters/number of players all become directly irrelevant (of course, there may be indirect benefits if they can be harnessed appropriately). If you think your club/district/locality deserve representation at the elite level prove it on the park. 

Gyfox, did you read "Death and Life of Australian Football" by Joe Gorman.  If so, did you think his account of the 1957 split was accurate?

The National Basketball League (NBL) has set a new regular season attendance record in its 40thseason.

688,712 fans attended home and away games during the 2017-18 season, an average attendance of 6,149 per game. This broke the previous record of 5,939 set in 2016-17.

Last weekend’s final round attendance of 52,597 was the second highest attendance for a round in NBL history.

The Perth Wildcats recorded the highest ever attendance for a club during an NBL season with 183,689 fans attending their home games.

Melbourne United also enjoyed a 12% increase in attendances this season with average crowds jumping from 7,402 to 8,293.

NBL Chief Executive Jeremy Loeliger said: “I want to thank the fans who have voted with their feet and embraced the quality entertainment the NBL offers across Australia and New Zealand.

“In an increasingly crowded sports and entertainment market it’s very encouraging to see this sort of growth in attendances particularly in our 40th season. It’s further evidence that basketball is continuing to flourish in Australia and New Zealand with record participation and interest levels in the game.

“It’s been another landmark year for the NBL with games against the NBA, an increased television audience, our first ever game at the Australian Open and the launch of a new 3x3 basketball competition.

Aubgraham,  Thanks for that link because it saves a huge amount of research.  Probably the highest rate of migration was between 1850 and 1860 when the discovery of gold saw 600,000 migrants come to Australia with 25% not from the UK/Ireland.  Of the 150,000 non UK migrants 70,000 were from Europe, 42,000 were from China and the rest from other parts of the world.  If those 70,000 were as prolific as my family, who arrived just after that period, in populating NSW then more than the total population of Australia at the 1947 census would be Euro migrant based which was not the case.  What this introduces is the large factor of departing migrants in most eras.  What is clear is the cumulative effect of all migration pre 1947 was a mixed society with a strong British tradition. In Sydney migrants that came before say 1865 had no introduction to codified football before they arrived, and post 1865 migrants from both the UK and Europe knew football to a lesser or more extent depending where they came from and at what time.  My recollection of Sydney in the mid 1950's before the split in 1957 was a significant minority of non British players being involved in the elite teams and migrant based teams which began to be started up in the late 1930's starting to make their way into the lower divisions of the state leagues.

I agree totally that neither the 1957 change of governance nor the 2003 change resulted in a unified code in Sydney with the District Association based players, which is the large majority of players, not feeling tied in to a club they saw as representing them.  In both instances the change left the existing expression of football out in the cold.  I'm not convinced this last change of governance will achieve what it hopes either because I don't see the distrust and disrespect that permeates football relationships as having been dealt with.  I hope I am wrong.

P/R.  Hmmm. My views aren't well liked on here.  I don't see it as a panacea of all ills.  I believe it helps a system that is established on good foundations operate fairly and for the benefit of the whole game.  We still have a game that has been wandering around in the dessert for near 100 years since national governance was established here.  Unfortunately we have people pushing a small country European full P/R based model when no country our geographic size works on that model.  We have people pushing P/R as the solution to our football problems when setting up proper structure is what is needed.  Once the structures are in place P/R will oil the machine.

I think we need to look at how Japan is operating after first having their top division set up on the wrong basis.  They re-established the J-League on strict criteria and populated it. They then set up J2 on similar criteria and immediately established P/R between J1 and J2.  Later they did the same with J3.  They don't have P/R to the J-League for non professional clubs and any further expansion will occur on similar criteria.

I haven't read Gorman's book.  It came out after my stroke a few years ago and I find reading new stuff a bit of a struggle but if you are looking for another view of the period you might read Philip Moseley's book on the first 100 years of football in NSW.  Up to 1957 its his PhD thesis and then he added up to 1977 to it.

Thanks. I'll check it out.

Victory v Wellington - 16,010  Thats 500 more than the elimination semi last season between Victory and Adelaide at AAMI.

Nix clearly a bigger club and rivalry for MV than Adelaide then :)

Phew. Less shit.

The crowd was a failure imo and it was a great match of football with good players playing but watching with my family it always goes back to how few seats there are 

Must be a fruitful discussion at a City game.