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Joe DOrazio
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+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+xOf course there's a problem in the A-league. Think about the number of football fans that have been abandoned/alienated due denying their club access to the top flight in order to keep the fans of the 12 franchises and casual sport supporters happy. The A-L can't even embrace all the football fans in Australia. What...the 500 people at Sydney Olympic, Sydney United, Woolongong etc? Half the South Melbourne supporters converted to Victory anyway. I bet alot of the turncoats have really enjoyed the increase in popularity and validity they feel as soccer fans now that they went to McVictory... "Football but not as you know it" really proved to be a huge mainstream success eh? Its not about whether South Melbourne will get 500 or 50000. And this is the mentality that has broken our game The AFL is a league where 99% of Aussie Rules fans follow the AFL. Same as the NFL. And same as other invitational only sports. Thats their model We will never have that model. Fact. Reality. Accept it. Football can only thrive with the next best economic model which is the 80/20 rule (where 80% of revenue / support comes from 20% of clubs). The rest is just filler. The game needs a big MV, SFC, WSW, BR and another club. People arent going to turn in Saturday night to see top vs bottom For the NRL to succeed it needed a strong Victorian team to capitalise on 100% of Victorian support so they manufactured one. Same as what the AFL did progressively over their foreign markets. We dont need a strong Central Coast Mariners or a strong Canberra. Thats not our model. The pittance these regions can bring at the expense of having our most valuable shit kicking at the bottom of the league just isnt worth it There is no such thing as an AFL fan or an NFL fan or a Cycling fan etc... People are dynamic sports fans. They watch the AFL expecting one thing, they watch the EPL expecting another, they watch golf or track expecting another. Fans of our game are used to big clubs, and internationally competitive instead of just locally. They dont tune in to say "herp de derp, last year MV bad, this year MV good. Me happy. Not bored" The FFA started with the answer. We must have an AFL model. We must be on one of three networks. In any other model South Melbourne would have been part of the league by now and nobody would give a shit what their crowds or ratings unless they ended up being one of the team 80% of people are interested in Pretty much my point mate. The FFA "re-invented" the game/clubs to appeal to a new audience and that has not materialised. All it did was alienate a segment of the old audience forever and bring in a an equivalent number (possibly marginally more than what was "lost" but only slightly) of new fans and then wonder why, after 17 years the TV audience and match day attendance is still where it was in the 90s.......... The new model did find a much bigger audience but then through rank mismanagement on every level alienated that audience. Now it's time gone and I agree it's not coming back. The A League was dubbed the NSL with a coat of paint. It was the same closed off franchise model that existed at the end of the NSL. It wasnt the model that found a new audience but a promising new organisation for digging our game out of a hole that every fan of the Australian game got behind. Also one that could attract government and commercial fundingI've always argued that the first 2 or 3 years of the league were necessary evils. Some people agree. Some dont. Some think there should have been 2 teams from Melbourne / Sydney. Other will argue there should have been a 2nd tier from day 1 The problem was those in charge decided to cement the initial model and sell it as the product. Season 7 was the start of the end of the A League Umm, are you sure about this statement? Myself and thousands of others did not "get behind it" as for the hundreds of thousands of so called "eurosnobs" that love football in this country and have done so for decades upon decades they didn't even realise the franchises existed...... and never will. That post has to be read within the context of my post above it. The 80/20 rule. I know I'm preaching to the converted so take this as more of an elaboration rather than a counter point Interest in the Australian game was low. You might have 100% of football fans follow football, 50% follow the Aussie NTs, 20% follow the national league (just as a very loose example). The point of the A League was to engage with the 20%, not the 100%. The fact the euro snobs didnt follow the initial league was moot, as with AFL fans I did a lot of stats at the start of the league and effectively it was just a consolidated NSL with money. Some NSL fans such as yourself may not have gotten on board but most did. It wasnt bye bye fans of Sydney teams and hello new fans for Sydney FC. They were the same. There was no way an unproven league for a historically mismanaged sport could have attracted a new audience like that. It was the NSL but with 8 clubs Then after the world cup the Australian game received a boom. In my made up figures above it would have been say 70% for the Aussie NTs and 35% for the local league. Peak interest can be seen in all teams in season 3 The A League was without a shadow of a doubt a successful and viable league. It had the corporate backing, investment, TV dollars, sponsorship and even player pool that the NSL couldnt touch. It just could never be a 100% model like the AFL / NRL. If the focus was on the 35% instead of the 65% it would be an established and stable part of the Australian sports market by now Fact is I don't care about whether you would watch it any more than I care about whether sad CCM fans would watch if if their team starts losing. The only thing the league needs to do is be competitive (not rigged) and a pathway for all clubs and players. The focus has to be on viability instead of popularity. Selling our game to be in a prime time slot on one of three networks shows we're a long way off learning that Will have to agree to disagree bluebird... I was not and will never be a statistician however anecdotally can state that most people I come across who are fans of the Aleague tend to mention in the same breath that they where also not fans of the old NSL .... you know the same old garbage arguments I get into on here all the time "blah blah, didn't like the wog teams, didn't feel safe, was scared by foreigners, soccer hooligans, Croatian flags etc etc etc" Yes some of the original NSL crowds migrated over ( please pardon the very laboured pun) but I think you will find the vast majority, like myself for a long time, just switched off altogether and watched EPL and euro leagues instead..... There is a dormant "ex NSL club" following out there which only comes out very very rarely ( big derby, final or FFA cup game), how many they are God only knows but they are still around and alot of them, have past on the madness to their kids.... The APL doesn't interact with these people and never will, you may dismiss us as being insignificant and you don't care if we watch the Aleague or not, that's fine, but you should care if the CCM fans "consume" the product because if they don't the APL and silverlake will pull the plug and you won't HAVE a league to follow.... The original A League support came from somewhere. It wasnt manufactured from a few board meetings and a brand new audience, one in, one out The fact remains that you have 100% of football fans, and x% for Australian league. The interest in the Australian "league" game has always been the smallest portion of football following as a whole and this isnt something that can be replicated in identical numbers over night If I had to guess I would say 80% of the A League year 1 fans had some original tie to the NSL whether it was a casual fan for big games, a historic fan who was disengaged towards the end, or somebody who just wanted to see the Australian game work, or a hardened fan I'm not dismissing NSL fans as insignificant. I'm simply saying that interest in the league will always be the smallest portion of fans so there is no need to try to appease to all football fans. Let them come over in their own time, if at all. The game simply has to be viable, not popular. If 60%-70% of football fans in this country are not fans of the national league, the vast majority of people are always "not" following the Australian league, so the league needs to appeal to those who are The AFL / NRL model for artificially stimulating growth in disinterested markets simply wasnt translatable to our game. Our approach should have been to simply "have" a league, and capitalise on the inevitable interest in the top league of a big sport, backed with the recent commercial interest that didnt exist before. The league would have continued to roll on year after year and a natural market would have determined which teams were in / out, and which fans were in / out they/we are members and fans of a specific club, not of a league. That's all there is to this debate, people follow a club and despie the initial goodwill from many football fans to support the local top league (me included) AL has squandered this with gimmicks and staleness. Football is the most popular game in the world for a reason and all APL needs to do is copy what other small football leagues do rather than trying to provide a AFL/NRL comp with a round ball Exactly.
People that follow professional competitions follow clubs - not just the league itself.
Souths fans follow the Bunnies bc their grandparents did. Same as a Collingwood fans or Hawthorn fans.
We need that sort of generational club support for our clubs. It takes decades. Some of the AFL clubs have been around since the 1860s. That's a century and a half of generational support. It's something that cannot easily be synthesised. Clubs like MV, SFC and WSW work because their population density is so high. All they need to do is win trophies and they work.WSW is the perfect demonstration of this. Grew rapidly due to onfield results. Declined when the results evaporated. When you don't have history, all you can rely on is success. Problem is success is difficult to sustain. Sorry mate but that is bollocks. Passion is passion, club is club. Even the AFL and NRL guys know that, some clubs haven't won a single thing in 50, 60 years yet still have die hard support. That's 100% right The mentality you responded to comes from the AFL / NRL approach I described above. There is no NRL in Victoria and any team would be weak. So the governing body puts a team in, sends their best players, and guarentees success. The market is artificially established. Over the course of 10 years, "fans" are trained to only watch when their team is winning. The game ends up with a conundrum Football took the same approach after season 6. For the first time introducing concessions to boost new markets. Since then it has been stuck in a Robin Hood paradox (continual rob from the rich and give to the poor). The result is obvious based on some of the plastic support dribble I read on here A competitive open league will be new and it will be scary to some here, no doubt about it. But the irony is these same fans already follow several sports and leagues around the Australia and the world with the same model This is what the post he responded to was saying. You both seem to be objecting to a post that makes the same point your making, but better. AFL clubs like Essendon and Carlton haven't had success for decades, but still draw big crowds. They are entrenched, generational clubs, with a fanatical base support that means even prolonged periods of relative failure doesn't see support collapse. A club like GWS needs to win and be successful. Its why Gold Coast support sucks. However, its also why West Coast succeeded in the long run. Despite being a created 'plastic' franchise, which had some initial trouble, its based in an AFL city. So, a period of success saw WAFL followers switch allegiances to WC. Now, not only does its support dwarf that of a lot of old Victorian teams, that support is entrenched. They emulated the support of old big Victorian clubs, and did it in only a couple of decades. Glory had something similar going, to a lesser extent. If the FFA expansion was following an AFL model, which I doubt, it was West Coast, not GWS or Gold Coast they aspired to. Its the whole, fish where the fish are, model. However, they bungled it. Or maybe they didn't, and it was just never going to work. I dont know. I have always thought part of the reason for the AFLs relative success compared to football, was lack of choice. People might follow a local team and an AFL team, but if they find the AFL a bit on the nose, other than just watching local footy at the ground, they have limited options, so they hold their nose, and keep supporting. An A league fan that is disillusioned has plenty of other options to watch top flight football, so they just leave. +x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x[quote]Of course there's a problem in the A-league. Think about the number of football fans that have been abandoned/alienated due denying their club access to the top flight in order to keep the fans of the 12 franchises and casual sport supporters happy. The A-L can't even embrace all the football fans in Australia. What...the 500 people at Sydney Olympic, Sydney United, Woolongong etc? Half the South Melbourne supporters converted to Victory anyway. I bet alot of the turncoats have really enjoyed the increase in popularity and validity they feel as soccer fans now that they went to McVictory... "Football but not as you know it" really proved to be a huge mainstream success eh? Its not about whether South Melbourne will get 500 or 50000. And this is the mentality that has broken our game The AFL is a league where 99% of Aussie Rules fans follow the AFL. Same as the NFL. And same as other invitational only sports. Thats their model We will never have that model. Fact. Reality. Accept it. Football can only thrive with the next best economic model which is the 80/20 rule (where 80% of revenue / support comes from 20% of clubs). The rest is just filler. The game needs a big MV, SFC, WSW, BR and another club. People arent going to turn in Saturday night to see top vs bottom For the NRL to succeed it needed a strong Victorian team to capitalise on 100% of Victorian support so they manufactured one. Same as what the AFL did progressively over their foreign markets. We dont need a strong Central Coast Mariners or a strong Canberra. Thats not our model. The pittance these regions can bring at the expense of having our most valuable shit kicking at the bottom of the league just isnt worth it There is no such thing as an AFL fan or an NFL fan or a Cycling fan etc... People are dynamic sports fans. They watch the AFL expecting one thing, they watch the EPL expecting another, they watch golf or track expecting another. Fans of our game are used to big clubs, and internationally competitive instead of just locally. They dont tune in to say "herp de derp, last year MV bad, this year MV good. Me happy. Not bored" The FFA started with the answer. We must have an AFL model. We must be on one of three networks. In any other model South Melbourne would have been part of the league by now and nobody would give a shit what their crowds or ratings unless they ended up being one of the team 80% of people are interested in Pretty much my point mate. The FFA "re-invented" the game/clubs to appeal to a new audience and that has not materialised. All it did was alienate a segment of the old audience forever and bring in a an equivalent number (possibly marginally more than what was "lost" but only slightly) of new fans and then wonder why, after 17 years the TV audience and match day attendance is still where it was in the 90s.......... The new model did find a much bigger audience but then through rank mismanagement on every level alienated that audience. Now it's time gone and I agree it's not coming back. The A League was dubbed the NSL with a coat of paint. It was the same closed off franchise model that existed at the end of the NSL. It wasnt the model that found a new audience but a promising new organisation for digging our game out of a hole that every fan of the Australian game got behind. Also one that could attract government and commercial fundingI've always argued that the first 2 or 3 years of the league were necessary evils. Some people agree. Some dont. Some think there should have been 2 teams from Melbourne / Sydney. Other will argue there should have been a 2nd tier from day 1 The problem was those in charge decided to cement the initial model and sell it as the product. Season 7 was the start of the end of the A League Umm, are you sure about this statement? Myself and thousands of others did not "get behind it" as for the hundreds of thousands of so called "eurosnobs" that love football in this country and have done so for decades upon decades they didn't even realise the franchises existed...... and never will. That post has to be read within the context of my post above it. The 80/20 rule. I know I'm preaching to the converted so take this as more of an elaboration rather than a counter point Interest in the Australian game was low. You might have 100% of football fans follow football, 50% follow the Aussie NTs, 20% follow the national league (just as a very loose example). The point of the A League was to engage with the 20%, not the 100%. The fact the euro snobs didnt follow the initial league was moot, as with AFL fans I did a lot of stats at the start of the league and effectively it was just a consolidated NSL with money. Some NSL fans such as yourself may not have gotten on board but most did. It wasnt bye bye fans of Sydney teams and hello new fans for Sydney FC. They were the same. There was no way an unproven league for a historically mismanaged sport could have attracted a new audience like that. It was the NSL but with 8 clubs Then after the world cup the Australian game received a boom. In my made up figures above it would have been say 70% for the Aussie NTs and 35% for the local league. Peak interest can be seen in all teams in season 3 The A League was without a shadow of a doubt a successful and viable league. It had the corporate backing, investment, TV dollars, sponsorship and even player pool that the NSL couldnt touch. It just could never be a 100% model like the AFL / NRL. If the focus was on the 35% instead of the 65% it would be an established and stable part of the Australian sports market by now Fact is I don't care about whether you would watch it any more than I care about whether sad CCM fans would watch if if their team starts losing. The only thing the league needs to do is be competitive (not rigged) and a pathway for all clubs and players. The focus has to be on viability instead of popularity. Selling our game to be in a prime time slot on one of three networks shows we're a long way off learning that Will have to agree to disagree bluebird... I was not and will never be a statistician however anecdotally can state that most people I come across who are fans of the Aleague tend to mention in the same breath that they where also not fans of the old NSL .... you know the same old garbage arguments I get into on here all the time "blah blah, didn't like the wog teams, didn't feel safe, was scared by foreigners, soccer hooligans, Croatian flags etc etc etc" Yes some of the original NSL crowds migrated over ( please pardon the very laboured pun) but I think you will find the vast majority, like myself for a long time, just switched off altogether and watched EPL and euro leagues instead..... There is a dormant "ex NSL club" following out there which only comes out very very rarely ( big derby, final or FFA cup game), how many they are God only knows but they are still around and alot of them, have past on the madness to their kids.... The APL doesn't interact with these people and never will, you may dismiss us as being insignificant and you don't care if we watch the Aleague or not, that's fine, but you should care if the CCM fans "consume" the product because if they don't the APL and silverlake will pull the plug and you won't HAVE a league to follow.... The original A League support came from somewhere. It wasnt manufactured from a few board meetings and a brand new audience, one in, one out The fact remains that you have 100% of football fans, and x% for Australian league. The interest in the Australian "league" game has always been the smallest portion of football following as a whole and this isnt something that can be replicated in identical numbers over night If I had to guess I would say 80% of the A League year 1 fans had some original tie to the NSL whether it was a casual fan for big games, a historic fan who was disengaged towards the end, or somebody who just wanted to see the Australian game work, or a hardened fan I'm not dismissing NSL fans as insignificant. I'm simply saying that interest in the league will always be the smallest portion of fans so there is no need to try to appease to all football fans. Let them come over in their own time, if at all. The game simply has to be viable, not popular. If 60%-70% of football fans in this country are not fans of the national league, the vast majority of people are always "not" following the Australian league, so the league needs to appeal to those who are The AFL / NRL model for artificially stimulating growth in disinterested markets simply wasnt translatable to our game. Our approach should have been to simply "have" a league, and capitalise on the inevitable interest in the top league of a big sport, backed with the recent commercial interest that didnt exist before. The league would have continued to roll on year after year and a natural market would have determined which teams were in / out, and which fans were in / out they/we are members and fans of a specific club, not of a league. That's all there is to this debate, people follow a club and despie the initial goodwill from many football fans to support the local top league (me included) AL has squandered this with gimmicks and staleness. Football is the most popular game in the world for a reason and all APL needs to do is copy what other small football leagues do rather than trying to provide a AFL/NRL comp with a round ball Exactly.
People that follow professional competitions follow clubs - not just the league itself.
Souths fans follow the Bunnies bc their grandparents did. Same as a Collingwood fans or Hawthorn fans.
We need that sort of generational club support for our clubs. It takes decades. Some of the AFL clubs have been around since the 1860s. That's a century and a half of generational support. It's something that cannot easily be synthesised. Clubs like MV, SFC and WSW work because their population density is so high. All they need to do is win trophies and they work.WSW is the perfect demonstration of this. Grew rapidly due to onfield results. Declined when the results evaporated. When you don't have history, all you can rely on is success. Problem is success is difficult to sustain. Sorry mate but that is bollocks. Passion is passion, club is club. Even the AFL and NRL guys know that, some clubs haven't won a single thing in 50, 60 years yet still have die hard support. That's 100% right The mentality you responded to comes from the AFL / NRL approach I described above. There is no NRL in Victoria and any team would be weak. So the governing body puts a team in, sends their best players, and guarentees success. The market is artificially established. Over the course of 10 years, "fans" are trained to only watch when their team is winning. The game ends up with a conundrum Football took the same approach after season 6. For the first time introducing concessions to boost new markets. Since then it has been stuck in a Robin Hood paradox (continual rob from the rich and give to the poor). The result is obvious based on some of the plastic support dribble I read on here A competitive open league will be new and it will be scary to some here, no doubt about it. But the irony is these same fans already follow several sports and leagues around the Australia and the world with the same model If the FFA expansion was following an AFL model, which I doubt, it was West Coast, not GWS or Gold Coast they aspired to. Its the whole, fish where the fish are, model. However, they bungled it. Or maybe they didn't, and it was just never going to work. I dont know. I have always thought part of the reason for the AFLs relative success compared to football, was lack of choice. People might follow a local team and an AFL team, but if they find the AFL a bit on the nose, other than just watching local footy at the ground, they have limited options, so they hold their nose, and keep supporting. An A league fan that is disillusioned has plenty of other options to watch top flight football, so they just leave. You answered your own question. The reason for WCE's success was due to lack of options, not because of success. There would have been plenty more successful teams in the WAFL but elite sports fans demand elite sport. Having a team in a professional national competition was always going to take fans away from having a team in a local competition The AFL had a crush, kill, destroy mentality that is synonymous with leagues like the NRL, NFL and other stand alone leagues. Its a model that only works when the governing body has a monopoly, which we dont This was never going to work for football. Never. Even _if_ the model could work, which it can't, as you rightfully pointed out there was a 10-20 year period for teams like West Coast and Storm to be ingrained in their respective codes. When our starting point was 8 unknown teams, which 2 teams were we supposed to give 15 years of support and what would that have meant for the other 6 teams struggling for 15 years in the interim? There is no "one way" to have a successful sport. The AFL and NRL were successful in approaches that worked for them. Our situation is different. The A League has had many attempts to artificially boost metrics and they have all failed in the long run. And there is no need I'll put this a slightly different way. Imagine you are trying to establish McDonalds in an Asian country that doesnt have McDonalds. Your fear is they wont like it so you use the same brand and colours, but you serve Asian cuisine instead. This will fail because it wont be McDonalds enough for fans of McDonalds, and it wont be top notch Asian cuisine for those who prefer Asian food. Thats the conundrum the A League is in. Either there is demand for a football league in this country, or there isnt The FA were put in charge to establish a competitive football league. If the starting point for the FA is to state "there is no demand for a competitive national football league in this country" then they are simply the wrong people for the job I agree with your argument. The problem Australian football is that it somehow believes its main competitor are the other football codes. Somehow we cannot compete with them. The other codes represent the elite of their codes. We aren't. When local competition was ethnically based, it didn't matter, because the supporter base was primarily tribal - as elsewhere in the world. Creating new teams doesn't automatically create a new tribe. There was a case when it was city vs city. But now we have several teams per city in Melbourne and Sydney. That tribal element has been watered down. The potential fan base remains as evidenced when we have a visiting EPL team. So how do you tap into it? I contend that you can't do it when far better quality football exists elsewhere. The code should revert to a winter competition, starting mid April and finishing in the first week of December (34 weeks). I don't expect huge crowds initially, and I would prioritize viability over crowd numbers. Hence, grounds should meet a certain standard, but the 10,000 per game will not be an attainable goal for all teams, hence the facility should be consistent with supporter base. Therefore, for about half the season there would minimal quality competition from say European football (15 weeks), and have a little from their season start, and some from final weeks of a season. One would only a very few percent of global football fans to get a decent number of TV viewers. .
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Midfielder
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At the end of the day it comes down to what people expect....
Second we need to cut out myths and half truths spoken about as if they are the absolute truth...dispelling some myths below and puts on helmet...
Myth 1.... we have never had a professional league and we don't have established competitions above grass roots....
Myth 2 .... since the mid 70's the migrant demographic has shifted from European to Indian / Asian / Middle Eastern.... these groups simply don't bring the same level of skill and likening of Football as Europeans did...
Myth 3 ... we have never ever aside from the golden gen had a great local Australian side most of the 74 side were born oversees... many of that golden gen were actually developed by the AIS ....
Myth 4... the NSL ... however successful that league may have been or who they developed... the mix of teams in the NSL was never ever and even now going to get broad stream community support and acceptance...
Myth 5... we have never had good management... jury still out on JJ and Townsend...
Myth 6 ... the answer is simple....
Myth 7 ... its an easy fix...
Myth 8.... it can be done quickly ...
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df1982
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+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+xOf course there's a problem in the A-league. Think about the number of football fans that have been abandoned/alienated due denying their club access to the top flight in order to keep the fans of the 12 franchises and casual sport supporters happy. The A-L can't even embrace all the football fans in Australia. What...the 500 people at Sydney Olympic, Sydney United, Woolongong etc? Half the South Melbourne supporters converted to Victory anyway. I bet alot of the turncoats have really enjoyed the increase in popularity and validity they feel as soccer fans now that they went to McVictory... "Football but not as you know it" really proved to be a huge mainstream success eh? Its not about whether South Melbourne will get 500 or 50000. And this is the mentality that has broken our game The AFL is a league where 99% of Aussie Rules fans follow the AFL. Same as the NFL. And same as other invitational only sports. Thats their model We will never have that model. Fact. Reality. Accept it. Football can only thrive with the next best economic model which is the 80/20 rule (where 80% of revenue / support comes from 20% of clubs). The rest is just filler. The game needs a big MV, SFC, WSW, BR and another club. People arent going to turn in Saturday night to see top vs bottom For the NRL to succeed it needed a strong Victorian team to capitalise on 100% of Victorian support so they manufactured one. Same as what the AFL did progressively over their foreign markets. We dont need a strong Central Coast Mariners or a strong Canberra. Thats not our model. The pittance these regions can bring at the expense of having our most valuable shit kicking at the bottom of the league just isnt worth it There is no such thing as an AFL fan or an NFL fan or a Cycling fan etc... People are dynamic sports fans. They watch the AFL expecting one thing, they watch the EPL expecting another, they watch golf or track expecting another. Fans of our game are used to big clubs, and internationally competitive instead of just locally. They dont tune in to say "herp de derp, last year MV bad, this year MV good. Me happy. Not bored" The FFA started with the answer. We must have an AFL model. We must be on one of three networks. In any other model South Melbourne would have been part of the league by now and nobody would give a shit what their crowds or ratings unless they ended up being one of the team 80% of people are interested in Pretty much my point mate. The FFA "re-invented" the game/clubs to appeal to a new audience and that has not materialised. All it did was alienate a segment of the old audience forever and bring in a an equivalent number (possibly marginally more than what was "lost" but only slightly) of new fans and then wonder why, after 17 years the TV audience and match day attendance is still where it was in the 90s.......... The new model did find a much bigger audience but then through rank mismanagement on every level alienated that audience. Now it's time gone and I agree it's not coming back. The A League was dubbed the NSL with a coat of paint. It was the same closed off franchise model that existed at the end of the NSL. It wasnt the model that found a new audience but a promising new organisation for digging our game out of a hole that every fan of the Australian game got behind. Also one that could attract government and commercial fundingI've always argued that the first 2 or 3 years of the league were necessary evils. Some people agree. Some dont. Some think there should have been 2 teams from Melbourne / Sydney. Other will argue there should have been a 2nd tier from day 1 The problem was those in charge decided to cement the initial model and sell it as the product. Season 7 was the start of the end of the A League Umm, are you sure about this statement? Myself and thousands of others did not "get behind it" as for the hundreds of thousands of so called "eurosnobs" that love football in this country and have done so for decades upon decades they didn't even realise the franchises existed...... and never will. That post has to be read within the context of my post above it. The 80/20 rule. I know I'm preaching to the converted so take this as more of an elaboration rather than a counter point Interest in the Australian game was low. You might have 100% of football fans follow football, 50% follow the Aussie NTs, 20% follow the national league (just as a very loose example). The point of the A League was to engage with the 20%, not the 100%. The fact the euro snobs didnt follow the initial league was moot, as with AFL fans I did a lot of stats at the start of the league and effectively it was just a consolidated NSL with money. Some NSL fans such as yourself may not have gotten on board but most did. It wasnt bye bye fans of Sydney teams and hello new fans for Sydney FC. They were the same. There was no way an unproven league for a historically mismanaged sport could have attracted a new audience like that. It was the NSL but with 8 clubs Then after the world cup the Australian game received a boom. In my made up figures above it would have been say 70% for the Aussie NTs and 35% for the local league. Peak interest can be seen in all teams in season 3 The A League was without a shadow of a doubt a successful and viable league. It had the corporate backing, investment, TV dollars, sponsorship and even player pool that the NSL couldnt touch. It just could never be a 100% model like the AFL / NRL. If the focus was on the 35% instead of the 65% it would be an established and stable part of the Australian sports market by now Fact is I don't care about whether you would watch it any more than I care about whether sad CCM fans would watch if if their team starts losing. The only thing the league needs to do is be competitive (not rigged) and a pathway for all clubs and players. The focus has to be on viability instead of popularity. Selling our game to be in a prime time slot on one of three networks shows we're a long way off learning that Will have to agree to disagree bluebird... I was not and will never be a statistician however anecdotally can state that most people I come across who are fans of the Aleague tend to mention in the same breath that they where also not fans of the old NSL .... you know the same old garbage arguments I get into on here all the time "blah blah, didn't like the wog teams, didn't feel safe, was scared by foreigners, soccer hooligans, Croatian flags etc etc etc" Yes some of the original NSL crowds migrated over ( please pardon the very laboured pun) but I think you will find the vast majority, like myself for a long time, just switched off altogether and watched EPL and euro leagues instead..... There is a dormant "ex NSL club" following out there which only comes out very very rarely ( big derby, final or FFA cup game), how many they are God only knows but they are still around and alot of them, have past on the madness to their kids.... The APL doesn't interact with these people and never will, you may dismiss us as being insignificant and you don't care if we watch the Aleague or not, that's fine, but you should care if the CCM fans "consume" the product because if they don't the APL and silverlake will pull the plug and you won't HAVE a league to follow.... The original A League support came from somewhere. It wasnt manufactured from a few board meetings and a brand new audience, one in, one out The fact remains that you have 100% of football fans, and x% for Australian league. The interest in the Australian "league" game has always been the smallest portion of football following as a whole and this isnt something that can be replicated in identical numbers over night If I had to guess I would say 80% of the A League year 1 fans had some original tie to the NSL whether it was a casual fan for big games, a historic fan who was disengaged towards the end, or somebody who just wanted to see the Australian game work, or a hardened fan I'm not dismissing NSL fans as insignificant. I'm simply saying that interest in the league will always be the smallest portion of fans so there is no need to try to appease to all football fans. Let them come over in their own time, if at all. The game simply has to be viable, not popular. If 60%-70% of football fans in this country are not fans of the national league, the vast majority of people are always "not" following the Australian league, so the league needs to appeal to those who are The AFL / NRL model for artificially stimulating growth in disinterested markets simply wasnt translatable to our game. Our approach should have been to simply "have" a league, and capitalise on the inevitable interest in the top league of a big sport, backed with the recent commercial interest that didnt exist before. The league would have continued to roll on year after year and a natural market would have determined which teams were in / out, and which fans were in / out they/we are members and fans of a specific club, not of a league. That's all there is to this debate, people follow a club and despie the initial goodwill from many football fans to support the local top league (me included) AL has squandered this with gimmicks and staleness. Football is the most popular game in the world for a reason and all APL needs to do is copy what other small football leagues do rather than trying to provide a AFL/NRL comp with a round ball Exactly.
People that follow professional competitions follow clubs - not just the league itself.
Souths fans follow the Bunnies bc their grandparents did. Same as a Collingwood fans or Hawthorn fans.
We need that sort of generational club support for our clubs. It takes decades. Some of the AFL clubs have been around since the 1860s. That's a century and a half of generational support. It's something that cannot easily be synthesised. Clubs like MV, SFC and WSW work because their population density is so high. All they need to do is win trophies and they work.WSW is the perfect demonstration of this. Grew rapidly due to onfield results. Declined when the results evaporated. When you don't have history, all you can rely on is success. Problem is success is difficult to sustain. Sorry mate but that is bollocks. Passion is passion, club is club. Even the AFL and NRL guys know that, some clubs haven't won a single thing in 50, 60 years yet still have die hard support. That's 100% right The mentality you responded to comes from the AFL / NRL approach I described above. There is no NRL in Victoria and any team would be weak. So the governing body puts a team in, sends their best players, and guarentees success. The market is artificially established. Over the course of 10 years, "fans" are trained to only watch when their team is winning. The game ends up with a conundrum Football took the same approach after season 6. For the first time introducing concessions to boost new markets. Since then it has been stuck in a Robin Hood paradox (continual rob from the rich and give to the poor). The result is obvious based on some of the plastic support dribble I read on here A competitive open league will be new and it will be scary to some here, no doubt about it. But the irony is these same fans already follow several sports and leagues around the Australia and the world with the same model This is what the post he responded to was saying. You both seem to be objecting to a post that makes the same point your making, but better. AFL clubs like Essendon and Carlton haven't had success for decades, but still draw big crowds. They are entrenched, generational clubs, with a fanatical base support that means even prolonged periods of relative failure doesn't see support collapse. A club like GWS needs to win and be successful. Its why Gold Coast support sucks. However, its also why West Coast succeeded in the long run. Despite being a created 'plastic' franchise, which had some initial trouble, its based in an AFL city. So, a period of success saw WAFL followers switch allegiances to WC. Now, not only does its support dwarf that of a lot of old Victorian teams, that support is entrenched. They emulated the support of old big Victorian clubs, and did it in only a couple of decades. Glory had something similar going, to a lesser extent. If the FFA expansion was following an AFL model, which I doubt, it was West Coast, not GWS or Gold Coast they aspired to. Its the whole, fish where the fish are, model. However, they bungled it. Or maybe they didn't, and it was just never going to work. I dont know. I have always thought part of the reason for the AFLs relative success compared to football, was lack of choice. People might follow a local team and an AFL team, but if they find the AFL a bit on the nose, other than just watching local footy at the ground, they have limited options, so they hold their nose, and keep supporting. An A league fan that is disillusioned has plenty of other options to watch top flight football, so they just leave. +x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x[quote]Of course there's a problem in the A-league. Think about the number of football fans that have been abandoned/alienated due denying their club access to the top flight in order to keep the fans of the 12 franchises and casual sport supporters happy. The A-L can't even embrace all the football fans in Australia. What...the 500 people at Sydney Olympic, Sydney United, Woolongong etc? Half the South Melbourne supporters converted to Victory anyway. I bet alot of the turncoats have really enjoyed the increase in popularity and validity they feel as soccer fans now that they went to McVictory... "Football but not as you know it" really proved to be a huge mainstream success eh? Its not about whether South Melbourne will get 500 or 50000. And this is the mentality that has broken our game The AFL is a league where 99% of Aussie Rules fans follow the AFL. Same as the NFL. And same as other invitational only sports. Thats their model We will never have that model. Fact. Reality. Accept it. Football can only thrive with the next best economic model which is the 80/20 rule (where 80% of revenue / support comes from 20% of clubs). The rest is just filler. The game needs a big MV, SFC, WSW, BR and another club. People arent going to turn in Saturday night to see top vs bottom For the NRL to succeed it needed a strong Victorian team to capitalise on 100% of Victorian support so they manufactured one. Same as what the AFL did progressively over their foreign markets. We dont need a strong Central Coast Mariners or a strong Canberra. Thats not our model. The pittance these regions can bring at the expense of having our most valuable shit kicking at the bottom of the league just isnt worth it There is no such thing as an AFL fan or an NFL fan or a Cycling fan etc... People are dynamic sports fans. They watch the AFL expecting one thing, they watch the EPL expecting another, they watch golf or track expecting another. Fans of our game are used to big clubs, and internationally competitive instead of just locally. They dont tune in to say "herp de derp, last year MV bad, this year MV good. Me happy. Not bored" The FFA started with the answer. We must have an AFL model. We must be on one of three networks. In any other model South Melbourne would have been part of the league by now and nobody would give a shit what their crowds or ratings unless they ended up being one of the team 80% of people are interested in Pretty much my point mate. The FFA "re-invented" the game/clubs to appeal to a new audience and that has not materialised. All it did was alienate a segment of the old audience forever and bring in a an equivalent number (possibly marginally more than what was "lost" but only slightly) of new fans and then wonder why, after 17 years the TV audience and match day attendance is still where it was in the 90s.......... The new model did find a much bigger audience but then through rank mismanagement on every level alienated that audience. Now it's time gone and I agree it's not coming back. The A League was dubbed the NSL with a coat of paint. It was the same closed off franchise model that existed at the end of the NSL. It wasnt the model that found a new audience but a promising new organisation for digging our game out of a hole that every fan of the Australian game got behind. Also one that could attract government and commercial fundingI've always argued that the first 2 or 3 years of the league were necessary evils. Some people agree. Some dont. Some think there should have been 2 teams from Melbourne / Sydney. Other will argue there should have been a 2nd tier from day 1 The problem was those in charge decided to cement the initial model and sell it as the product. Season 7 was the start of the end of the A League Umm, are you sure about this statement? Myself and thousands of others did not "get behind it" as for the hundreds of thousands of so called "eurosnobs" that love football in this country and have done so for decades upon decades they didn't even realise the franchises existed...... and never will. That post has to be read within the context of my post above it. The 80/20 rule. I know I'm preaching to the converted so take this as more of an elaboration rather than a counter point Interest in the Australian game was low. You might have 100% of football fans follow football, 50% follow the Aussie NTs, 20% follow the national league (just as a very loose example). The point of the A League was to engage with the 20%, not the 100%. The fact the euro snobs didnt follow the initial league was moot, as with AFL fans I did a lot of stats at the start of the league and effectively it was just a consolidated NSL with money. Some NSL fans such as yourself may not have gotten on board but most did. It wasnt bye bye fans of Sydney teams and hello new fans for Sydney FC. They were the same. There was no way an unproven league for a historically mismanaged sport could have attracted a new audience like that. It was the NSL but with 8 clubs Then after the world cup the Australian game received a boom. In my made up figures above it would have been say 70% for the Aussie NTs and 35% for the local league. Peak interest can be seen in all teams in season 3 The A League was without a shadow of a doubt a successful and viable league. It had the corporate backing, investment, TV dollars, sponsorship and even player pool that the NSL couldnt touch. It just could never be a 100% model like the AFL / NRL. If the focus was on the 35% instead of the 65% it would be an established and stable part of the Australian sports market by now Fact is I don't care about whether you would watch it any more than I care about whether sad CCM fans would watch if if their team starts losing. The only thing the league needs to do is be competitive (not rigged) and a pathway for all clubs and players. The focus has to be on viability instead of popularity. Selling our game to be in a prime time slot on one of three networks shows we're a long way off learning that Will have to agree to disagree bluebird... I was not and will never be a statistician however anecdotally can state that most people I come across who are fans of the Aleague tend to mention in the same breath that they where also not fans of the old NSL .... you know the same old garbage arguments I get into on here all the time "blah blah, didn't like the wog teams, didn't feel safe, was scared by foreigners, soccer hooligans, Croatian flags etc etc etc" Yes some of the original NSL crowds migrated over ( please pardon the very laboured pun) but I think you will find the vast majority, like myself for a long time, just switched off altogether and watched EPL and euro leagues instead..... There is a dormant "ex NSL club" following out there which only comes out very very rarely ( big derby, final or FFA cup game), how many they are God only knows but they are still around and alot of them, have past on the madness to their kids.... The APL doesn't interact with these people and never will, you may dismiss us as being insignificant and you don't care if we watch the Aleague or not, that's fine, but you should care if the CCM fans "consume" the product because if they don't the APL and silverlake will pull the plug and you won't HAVE a league to follow.... The original A League support came from somewhere. It wasnt manufactured from a few board meetings and a brand new audience, one in, one out The fact remains that you have 100% of football fans, and x% for Australian league. The interest in the Australian "league" game has always been the smallest portion of football following as a whole and this isnt something that can be replicated in identical numbers over night If I had to guess I would say 80% of the A League year 1 fans had some original tie to the NSL whether it was a casual fan for big games, a historic fan who was disengaged towards the end, or somebody who just wanted to see the Australian game work, or a hardened fan I'm not dismissing NSL fans as insignificant. I'm simply saying that interest in the league will always be the smallest portion of fans so there is no need to try to appease to all football fans. Let them come over in their own time, if at all. The game simply has to be viable, not popular. If 60%-70% of football fans in this country are not fans of the national league, the vast majority of people are always "not" following the Australian league, so the league needs to appeal to those who are The AFL / NRL model for artificially stimulating growth in disinterested markets simply wasnt translatable to our game. Our approach should have been to simply "have" a league, and capitalise on the inevitable interest in the top league of a big sport, backed with the recent commercial interest that didnt exist before. The league would have continued to roll on year after year and a natural market would have determined which teams were in / out, and which fans were in / out they/we are members and fans of a specific club, not of a league. That's all there is to this debate, people follow a club and despie the initial goodwill from many football fans to support the local top league (me included) AL has squandered this with gimmicks and staleness. Football is the most popular game in the world for a reason and all APL needs to do is copy what other small football leagues do rather than trying to provide a AFL/NRL comp with a round ball Exactly.
People that follow professional competitions follow clubs - not just the league itself.
Souths fans follow the Bunnies bc their grandparents did. Same as a Collingwood fans or Hawthorn fans.
We need that sort of generational club support for our clubs. It takes decades. Some of the AFL clubs have been around since the 1860s. That's a century and a half of generational support. It's something that cannot easily be synthesised. Clubs like MV, SFC and WSW work because their population density is so high. All they need to do is win trophies and they work.WSW is the perfect demonstration of this. Grew rapidly due to onfield results. Declined when the results evaporated. When you don't have history, all you can rely on is success. Problem is success is difficult to sustain. Sorry mate but that is bollocks. Passion is passion, club is club. Even the AFL and NRL guys know that, some clubs haven't won a single thing in 50, 60 years yet still have die hard support. That's 100% right The mentality you responded to comes from the AFL / NRL approach I described above. There is no NRL in Victoria and any team would be weak. So the governing body puts a team in, sends their best players, and guarentees success. The market is artificially established. Over the course of 10 years, "fans" are trained to only watch when their team is winning. The game ends up with a conundrum Football took the same approach after season 6. For the first time introducing concessions to boost new markets. Since then it has been stuck in a Robin Hood paradox (continual rob from the rich and give to the poor). The result is obvious based on some of the plastic support dribble I read on here A competitive open league will be new and it will be scary to some here, no doubt about it. But the irony is these same fans already follow several sports and leagues around the Australia and the world with the same model If the FFA expansion was following an AFL model, which I doubt, it was West Coast, not GWS or Gold Coast they aspired to. Its the whole, fish where the fish are, model. However, they bungled it. Or maybe they didn't, and it was just never going to work. I dont know. I have always thought part of the reason for the AFLs relative success compared to football, was lack of choice. People might follow a local team and an AFL team, but if they find the AFL a bit on the nose, other than just watching local footy at the ground, they have limited options, so they hold their nose, and keep supporting. An A league fan that is disillusioned has plenty of other options to watch top flight football, so they just leave. You answered your own question. The reason for WCE's success was due to lack of options, not because of success. There would have been plenty more successful teams in the WAFL but elite sports fans demand elite sport. Having a team in a professional national competition was always going to take fans away from having a team in a local competition The AFL had a crush, kill, destroy mentality that is synonymous with leagues like the NRL, NFL and other stand alone leagues. Its a model that only works when the governing body has a monopoly, which we dont This was never going to work for football. Never. Even _if_ the model could work, which it can't, as you rightfully pointed out there was a 10-20 year period for teams like West Coast and Storm to be ingrained in their respective codes. When our starting point was 8 unknown teams, which 2 teams were we supposed to give 15 years of support and what would that have meant for the other 6 teams struggling for 15 years in the interim? There is no "one way" to have a successful sport. The AFL and NRL were successful in approaches that worked for them. Our situation is different. The A League has had many attempts to artificially boost metrics and they have all failed in the long run. And there is no need I'll put this a slightly different way. Imagine you are trying to establish McDonalds in an Asian country that doesnt have McDonalds. Your fear is they wont like it so you use the same brand and colours, but you serve Asian cuisine instead. This will fail because it wont be McDonalds enough for fans of McDonalds, and it wont be top notch Asian cuisine for those who prefer Asian food. Thats the conundrum the A League is in. Either there is demand for a football league in this country, or there isnt The FA were put in charge to establish a competitive football league. If the starting point for the FA is to state "there is no demand for a competitive national football league in this country" then they are simply the wrong people for the job So how do you tap into it? I contend that you can't do it when far better quality football exists elsewhere. The code should revert to a winter competition, starting mid April and finishing in the first week of December (34 weeks). I don't expect huge crowds initially, and I would prioritize viability over crowd numbers. Hence, grounds should meet a certain standard, but the 10,000 per game will not be an attainable goal for all teams, hence the facility should be consistent with supporter base. Therefore, for about half the season there would minimal quality competition from say European football (15 weeks), and have a little from their season start, and some from final weeks of a season. One would only a very few percent of global football fans to get a decent number of TV viewers. . I pretty much agree with the thinking behind this sentiment. Instead of conceiving of A-League clubs as being akin to AFL or NRL franchises, they should be understood as part of the global ecosystem of football. This puts a much bigger premium on player development, because if you can unearth and develop a top-notch player and have the wits to sell him for true market value (something which A-League clubs have been pretty hopeless at), then you should be able to bring millions of dollars into the game. This is a potential resource AFL and NRL clubs don't have. But the ideal environment for player development is not a Big Bash League style league with short seasons but big fan interest. It's a full-length season (9-10 months, so 30+ rounds in the regular season), and played in winter which is more conducive to good football. And you need an integrated pyramid with pro-rel for clubs to adopt a more cut-throat mentality. This logically also means no more salary cap either, allowing clubs to sign players onto longer-term contracts so they could on-sell them for a decent price. Below A-League level, clubs would decide on an individual basis whether to go full time or stay part time. The lower divisions (a national second division, then regional divisions below that) should also make sure they cover all regional areas so that we have a universal player catchment. This means lower tier clubs in places like Geelong, Wollongong, Sunshine Coast, Townsville, Hobart, and even Albury-Wodonga, Ballarat, Coffs Harbour, Toowoomba and the like (these should even be subsidised by a regional football fund if necessary). The flipside of this is you no longer have a league with 10-12 clubs who all think they can win the league next year. The A-League would become more Darwinian, and you'd probably end up with something like a Big 4: Sydney, Wanderers, Victory and City. Between them they would hoover up the best players, win the league most years and be nearly ever-present in the ACL (where hopefully they could actually start to be a bit competitive). Clubs like Brisbane and Perth might get a look in every now and again, but the commercial gulf between big and small clubs would get bigger. The rest of the A-League would be a rotation of smaller clubs who are either yoyo-ing with the second division or treading water in the top flight. Either way the prize for them is not winning the A-League, it's being in the A-League. They should be happy with modest crowds in suitably sized stadiums, playing for the sake of local pride, and adopting the role of selling clubs, off-loading promising players to the big boys when the time is ripe. You don't quite want to get to the point of Portugal or Scotland where the same 2-3 clubs win the league absolutely every year, but it would be heading more in that direction. This is probably a more sustainable future than the current trajectory of the game.
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bluebird2
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+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x[quote]Of course there's a problem in the A-league. Think about the number of football fans that have been abandoned/alienated due denying their club access to the top flight in order to keep the fans of the 12 franchises and casual sport supporters happy. The A-L can't even embrace all the football fans in Australia. What...the 500 people at Sydney Olympic, Sydney United, Woolongong etc? Half the South Melbourne supporters converted to Victory anyway. I bet alot of the turncoats have really enjoyed the increase in popularity and validity they feel as soccer fans now that they went to McVictory... "Football but not as you know it" really proved to be a huge mainstream success eh? Its not about whether South Melbourne will get 500 or 50000. And this is the mentality that has broken our game The AFL is a league where 99% of Aussie Rules fans follow the AFL. Same as the NFL. And same as other invitational only sports. Thats their model We will never have that model. Fact. Reality. Accept it. Football can only thrive with the next best economic model which is the 80/20 rule (where 80% of revenue / support comes from 20% of clubs). The rest is just filler. The game needs a big MV, SFC, WSW, BR and another club. People arent going to turn in Saturday night to see top vs bottom For the NRL to succeed it needed a strong Victorian team to capitalise on 100% of Victorian support so they manufactured one. Same as what the AFL did progressively over their foreign markets. We dont need a strong Central Coast Mariners or a strong Canberra. Thats not our model. The pittance these regions can bring at the expense of having our most valuable shit kicking at the bottom of the league just isnt worth it There is no such thing as an AFL fan or an NFL fan or a Cycling fan etc... People are dynamic sports fans. They watch the AFL expecting one thing, they watch the EPL expecting another, they watch golf or track expecting another. Fans of our game are used to big clubs, and internationally competitive instead of just locally. They dont tune in to say "herp de derp, last year MV bad, this year MV good. Me happy. Not bored" The FFA started with the answer. We must have an AFL model. We must be on one of three networks. In any other model South Melbourne would have been part of the league by now and nobody would give a shit what their crowds or ratings unless they ended up being one of the team 80% of people are interested in Pretty much my point mate. The FFA "re-invented" the game/clubs to appeal to a new audience and that has not materialised. All it did was alienate a segment of the old audience forever and bring in a an equivalent number (possibly marginally more than what was "lost" but only slightly) of new fans and then wonder why, after 17 years the TV audience and match day attendance is still where it was in the 90s.......... The new model did find a much bigger audience but then through rank mismanagement on every level alienated that audience. Now it's time gone and I agree it's not coming back. The A League was dubbed the NSL with a coat of paint. It was the same closed off franchise model that existed at the end of the NSL. It wasnt the model that found a new audience but a promising new organisation for digging our game out of a hole that every fan of the Australian game got behind. Also one that could attract government and commercial fundingI've always argued that the first 2 or 3 years of the league were necessary evils. Some people agree. Some dont. Some think there should have been 2 teams from Melbourne / Sydney. Other will argue there should have been a 2nd tier from day 1 The problem was those in charge decided to cement the initial model and sell it as the product. Season 7 was the start of the end of the A League Umm, are you sure about this statement? Myself and thousands of others did not "get behind it" as for the hundreds of thousands of so called "eurosnobs" that love football in this country and have done so for decades upon decades they didn't even realise the franchises existed...... and never will. That post has to be read within the context of my post above it. The 80/20 rule. I know I'm preaching to the converted so take this as more of an elaboration rather than a counter point Interest in the Australian game was low. You might have 100% of football fans follow football, 50% follow the Aussie NTs, 20% follow the national league (just as a very loose example). The point of the A League was to engage with the 20%, not the 100%. The fact the euro snobs didnt follow the initial league was moot, as with AFL fans I did a lot of stats at the start of the league and effectively it was just a consolidated NSL with money. Some NSL fans such as yourself may not have gotten on board but most did. It wasnt bye bye fans of Sydney teams and hello new fans for Sydney FC. They were the same. There was no way an unproven league for a historically mismanaged sport could have attracted a new audience like that. It was the NSL but with 8 clubs Then after the world cup the Australian game received a boom. In my made up figures above it would have been say 70% for the Aussie NTs and 35% for the local league. Peak interest can be seen in all teams in season 3 The A League was without a shadow of a doubt a successful and viable league. It had the corporate backing, investment, TV dollars, sponsorship and even player pool that the NSL couldnt touch. It just could never be a 100% model like the AFL / NRL. If the focus was on the 35% instead of the 65% it would be an established and stable part of the Australian sports market by now Fact is I don't care about whether you would watch it any more than I care about whether sad CCM fans would watch if if their team starts losing. The only thing the league needs to do is be competitive (not rigged) and a pathway for all clubs and players. The focus has to be on viability instead of popularity. Selling our game to be in a prime time slot on one of three networks shows we're a long way off learning that Will have to agree to disagree bluebird... I was not and will never be a statistician however anecdotally can state that most people I come across who are fans of the Aleague tend to mention in the same breath that they where also not fans of the old NSL .... you know the same old garbage arguments I get into on here all the time "blah blah, didn't like the wog teams, didn't feel safe, was scared by foreigners, soccer hooligans, Croatian flags etc etc etc" Yes some of the original NSL crowds migrated over ( please pardon the very laboured pun) but I think you will find the vast majority, like myself for a long time, just switched off altogether and watched EPL and euro leagues instead..... There is a dormant "ex NSL club" following out there which only comes out very very rarely ( big derby, final or FFA cup game), how many they are God only knows but they are still around and alot of them, have past on the madness to their kids.... The APL doesn't interact with these people and never will, you may dismiss us as being insignificant and you don't care if we watch the Aleague or not, that's fine, but you should care if the CCM fans "consume" the product because if they don't the APL and silverlake will pull the plug and you won't HAVE a league to follow.... The original A League support came from somewhere. It wasnt manufactured from a few board meetings and a brand new audience, one in, one out The fact remains that you have 100% of football fans, and x% for Australian league. The interest in the Australian "league" game has always been the smallest portion of football following as a whole and this isnt something that can be replicated in identical numbers over night If I had to guess I would say 80% of the A League year 1 fans had some original tie to the NSL whether it was a casual fan for big games, a historic fan who was disengaged towards the end, or somebody who just wanted to see the Australian game work, or a hardened fan I'm not dismissing NSL fans as insignificant. I'm simply saying that interest in the league will always be the smallest portion of fans so there is no need to try to appease to all football fans. Let them come over in their own time, if at all. The game simply has to be viable, not popular. If 60%-70% of football fans in this country are not fans of the national league, the vast majority of people are always "not" following the Australian league, so the league needs to appeal to those who are The AFL / NRL model for artificially stimulating growth in disinterested markets simply wasnt translatable to our game. Our approach should have been to simply "have" a league, and capitalise on the inevitable interest in the top league of a big sport, backed with the recent commercial interest that didnt exist before. The league would have continued to roll on year after year and a natural market would have determined which teams were in / out, and which fans were in / out they/we are members and fans of a specific club, not of a league. That's all there is to this debate, people follow a club and despie the initial goodwill from many football fans to support the local top league (me included) AL has squandered this with gimmicks and staleness. Football is the most popular game in the world for a reason and all APL needs to do is copy what other small football leagues do rather than trying to provide a AFL/NRL comp with a round ball Exactly.
People that follow professional competitions follow clubs - not just the league itself.
Souths fans follow the Bunnies bc their grandparents did. Same as a Collingwood fans or Hawthorn fans.
We need that sort of generational club support for our clubs. It takes decades. Some of the AFL clubs have been around since the 1860s. That's a century and a half of generational support. It's something that cannot easily be synthesised. Clubs like MV, SFC and WSW work because their population density is so high. All they need to do is win trophies and they work.WSW is the perfect demonstration of this. Grew rapidly due to onfield results. Declined when the results evaporated. When you don't have history, all you can rely on is success. Problem is success is difficult to sustain. Sorry mate but that is bollocks. Passion is passion, club is club. Even the AFL and NRL guys know that, some clubs haven't won a single thing in 50, 60 years yet still have die hard support. That's 100% right The mentality you responded to comes from the AFL / NRL approach I described above. There is no NRL in Victoria and any team would be weak. So the governing body puts a team in, sends their best players, and guarentees success. The market is artificially established. Over the course of 10 years, "fans" are trained to only watch when their team is winning. The game ends up with a conundrum Football took the same approach after season 6. For the first time introducing concessions to boost new markets. Since then it has been stuck in a Robin Hood paradox (continual rob from the rich and give to the poor). The result is obvious based on some of the plastic support dribble I read on here A competitive open league will be new and it will be scary to some here, no doubt about it. But the irony is these same fans already follow several sports and leagues around the Australia and the world with the same model If the FFA expansion was following an AFL model, which I doubt, it was West Coast, not GWS or Gold Coast they aspired to. Its the whole, fish where the fish are, model. However, they bungled it. Or maybe they didn't, and it was just never going to work. I dont know. I have always thought part of the reason for the AFLs relative success compared to football, was lack of choice. People might follow a local team and an AFL team, but if they find the AFL a bit on the nose, other than just watching local footy at the ground, they have limited options, so they hold their nose, and keep supporting. An A league fan that is disillusioned has plenty of other options to watch top flight football, so they just leave. You answered your own question. The reason for WCE's success was due to lack of options, not because of success. There would have been plenty more successful teams in the WAFL but elite sports fans demand elite sport. Having a team in a professional national competition was always going to take fans away from having a team in a local competition The AFL had a crush, kill, destroy mentality that is synonymous with leagues like the NRL, NFL and other stand alone leagues. Its a model that only works when the governing body has a monopoly, which we dont This was never going to work for football. Never. Even _if_ the model could work, which it can't, as you rightfully pointed out there was a 10-20 year period for teams like West Coast and Storm to be ingrained in their respective codes. When our starting point was 8 unknown teams, which 2 teams were we supposed to give 15 years of support and what would that have meant for the other 6 teams struggling for 15 years in the interim? There is no "one way" to have a successful sport. The AFL and NRL were successful in approaches that worked for them. Our situation is different. The A League has had many attempts to artificially boost metrics and they have all failed in the long run. And there is no need I'll put this a slightly different way. Imagine you are trying to establish McDonalds in an Asian country that doesnt have McDonalds. Your fear is they wont like it so you use the same brand and colours, but you serve Asian cuisine instead. This will fail because it wont be McDonalds enough for fans of McDonalds, and it wont be top notch Asian cuisine for those who prefer Asian food. Thats the conundrum the A League is in. Either there is demand for a football league in this country, or there isnt The FA were put in charge to establish a competitive football league. If the starting point for the FA is to state "there is no demand for a competitive national football league in this country" then they are simply the wrong people for the job You cannot copy paste European leagues to Australia, but you cannot just replicate the NRL or AFL either. So, where is the middle ground? What needs to be retained for the authenticity of the sport, what needs to be changed to make it work in Australia (as a pro code I mean, as a community sport, its working just fine now imop). Its about whether the clubs determine which clubs are the most successful or whether the governing body does The two lowest things in any sport are match fixing and drugs. When a governing body takes steps to ensure an otherwise non competitive region is successful so they get more money, thats not honorable As I said, the FA simply have to establish a competitive league and nature will sort out the rest. The structure of a sport is not "cultural" and you'll find many formats exist in all countries
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bluebird2
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Group: Forum Members
Posts: 648,
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+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+xOf course there's a problem in the A-league. Think about the number of football fans that have been abandoned/alienated due denying their club access to the top flight in order to keep the fans of the 12 franchises and casual sport supporters happy. The A-L can't even embrace all the football fans in Australia. What...the 500 people at Sydney Olympic, Sydney United, Woolongong etc? Half the South Melbourne supporters converted to Victory anyway. I bet alot of the turncoats have really enjoyed the increase in popularity and validity they feel as soccer fans now that they went to McVictory... "Football but not as you know it" really proved to be a huge mainstream success eh? Its not about whether South Melbourne will get 500 or 50000. And this is the mentality that has broken our game The AFL is a league where 99% of Aussie Rules fans follow the AFL. Same as the NFL. And same as other invitational only sports. Thats their model We will never have that model. Fact. Reality. Accept it. Football can only thrive with the next best economic model which is the 80/20 rule (where 80% of revenue / support comes from 20% of clubs). The rest is just filler. The game needs a big MV, SFC, WSW, BR and another club. People arent going to turn in Saturday night to see top vs bottom For the NRL to succeed it needed a strong Victorian team to capitalise on 100% of Victorian support so they manufactured one. Same as what the AFL did progressively over their foreign markets. We dont need a strong Central Coast Mariners or a strong Canberra. Thats not our model. The pittance these regions can bring at the expense of having our most valuable shit kicking at the bottom of the league just isnt worth it There is no such thing as an AFL fan or an NFL fan or a Cycling fan etc... People are dynamic sports fans. They watch the AFL expecting one thing, they watch the EPL expecting another, they watch golf or track expecting another. Fans of our game are used to big clubs, and internationally competitive instead of just locally. They dont tune in to say "herp de derp, last year MV bad, this year MV good. Me happy. Not bored" The FFA started with the answer. We must have an AFL model. We must be on one of three networks. In any other model South Melbourne would have been part of the league by now and nobody would give a shit what their crowds or ratings unless they ended up being one of the team 80% of people are interested in Pretty much my point mate. The FFA "re-invented" the game/clubs to appeal to a new audience and that has not materialised. All it did was alienate a segment of the old audience forever and bring in a an equivalent number (possibly marginally more than what was "lost" but only slightly) of new fans and then wonder why, after 17 years the TV audience and match day attendance is still where it was in the 90s.......... The new model did find a much bigger audience but then through rank mismanagement on every level alienated that audience. Now it's time gone and I agree it's not coming back. The A League was dubbed the NSL with a coat of paint. It was the same closed off franchise model that existed at the end of the NSL. It wasnt the model that found a new audience but a promising new organisation for digging our game out of a hole that every fan of the Australian game got behind. Also one that could attract government and commercial fundingI've always argued that the first 2 or 3 years of the league were necessary evils. Some people agree. Some dont. Some think there should have been 2 teams from Melbourne / Sydney. Other will argue there should have been a 2nd tier from day 1 The problem was those in charge decided to cement the initial model and sell it as the product. Season 7 was the start of the end of the A League Umm, are you sure about this statement? Myself and thousands of others did not "get behind it" as for the hundreds of thousands of so called "eurosnobs" that love football in this country and have done so for decades upon decades they didn't even realise the franchises existed...... and never will. That post has to be read within the context of my post above it. The 80/20 rule. I know I'm preaching to the converted so take this as more of an elaboration rather than a counter point Interest in the Australian game was low. You might have 100% of football fans follow football, 50% follow the Aussie NTs, 20% follow the national league (just as a very loose example). The point of the A League was to engage with the 20%, not the 100%. The fact the euro snobs didnt follow the initial league was moot, as with AFL fans I did a lot of stats at the start of the league and effectively it was just a consolidated NSL with money. Some NSL fans such as yourself may not have gotten on board but most did. It wasnt bye bye fans of Sydney teams and hello new fans for Sydney FC. They were the same. There was no way an unproven league for a historically mismanaged sport could have attracted a new audience like that. It was the NSL but with 8 clubs Then after the world cup the Australian game received a boom. In my made up figures above it would have been say 70% for the Aussie NTs and 35% for the local league. Peak interest can be seen in all teams in season 3 The A League was without a shadow of a doubt a successful and viable league. It had the corporate backing, investment, TV dollars, sponsorship and even player pool that the NSL couldnt touch. It just could never be a 100% model like the AFL / NRL. If the focus was on the 35% instead of the 65% it would be an established and stable part of the Australian sports market by now Fact is I don't care about whether you would watch it any more than I care about whether sad CCM fans would watch if if their team starts losing. The only thing the league needs to do is be competitive (not rigged) and a pathway for all clubs and players. The focus has to be on viability instead of popularity. Selling our game to be in a prime time slot on one of three networks shows we're a long way off learning that Will have to agree to disagree bluebird... I was not and will never be a statistician however anecdotally can state that most people I come across who are fans of the Aleague tend to mention in the same breath that they where also not fans of the old NSL .... you know the same old garbage arguments I get into on here all the time "blah blah, didn't like the wog teams, didn't feel safe, was scared by foreigners, soccer hooligans, Croatian flags etc etc etc" Yes some of the original NSL crowds migrated over ( please pardon the very laboured pun) but I think you will find the vast majority, like myself for a long time, just switched off altogether and watched EPL and euro leagues instead..... There is a dormant "ex NSL club" following out there which only comes out very very rarely ( big derby, final or FFA cup game), how many they are God only knows but they are still around and alot of them, have past on the madness to their kids.... The APL doesn't interact with these people and never will, you may dismiss us as being insignificant and you don't care if we watch the Aleague or not, that's fine, but you should care if the CCM fans "consume" the product because if they don't the APL and silverlake will pull the plug and you won't HAVE a league to follow.... The original A League support came from somewhere. It wasnt manufactured from a few board meetings and a brand new audience, one in, one out The fact remains that you have 100% of football fans, and x% for Australian league. The interest in the Australian "league" game has always been the smallest portion of football following as a whole and this isnt something that can be replicated in identical numbers over night If I had to guess I would say 80% of the A League year 1 fans had some original tie to the NSL whether it was a casual fan for big games, a historic fan who was disengaged towards the end, or somebody who just wanted to see the Australian game work, or a hardened fan I'm not dismissing NSL fans as insignificant. I'm simply saying that interest in the league will always be the smallest portion of fans so there is no need to try to appease to all football fans. Let them come over in their own time, if at all. The game simply has to be viable, not popular. If 60%-70% of football fans in this country are not fans of the national league, the vast majority of people are always "not" following the Australian league, so the league needs to appeal to those who are The AFL / NRL model for artificially stimulating growth in disinterested markets simply wasnt translatable to our game. Our approach should have been to simply "have" a league, and capitalise on the inevitable interest in the top league of a big sport, backed with the recent commercial interest that didnt exist before. The league would have continued to roll on year after year and a natural market would have determined which teams were in / out, and which fans were in / out they/we are members and fans of a specific club, not of a league. That's all there is to this debate, people follow a club and despie the initial goodwill from many football fans to support the local top league (me included) AL has squandered this with gimmicks and staleness. Football is the most popular game in the world for a reason and all APL needs to do is copy what other small football leagues do rather than trying to provide a AFL/NRL comp with a round ball Exactly.
People that follow professional competitions follow clubs - not just the league itself.
Souths fans follow the Bunnies bc their grandparents did. Same as a Collingwood fans or Hawthorn fans.
We need that sort of generational club support for our clubs. It takes decades. Some of the AFL clubs have been around since the 1860s. That's a century and a half of generational support. It's something that cannot easily be synthesised. Clubs like MV, SFC and WSW work because their population density is so high. All they need to do is win trophies and they work.WSW is the perfect demonstration of this. Grew rapidly due to onfield results. Declined when the results evaporated. When you don't have history, all you can rely on is success. Problem is success is difficult to sustain. Sorry mate but that is bollocks. Passion is passion, club is club. Even the AFL and NRL guys know that, some clubs haven't won a single thing in 50, 60 years yet still have die hard support. That's 100% right The mentality you responded to comes from the AFL / NRL approach I described above. There is no NRL in Victoria and any team would be weak. So the governing body puts a team in, sends their best players, and guarentees success. The market is artificially established. Over the course of 10 years, "fans" are trained to only watch when their team is winning. The game ends up with a conundrum Football took the same approach after season 6. For the first time introducing concessions to boost new markets. Since then it has been stuck in a Robin Hood paradox (continual rob from the rich and give to the poor). The result is obvious based on some of the plastic support dribble I read on here A competitive open league will be new and it will be scary to some here, no doubt about it. But the irony is these same fans already follow several sports and leagues around the Australia and the world with the same model This is what the post he responded to was saying. You both seem to be objecting to a post that makes the same point your making, but better. AFL clubs like Essendon and Carlton haven't had success for decades, but still draw big crowds. They are entrenched, generational clubs, with a fanatical base support that means even prolonged periods of relative failure doesn't see support collapse. A club like GWS needs to win and be successful. Its why Gold Coast support sucks. However, its also why West Coast succeeded in the long run. Despite being a created 'plastic' franchise, which had some initial trouble, its based in an AFL city. So, a period of success saw WAFL followers switch allegiances to WC. Now, not only does its support dwarf that of a lot of old Victorian teams, that support is entrenched. They emulated the support of old big Victorian clubs, and did it in only a couple of decades. Glory had something similar going, to a lesser extent. If the FFA expansion was following an AFL model, which I doubt, it was West Coast, not GWS or Gold Coast they aspired to. Its the whole, fish where the fish are, model. However, they bungled it. Or maybe they didn't, and it was just never going to work. I dont know. I have always thought part of the reason for the AFLs relative success compared to football, was lack of choice. People might follow a local team and an AFL team, but if they find the AFL a bit on the nose, other than just watching local footy at the ground, they have limited options, so they hold their nose, and keep supporting. An A league fan that is disillusioned has plenty of other options to watch top flight football, so they just leave. +x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x[quote]Of course there's a problem in the A-league. Think about the number of football fans that have been abandoned/alienated due denying their club access to the top flight in order to keep the fans of the 12 franchises and casual sport supporters happy. The A-L can't even embrace all the football fans in Australia. What...the 500 people at Sydney Olympic, Sydney United, Woolongong etc? Half the South Melbourne supporters converted to Victory anyway. I bet alot of the turncoats have really enjoyed the increase in popularity and validity they feel as soccer fans now that they went to McVictory... "Football but not as you know it" really proved to be a huge mainstream success eh? Its not about whether South Melbourne will get 500 or 50000. And this is the mentality that has broken our game The AFL is a league where 99% of Aussie Rules fans follow the AFL. Same as the NFL. And same as other invitational only sports. Thats their model We will never have that model. Fact. Reality. Accept it. Football can only thrive with the next best economic model which is the 80/20 rule (where 80% of revenue / support comes from 20% of clubs). The rest is just filler. The game needs a big MV, SFC, WSW, BR and another club. People arent going to turn in Saturday night to see top vs bottom For the NRL to succeed it needed a strong Victorian team to capitalise on 100% of Victorian support so they manufactured one. Same as what the AFL did progressively over their foreign markets. We dont need a strong Central Coast Mariners or a strong Canberra. Thats not our model. The pittance these regions can bring at the expense of having our most valuable shit kicking at the bottom of the league just isnt worth it There is no such thing as an AFL fan or an NFL fan or a Cycling fan etc... People are dynamic sports fans. They watch the AFL expecting one thing, they watch the EPL expecting another, they watch golf or track expecting another. Fans of our game are used to big clubs, and internationally competitive instead of just locally. They dont tune in to say "herp de derp, last year MV bad, this year MV good. Me happy. Not bored" The FFA started with the answer. We must have an AFL model. We must be on one of three networks. In any other model South Melbourne would have been part of the league by now and nobody would give a shit what their crowds or ratings unless they ended up being one of the team 80% of people are interested in Pretty much my point mate. The FFA "re-invented" the game/clubs to appeal to a new audience and that has not materialised. All it did was alienate a segment of the old audience forever and bring in a an equivalent number (possibly marginally more than what was "lost" but only slightly) of new fans and then wonder why, after 17 years the TV audience and match day attendance is still where it was in the 90s.......... The new model did find a much bigger audience but then through rank mismanagement on every level alienated that audience. Now it's time gone and I agree it's not coming back. The A League was dubbed the NSL with a coat of paint. It was the same closed off franchise model that existed at the end of the NSL. It wasnt the model that found a new audience but a promising new organisation for digging our game out of a hole that every fan of the Australian game got behind. Also one that could attract government and commercial fundingI've always argued that the first 2 or 3 years of the league were necessary evils. Some people agree. Some dont. Some think there should have been 2 teams from Melbourne / Sydney. Other will argue there should have been a 2nd tier from day 1 The problem was those in charge decided to cement the initial model and sell it as the product. Season 7 was the start of the end of the A League Umm, are you sure about this statement? Myself and thousands of others did not "get behind it" as for the hundreds of thousands of so called "eurosnobs" that love football in this country and have done so for decades upon decades they didn't even realise the franchises existed...... and never will. That post has to be read within the context of my post above it. The 80/20 rule. I know I'm preaching to the converted so take this as more of an elaboration rather than a counter point Interest in the Australian game was low. You might have 100% of football fans follow football, 50% follow the Aussie NTs, 20% follow the national league (just as a very loose example). The point of the A League was to engage with the 20%, not the 100%. The fact the euro snobs didnt follow the initial league was moot, as with AFL fans I did a lot of stats at the start of the league and effectively it was just a consolidated NSL with money. Some NSL fans such as yourself may not have gotten on board but most did. It wasnt bye bye fans of Sydney teams and hello new fans for Sydney FC. They were the same. There was no way an unproven league for a historically mismanaged sport could have attracted a new audience like that. It was the NSL but with 8 clubs Then after the world cup the Australian game received a boom. In my made up figures above it would have been say 70% for the Aussie NTs and 35% for the local league. Peak interest can be seen in all teams in season 3 The A League was without a shadow of a doubt a successful and viable league. It had the corporate backing, investment, TV dollars, sponsorship and even player pool that the NSL couldnt touch. It just could never be a 100% model like the AFL / NRL. If the focus was on the 35% instead of the 65% it would be an established and stable part of the Australian sports market by now Fact is I don't care about whether you would watch it any more than I care about whether sad CCM fans would watch if if their team starts losing. The only thing the league needs to do is be competitive (not rigged) and a pathway for all clubs and players. The focus has to be on viability instead of popularity. Selling our game to be in a prime time slot on one of three networks shows we're a long way off learning that Will have to agree to disagree bluebird... I was not and will never be a statistician however anecdotally can state that most people I come across who are fans of the Aleague tend to mention in the same breath that they where also not fans of the old NSL .... you know the same old garbage arguments I get into on here all the time "blah blah, didn't like the wog teams, didn't feel safe, was scared by foreigners, soccer hooligans, Croatian flags etc etc etc" Yes some of the original NSL crowds migrated over ( please pardon the very laboured pun) but I think you will find the vast majority, like myself for a long time, just switched off altogether and watched EPL and euro leagues instead..... There is a dormant "ex NSL club" following out there which only comes out very very rarely ( big derby, final or FFA cup game), how many they are God only knows but they are still around and alot of them, have past on the madness to their kids.... The APL doesn't interact with these people and never will, you may dismiss us as being insignificant and you don't care if we watch the Aleague or not, that's fine, but you should care if the CCM fans "consume" the product because if they don't the APL and silverlake will pull the plug and you won't HAVE a league to follow.... The original A League support came from somewhere. It wasnt manufactured from a few board meetings and a brand new audience, one in, one out The fact remains that you have 100% of football fans, and x% for Australian league. The interest in the Australian "league" game has always been the smallest portion of football following as a whole and this isnt something that can be replicated in identical numbers over night If I had to guess I would say 80% of the A League year 1 fans had some original tie to the NSL whether it was a casual fan for big games, a historic fan who was disengaged towards the end, or somebody who just wanted to see the Australian game work, or a hardened fan I'm not dismissing NSL fans as insignificant. I'm simply saying that interest in the league will always be the smallest portion of fans so there is no need to try to appease to all football fans. Let them come over in their own time, if at all. The game simply has to be viable, not popular. If 60%-70% of football fans in this country are not fans of the national league, the vast majority of people are always "not" following the Australian league, so the league needs to appeal to those who are The AFL / NRL model for artificially stimulating growth in disinterested markets simply wasnt translatable to our game. Our approach should have been to simply "have" a league, and capitalise on the inevitable interest in the top league of a big sport, backed with the recent commercial interest that didnt exist before. The league would have continued to roll on year after year and a natural market would have determined which teams were in / out, and which fans were in / out they/we are members and fans of a specific club, not of a league. That's all there is to this debate, people follow a club and despie the initial goodwill from many football fans to support the local top league (me included) AL has squandered this with gimmicks and staleness. Football is the most popular game in the world for a reason and all APL needs to do is copy what other small football leagues do rather than trying to provide a AFL/NRL comp with a round ball Exactly.
People that follow professional competitions follow clubs - not just the league itself.
Souths fans follow the Bunnies bc their grandparents did. Same as a Collingwood fans or Hawthorn fans.
We need that sort of generational club support for our clubs. It takes decades. Some of the AFL clubs have been around since the 1860s. That's a century and a half of generational support. It's something that cannot easily be synthesised. Clubs like MV, SFC and WSW work because their population density is so high. All they need to do is win trophies and they work.WSW is the perfect demonstration of this. Grew rapidly due to onfield results. Declined when the results evaporated. When you don't have history, all you can rely on is success. Problem is success is difficult to sustain. Sorry mate but that is bollocks. Passion is passion, club is club. Even the AFL and NRL guys know that, some clubs haven't won a single thing in 50, 60 years yet still have die hard support. That's 100% right The mentality you responded to comes from the AFL / NRL approach I described above. There is no NRL in Victoria and any team would be weak. So the governing body puts a team in, sends their best players, and guarentees success. The market is artificially established. Over the course of 10 years, "fans" are trained to only watch when their team is winning. The game ends up with a conundrum Football took the same approach after season 6. For the first time introducing concessions to boost new markets. Since then it has been stuck in a Robin Hood paradox (continual rob from the rich and give to the poor). The result is obvious based on some of the plastic support dribble I read on here A competitive open league will be new and it will be scary to some here, no doubt about it. But the irony is these same fans already follow several sports and leagues around the Australia and the world with the same model If the FFA expansion was following an AFL model, which I doubt, it was West Coast, not GWS or Gold Coast they aspired to. Its the whole, fish where the fish are, model. However, they bungled it. Or maybe they didn't, and it was just never going to work. I dont know. I have always thought part of the reason for the AFLs relative success compared to football, was lack of choice. People might follow a local team and an AFL team, but if they find the AFL a bit on the nose, other than just watching local footy at the ground, they have limited options, so they hold their nose, and keep supporting. An A league fan that is disillusioned has plenty of other options to watch top flight football, so they just leave. You answered your own question. The reason for WCE's success was due to lack of options, not because of success. There would have been plenty more successful teams in the WAFL but elite sports fans demand elite sport. Having a team in a professional national competition was always going to take fans away from having a team in a local competition The AFL had a crush, kill, destroy mentality that is synonymous with leagues like the NRL, NFL and other stand alone leagues. Its a model that only works when the governing body has a monopoly, which we dont This was never going to work for football. Never. Even _if_ the model could work, which it can't, as you rightfully pointed out there was a 10-20 year period for teams like West Coast and Storm to be ingrained in their respective codes. When our starting point was 8 unknown teams, which 2 teams were we supposed to give 15 years of support and what would that have meant for the other 6 teams struggling for 15 years in the interim? There is no "one way" to have a successful sport. The AFL and NRL were successful in approaches that worked for them. Our situation is different. The A League has had many attempts to artificially boost metrics and they have all failed in the long run. And there is no need I'll put this a slightly different way. Imagine you are trying to establish McDonalds in an Asian country that doesnt have McDonalds. Your fear is they wont like it so you use the same brand and colours, but you serve Asian cuisine instead. This will fail because it wont be McDonalds enough for fans of McDonalds, and it wont be top notch Asian cuisine for those who prefer Asian food. Thats the conundrum the A League is in. Either there is demand for a football league in this country, or there isnt The FA were put in charge to establish a competitive football league. If the starting point for the FA is to state "there is no demand for a competitive national football league in this country" then they are simply the wrong people for the job So how do you tap into it? I contend that you can't do it when far better quality football exists elsewhere As I said, its about tapping into the 30% of people who are willing to follow and Australian league instead of the 70% who arent All the FA had to do is put together a league, worry about the financial viability components, and then let it evolve down a sensible pathway. Exactly what they started doing season 1-6 At first sign of danger they hit the abort button and introduced concessions, cemented the salary cap, established the top 6 "exciting" finals, and all other gimmicks at the finger tips of the dime a dozen Australian sports administrators reading from the same pamphlet You can read through the last few pages of this thread and see lots of ideas and opinions of what will work and what wont work and how to get those extra fans. We dont even have to guess. A natural approach will get us success faster than a manufactured approach
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bettega
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+xAt the end of the day it comes down to what people expect.... Second we need to cut out myths and half truths spoken about as if they are the absolute truth...dispelling some myths below and puts on helmet... Myth 1.... we have never had a professional league and we don't have established competitions above grass roots.... Myth 2 .... since the mid 70's the migrant demographic has shifted from European to Indian / Asian / Middle Eastern.... these groups simply don't bring the same level of skill and likening of Football as Europeans did... Myth 3 ... we have never ever aside from the golden gen had a great local Australian side most of the 74 side were born oversees... many of that golden gen were actually developed by the AIS .... Myth 4... the NSL ... however successful that league may have been or who they developed... the mix of teams in the NSL was never ever and even now going to get broad stream community support and acceptance... Myth 5... we have never had good management... jury still out on JJ and Townsend... Myth 6 ... the answer is simple.... Myth 7 ... its an easy fix... Myth 8.... it can be done quickly ... Reflecting on this list, I have this starting point. Some 18 years ago, the then Aust PM handpicked one man to start over. This man happened to be the wealthiest Australian and probably one of the most influential. In aid of this re-set, the Commonwealth Govt paid out tens of millions of dollars in debt, owed by Soccer australia, and from there, we get the FFA and A-League starting with clean sheets. That series of events was a once in a century thing, don't expect to see that again in our lifetime. So I disagree with anyone who thinks we have to blow it all up and start again (not referring to you here, just a general comment). We already did blow it all up and start again. That's it, already happened, ain't going to happen again. Furthermore, we've gone from a situation where that one wealthy, powerful man could dictate terms to everyone, and get away with it, to now having a situation where power has become a bit more diffuse, but worse than that, we've allowed a handful of foreign entities to take on a lot of control of key elements of Australian football. Good thing or bad thing? No one can say one way or the other, but there are now some very powerful vested interests involved, and there is no guarantee that we're on a path to something a whole lot better.
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Barca4Life
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Its clear that the ratings are not good but im not surprised, covid or not people see the product on show and the ratings reflect it.
Aussie sport fans like to watch premium product and it seems they dont see it with the aleague.
I personally feel like the aleague has lost its way in the last few years and the APL have a massive job in their hands in rebuilding the league as it was in its peak but also trying to grow it beyond that so we can compete with the Asian leagues, big job ahead for them.
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Monoethnic Social Club
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+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+xOf course there's a problem in the A-league. Think about the number of football fans that have been abandoned/alienated due denying their club access to the top flight in order to keep the fans of the 12 franchises and casual sport supporters happy. The A-L can't even embrace all the football fans in Australia. What...the 500 people at Sydney Olympic, Sydney United, Woolongong etc? Half the South Melbourne supporters converted to Victory anyway. I bet alot of the turncoats have really enjoyed the increase in popularity and validity they feel as soccer fans now that they went to McVictory... "Football but not as you know it" really proved to be a huge mainstream success eh? Its not about whether South Melbourne will get 500 or 50000. And this is the mentality that has broken our game The AFL is a league where 99% of Aussie Rules fans follow the AFL. Same as the NFL. And same as other invitational only sports. Thats their model We will never have that model. Fact. Reality. Accept it. Football can only thrive with the next best economic model which is the 80/20 rule (where 80% of revenue / support comes from 20% of clubs). The rest is just filler. The game needs a big MV, SFC, WSW, BR and another club. People arent going to turn in Saturday night to see top vs bottom For the NRL to succeed it needed a strong Victorian team to capitalise on 100% of Victorian support so they manufactured one. Same as what the AFL did progressively over their foreign markets. We dont need a strong Central Coast Mariners or a strong Canberra. Thats not our model. The pittance these regions can bring at the expense of having our most valuable shit kicking at the bottom of the league just isnt worth it There is no such thing as an AFL fan or an NFL fan or a Cycling fan etc... People are dynamic sports fans. They watch the AFL expecting one thing, they watch the EPL expecting another, they watch golf or track expecting another. Fans of our game are used to big clubs, and internationally competitive instead of just locally. They dont tune in to say "herp de derp, last year MV bad, this year MV good. Me happy. Not bored" The FFA started with the answer. We must have an AFL model. We must be on one of three networks. In any other model South Melbourne would have been part of the league by now and nobody would give a shit what their crowds or ratings unless they ended up being one of the team 80% of people are interested in Pretty much my point mate. The FFA "re-invented" the game/clubs to appeal to a new audience and that has not materialised. All it did was alienate a segment of the old audience forever and bring in a an equivalent number (possibly marginally more than what was "lost" but only slightly) of new fans and then wonder why, after 17 years the TV audience and match day attendance is still where it was in the 90s.......... The new model did find a much bigger audience but then through rank mismanagement on every level alienated that audience. Now it's time gone and I agree it's not coming back. The A League was dubbed the NSL with a coat of paint. It was the same closed off franchise model that existed at the end of the NSL. It wasnt the model that found a new audience but a promising new organisation for digging our game out of a hole that every fan of the Australian game got behind. Also one that could attract government and commercial fundingI've always argued that the first 2 or 3 years of the league were necessary evils. Some people agree. Some dont. Some think there should have been 2 teams from Melbourne / Sydney. Other will argue there should have been a 2nd tier from day 1 The problem was those in charge decided to cement the initial model and sell it as the product. Season 7 was the start of the end of the A League Umm, are you sure about this statement? Myself and thousands of others did not "get behind it" as for the hundreds of thousands of so called "eurosnobs" that love football in this country and have done so for decades upon decades they didn't even realise the franchises existed...... and never will. That post has to be read within the context of my post above it. The 80/20 rule. I know I'm preaching to the converted so take this as more of an elaboration rather than a counter point Interest in the Australian game was low. You might have 100% of football fans follow football, 50% follow the Aussie NTs, 20% follow the national league (just as a very loose example). The point of the A League was to engage with the 20%, not the 100%. The fact the euro snobs didnt follow the initial league was moot, as with AFL fans I did a lot of stats at the start of the league and effectively it was just a consolidated NSL with money. Some NSL fans such as yourself may not have gotten on board but most did. It wasnt bye bye fans of Sydney teams and hello new fans for Sydney FC. They were the same. There was no way an unproven league for a historically mismanaged sport could have attracted a new audience like that. It was the NSL but with 8 clubs Then after the world cup the Australian game received a boom. In my made up figures above it would have been say 70% for the Aussie NTs and 35% for the local league. Peak interest can be seen in all teams in season 3 The A League was without a shadow of a doubt a successful and viable league. It had the corporate backing, investment, TV dollars, sponsorship and even player pool that the NSL couldnt touch. It just could never be a 100% model like the AFL / NRL. If the focus was on the 35% instead of the 65% it would be an established and stable part of the Australian sports market by now Fact is I don't care about whether you would watch it any more than I care about whether sad CCM fans would watch if if their team starts losing. The only thing the league needs to do is be competitive (not rigged) and a pathway for all clubs and players. The focus has to be on viability instead of popularity. Selling our game to be in a prime time slot on one of three networks shows we're a long way off learning that Will have to agree to disagree bluebird... I was not and will never be a statistician however anecdotally can state that most people I come across who are fans of the Aleague tend to mention in the same breath that they where also not fans of the old NSL .... you know the same old garbage arguments I get into on here all the time "blah blah, didn't like the wog teams, didn't feel safe, was scared by foreigners, soccer hooligans, Croatian flags etc etc etc" Yes some of the original NSL crowds migrated over ( please pardon the very laboured pun) but I think you will find the vast majority, like myself for a long time, just switched off altogether and watched EPL and euro leagues instead..... There is a dormant "ex NSL club" following out there which only comes out very very rarely ( big derby, final or FFA cup game), how many they are God only knows but they are still around and alot of them, have past on the madness to their kids.... The APL doesn't interact with these people and never will, you may dismiss us as being insignificant and you don't care if we watch the Aleague or not, that's fine, but you should care if the CCM fans "consume" the product because if they don't the APL and silverlake will pull the plug and you won't HAVE a league to follow.... The original A League support came from somewhere. It wasnt manufactured from a few board meetings and a brand new audience, one in, one out The fact remains that you have 100% of football fans, and x% for Australian league. The interest in the Australian "league" game has always been the smallest portion of football following as a whole and this isnt something that can be replicated in identical numbers over night If I had to guess I would say 80% of the A League year 1 fans had some original tie to the NSL whether it was a casual fan for big games, a historic fan who was disengaged towards the end, or somebody who just wanted to see the Australian game work, or a hardened fan I'm not dismissing NSL fans as insignificant. I'm simply saying that interest in the league will always be the smallest portion of fans so there is no need to try to appease to all football fans. Let them come over in their own time, if at all. The game simply has to be viable, not popular. If 60%-70% of football fans in this country are not fans of the national league, the vast majority of people are always "not" following the Australian league, so the league needs to appeal to those who are The AFL / NRL model for artificially stimulating growth in disinterested markets simply wasnt translatable to our game. Our approach should have been to simply "have" a league, and capitalise on the inevitable interest in the top league of a big sport, backed with the recent commercial interest that didnt exist before. The league would have continued to roll on year after year and a natural market would have determined which teams were in / out, and which fans were in / out they/we are members and fans of a specific club, not of a league. That's all there is to this debate, people follow a club and despie the initial goodwill from many football fans to support the local top league (me included) AL has squandered this with gimmicks and staleness. Football is the most popular game in the world for a reason and all APL needs to do is copy what other small football leagues do rather than trying to provide a AFL/NRL comp with a round ball Exactly.
People that follow professional competitions follow clubs - not just the league itself.
Souths fans follow the Bunnies bc their grandparents did. Same as a Collingwood fans or Hawthorn fans.
We need that sort of generational club support for our clubs. It takes decades. Some of the AFL clubs have been around since the 1860s. That's a century and a half of generational support. It's something that cannot easily be synthesised. Clubs like MV, SFC and WSW work because their population density is so high. All they need to do is win trophies and they work.WSW is the perfect demonstration of this. Grew rapidly due to onfield results. Declined when the results evaporated. When you don't have history, all you can rely on is success. Problem is success is difficult to sustain. Sorry mate but that is bollocks. Passion is passion, club is club. Even the AFL and NRL guys know that, some clubs haven't won a single thing in 50, 60 years yet still have die hard support. That's 100% right The mentality you responded to comes from the AFL / NRL approach I described above. There is no NRL in Victoria and any team would be weak. So the governing body puts a team in, sends their best players, and guarentees success. The market is artificially established. Over the course of 10 years, "fans" are trained to only watch when their team is winning. The game ends up with a conundrum Football took the same approach after season 6. For the first time introducing concessions to boost new markets. Since then it has been stuck in a Robin Hood paradox (continual rob from the rich and give to the poor). The result is obvious based on some of the plastic support dribble I read on here A competitive open league will be new and it will be scary to some here, no doubt about it. But the irony is these same fans already follow several sports and leagues around the Australia and the world with the same model This is what the post he responded to was saying. You both seem to be objecting to a post that makes the same point your making, but better. AFL clubs like Essendon and Carlton haven't had success for decades, but still draw big crowds. They are entrenched, generational clubs, with a fanatical base support that means even prolonged periods of relative failure doesn't see support collapse. A club like GWS needs to win and be successful. Its why Gold Coast support sucks. However, its also why West Coast succeeded in the long run. Despite being a created 'plastic' franchise, which had some initial trouble, its based in an AFL city. So, a period of success saw WAFL followers switch allegiances to WC. Now, not only does its support dwarf that of a lot of old Victorian teams, that support is entrenched. They emulated the support of old big Victorian clubs, and did it in only a couple of decades. Glory had something similar going, to a lesser extent. If the FFA expansion was following an AFL model, which I doubt, it was West Coast, not GWS or Gold Coast they aspired to. Its the whole, fish where the fish are, model. However, they bungled it. Or maybe they didn't, and it was just never going to work. I dont know. I have always thought part of the reason for the AFLs relative success compared to football, was lack of choice. People might follow a local team and an AFL team, but if they find the AFL a bit on the nose, other than just watching local footy at the ground, they have limited options, so they hold their nose, and keep supporting. An A league fan that is disillusioned has plenty of other options to watch top flight football, so they just leave. +x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x[quote]Of course there's a problem in the A-league. Think about the number of football fans that have been abandoned/alienated due denying their club access to the top flight in order to keep the fans of the 12 franchises and casual sport supporters happy. The A-L can't even embrace all the football fans in Australia. What...the 500 people at Sydney Olympic, Sydney United, Woolongong etc? Half the South Melbourne supporters converted to Victory anyway. I bet alot of the turncoats have really enjoyed the increase in popularity and validity they feel as soccer fans now that they went to McVictory... "Football but not as you know it" really proved to be a huge mainstream success eh? Its not about whether South Melbourne will get 500 or 50000. And this is the mentality that has broken our game The AFL is a league where 99% of Aussie Rules fans follow the AFL. Same as the NFL. And same as other invitational only sports. Thats their model We will never have that model. Fact. Reality. Accept it. Football can only thrive with the next best economic model which is the 80/20 rule (where 80% of revenue / support comes from 20% of clubs). The rest is just filler. The game needs a big MV, SFC, WSW, BR and another club. People arent going to turn in Saturday night to see top vs bottom For the NRL to succeed it needed a strong Victorian team to capitalise on 100% of Victorian support so they manufactured one. Same as what the AFL did progressively over their foreign markets. We dont need a strong Central Coast Mariners or a strong Canberra. Thats not our model. The pittance these regions can bring at the expense of having our most valuable shit kicking at the bottom of the league just isnt worth it There is no such thing as an AFL fan or an NFL fan or a Cycling fan etc... People are dynamic sports fans. They watch the AFL expecting one thing, they watch the EPL expecting another, they watch golf or track expecting another. Fans of our game are used to big clubs, and internationally competitive instead of just locally. They dont tune in to say "herp de derp, last year MV bad, this year MV good. Me happy. Not bored" The FFA started with the answer. We must have an AFL model. We must be on one of three networks. In any other model South Melbourne would have been part of the league by now and nobody would give a shit what their crowds or ratings unless they ended up being one of the team 80% of people are interested in Pretty much my point mate. The FFA "re-invented" the game/clubs to appeal to a new audience and that has not materialised. All it did was alienate a segment of the old audience forever and bring in a an equivalent number (possibly marginally more than what was "lost" but only slightly) of new fans and then wonder why, after 17 years the TV audience and match day attendance is still where it was in the 90s.......... The new model did find a much bigger audience but then through rank mismanagement on every level alienated that audience. Now it's time gone and I agree it's not coming back. The A League was dubbed the NSL with a coat of paint. It was the same closed off franchise model that existed at the end of the NSL. It wasnt the model that found a new audience but a promising new organisation for digging our game out of a hole that every fan of the Australian game got behind. Also one that could attract government and commercial fundingI've always argued that the first 2 or 3 years of the league were necessary evils. Some people agree. Some dont. Some think there should have been 2 teams from Melbourne / Sydney. Other will argue there should have been a 2nd tier from day 1 The problem was those in charge decided to cement the initial model and sell it as the product. Season 7 was the start of the end of the A League Umm, are you sure about this statement? Myself and thousands of others did not "get behind it" as for the hundreds of thousands of so called "eurosnobs" that love football in this country and have done so for decades upon decades they didn't even realise the franchises existed...... and never will. That post has to be read within the context of my post above it. The 80/20 rule. I know I'm preaching to the converted so take this as more of an elaboration rather than a counter point Interest in the Australian game was low. You might have 100% of football fans follow football, 50% follow the Aussie NTs, 20% follow the national league (just as a very loose example). The point of the A League was to engage with the 20%, not the 100%. The fact the euro snobs didnt follow the initial league was moot, as with AFL fans I did a lot of stats at the start of the league and effectively it was just a consolidated NSL with money. Some NSL fans such as yourself may not have gotten on board but most did. It wasnt bye bye fans of Sydney teams and hello new fans for Sydney FC. They were the same. There was no way an unproven league for a historically mismanaged sport could have attracted a new audience like that. It was the NSL but with 8 clubs Then after the world cup the Australian game received a boom. In my made up figures above it would have been say 70% for the Aussie NTs and 35% for the local league. Peak interest can be seen in all teams in season 3 The A League was without a shadow of a doubt a successful and viable league. It had the corporate backing, investment, TV dollars, sponsorship and even player pool that the NSL couldnt touch. It just could never be a 100% model like the AFL / NRL. If the focus was on the 35% instead of the 65% it would be an established and stable part of the Australian sports market by now Fact is I don't care about whether you would watch it any more than I care about whether sad CCM fans would watch if if their team starts losing. The only thing the league needs to do is be competitive (not rigged) and a pathway for all clubs and players. The focus has to be on viability instead of popularity. Selling our game to be in a prime time slot on one of three networks shows we're a long way off learning that Will have to agree to disagree bluebird... I was not and will never be a statistician however anecdotally can state that most people I come across who are fans of the Aleague tend to mention in the same breath that they where also not fans of the old NSL .... you know the same old garbage arguments I get into on here all the time "blah blah, didn't like the wog teams, didn't feel safe, was scared by foreigners, soccer hooligans, Croatian flags etc etc etc" Yes some of the original NSL crowds migrated over ( please pardon the very laboured pun) but I think you will find the vast majority, like myself for a long time, just switched off altogether and watched EPL and euro leagues instead..... There is a dormant "ex NSL club" following out there which only comes out very very rarely ( big derby, final or FFA cup game), how many they are God only knows but they are still around and alot of them, have past on the madness to their kids.... The APL doesn't interact with these people and never will, you may dismiss us as being insignificant and you don't care if we watch the Aleague or not, that's fine, but you should care if the CCM fans "consume" the product because if they don't the APL and silverlake will pull the plug and you won't HAVE a league to follow.... The original A League support came from somewhere. It wasnt manufactured from a few board meetings and a brand new audience, one in, one out The fact remains that you have 100% of football fans, and x% for Australian league. The interest in the Australian "league" game has always been the smallest portion of football following as a whole and this isnt something that can be replicated in identical numbers over night If I had to guess I would say 80% of the A League year 1 fans had some original tie to the NSL whether it was a casual fan for big games, a historic fan who was disengaged towards the end, or somebody who just wanted to see the Australian game work, or a hardened fan I'm not dismissing NSL fans as insignificant. I'm simply saying that interest in the league will always be the smallest portion of fans so there is no need to try to appease to all football fans. Let them come over in their own time, if at all. The game simply has to be viable, not popular. If 60%-70% of football fans in this country are not fans of the national league, the vast majority of people are always "not" following the Australian league, so the league needs to appeal to those who are The AFL / NRL model for artificially stimulating growth in disinterested markets simply wasnt translatable to our game. Our approach should have been to simply "have" a league, and capitalise on the inevitable interest in the top league of a big sport, backed with the recent commercial interest that didnt exist before. The league would have continued to roll on year after year and a natural market would have determined which teams were in / out, and which fans were in / out they/we are members and fans of a specific club, not of a league. That's all there is to this debate, people follow a club and despie the initial goodwill from many football fans to support the local top league (me included) AL has squandered this with gimmicks and staleness. Football is the most popular game in the world for a reason and all APL needs to do is copy what other small football leagues do rather than trying to provide a AFL/NRL comp with a round ball Exactly.
People that follow professional competitions follow clubs - not just the league itself.
Souths fans follow the Bunnies bc their grandparents did. Same as a Collingwood fans or Hawthorn fans.
We need that sort of generational club support for our clubs. It takes decades. Some of the AFL clubs have been around since the 1860s. That's a century and a half of generational support. It's something that cannot easily be synthesised. Clubs like MV, SFC and WSW work because their population density is so high. All they need to do is win trophies and they work.WSW is the perfect demonstration of this. Grew rapidly due to onfield results. Declined when the results evaporated. When you don't have history, all you can rely on is success. Problem is success is difficult to sustain. Sorry mate but that is bollocks. Passion is passion, club is club. Even the AFL and NRL guys know that, some clubs haven't won a single thing in 50, 60 years yet still have die hard support. That's 100% right The mentality you responded to comes from the AFL / NRL approach I described above. There is no NRL in Victoria and any team would be weak. So the governing body puts a team in, sends their best players, and guarentees success. The market is artificially established. Over the course of 10 years, "fans" are trained to only watch when their team is winning. The game ends up with a conundrum Football took the same approach after season 6. For the first time introducing concessions to boost new markets. Since then it has been stuck in a Robin Hood paradox (continual rob from the rich and give to the poor). The result is obvious based on some of the plastic support dribble I read on here A competitive open league will be new and it will be scary to some here, no doubt about it. But the irony is these same fans already follow several sports and leagues around the Australia and the world with the same model If the FFA expansion was following an AFL model, which I doubt, it was West Coast, not GWS or Gold Coast they aspired to. Its the whole, fish where the fish are, model. However, they bungled it. Or maybe they didn't, and it was just never going to work. I dont know. I have always thought part of the reason for the AFLs relative success compared to football, was lack of choice. People might follow a local team and an AFL team, but if they find the AFL a bit on the nose, other than just watching local footy at the ground, they have limited options, so they hold their nose, and keep supporting. An A league fan that is disillusioned has plenty of other options to watch top flight football, so they just leave. You answered your own question. The reason for WCE's success was due to lack of options, not because of success. There would have been plenty more successful teams in the WAFL but elite sports fans demand elite sport. Having a team in a professional national competition was always going to take fans away from having a team in a local competition The AFL had a crush, kill, destroy mentality that is synonymous with leagues like the NRL, NFL and other stand alone leagues. Its a model that only works when the governing body has a monopoly, which we dont This was never going to work for football. Never. Even _if_ the model could work, which it can't, as you rightfully pointed out there was a 10-20 year period for teams like West Coast and Storm to be ingrained in their respective codes. When our starting point was 8 unknown teams, which 2 teams were we supposed to give 15 years of support and what would that have meant for the other 6 teams struggling for 15 years in the interim? There is no "one way" to have a successful sport. The AFL and NRL were successful in approaches that worked for them. Our situation is different. The A League has had many attempts to artificially boost metrics and they have all failed in the long run. And there is no need I'll put this a slightly different way. Imagine you are trying to establish McDonalds in an Asian country that doesnt have McDonalds. Your fear is they wont like it so you use the same brand and colours, but you serve Asian cuisine instead. This will fail because it wont be McDonalds enough for fans of McDonalds, and it wont be top notch Asian cuisine for those who prefer Asian food. Thats the conundrum the A League is in. Either there is demand for a football league in this country, or there isnt The FA were put in charge to establish a competitive football league. If the starting point for the FA is to state "there is no demand for a competitive national football league in this country" then they are simply the wrong people for the job So how do you tap into it? I contend that you can't do it when far better quality football exists elsewhere. The code should revert to a winter competition, starting mid April and finishing in the first week of December (34 weeks). I don't expect huge crowds initially, and I would prioritize viability over crowd numbers. Hence, grounds should meet a certain standard, but the 10,000 per game will not be an attainable goal for all teams, hence the facility should be consistent with supporter base. Therefore, for about half the season there would minimal quality competition from say European football (15 weeks), and have a little from their season start, and some from final weeks of a season. One would only a very few percent of global football fans to get a decent number of TV viewers. . I pretty much agree with the thinking behind this sentiment. Instead of conceiving of A-League clubs as being akin to AFL or NRL franchises, they should be understood as part of the global ecosystem of football. This puts a much bigger premium on player development, because if you can unearth and develop a top-notch player and have the wits to sell him for true market value (something which A-League clubs have been pretty hopeless at), then you should be able to bring millions of dollars into the game. This is a potential resource AFL and NRL clubs don't have. But the ideal environment for player development is not a Big Bash League style league with short seasons but big fan interest. It's a full-length season (9-10 months, so 30+ rounds in the regular season), and played in winter which is more conducive to good football. And you need an integrated pyramid with pro-rel for clubs to adopt a more cut-throat mentality. This logically also means no more salary cap either, allowing clubs to sign players onto longer-term contracts so they could on-sell them for a decent price. Below A-League level, clubs would decide on an individual basis whether to go full time or stay part time. The lower divisions (a national second division, then regional divisions below that) should also make sure they cover all regional areas so that we have a universal player catchment. This means lower tier clubs in places like Geelong, Wollongong, Sunshine Coast, Townsville, Hobart, and even Albury-Wodonga, Ballarat, Coffs Harbour, Toowoomba and the like (these should even be subsidised by a regional football fund if necessary). The flipside of this is you no longer have a league with 10-12 clubs who all think they can win the league next year. The A-League would become more Darwinian, and you'd probably end up with something like a Big 4: Sydney, Wanderers, Victory and City. Between them they would hoover up the best players, win the league most years and be nearly ever-present in the ACL (where hopefully they could actually start to be a bit competitive). Clubs like Brisbane and Perth might get a look in every now and again, but the commercial gulf between big and small clubs would get bigger. The rest of the A-League would be a rotation of smaller clubs who are either yoyo-ing with the second division or treading water in the top flight. Either way the prize for them is not winning the A-League, it's being in the A-League. They should be happy with modest crowds in suitably sized stadiums, playing for the sake of local pride, and adopting the role of selling clubs, off-loading promising players to the big boys when the time is ripe. You don't quite want to get to the point of Portugal or Scotland where the same 2-3 clubs win the league absolutely every year, but it would be heading more in that direction. This is probably a more sustainable future than the current trajectory of the game. Pretty much bang on in agreement with all,of this. PROVIDED the regional, geographic spread you desire is not used as a hindrance to merit based competition and promotion and or relegation than all good otherwise.
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Monoethnic Social Club
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+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+xOf course there's a problem in the A-league. Think about the number of football fans that have been abandoned/alienated due denying their club access to the top flight in order to keep the fans of the 12 franchises and casual sport supporters happy. The A-L can't even embrace all the football fans in Australia. What...the 500 people at Sydney Olympic, Sydney United, Woolongong etc? Half the South Melbourne supporters converted to Victory anyway. I bet alot of the turncoats have really enjoyed the increase in popularity and validity they feel as soccer fans now that they went to McVictory... "Football but not as you know it" really proved to be a huge mainstream success eh? Its not about whether South Melbourne will get 500 or 50000. And this is the mentality that has broken our game The AFL is a league where 99% of Aussie Rules fans follow the AFL. Same as the NFL. And same as other invitational only sports. Thats their model We will never have that model. Fact. Reality. Accept it. Football can only thrive with the next best economic model which is the 80/20 rule (where 80% of revenue / support comes from 20% of clubs). The rest is just filler. The game needs a big MV, SFC, WSW, BR and another club. People arent going to turn in Saturday night to see top vs bottom For the NRL to succeed it needed a strong Victorian team to capitalise on 100% of Victorian support so they manufactured one. Same as what the AFL did progressively over their foreign markets. We dont need a strong Central Coast Mariners or a strong Canberra. Thats not our model. The pittance these regions can bring at the expense of having our most valuable shit kicking at the bottom of the league just isnt worth it There is no such thing as an AFL fan or an NFL fan or a Cycling fan etc... People are dynamic sports fans. They watch the AFL expecting one thing, they watch the EPL expecting another, they watch golf or track expecting another. Fans of our game are used to big clubs, and internationally competitive instead of just locally. They dont tune in to say "herp de derp, last year MV bad, this year MV good. Me happy. Not bored" The FFA started with the answer. We must have an AFL model. We must be on one of three networks. In any other model South Melbourne would have been part of the league by now and nobody would give a shit what their crowds or ratings unless they ended up being one of the team 80% of people are interested in Pretty much my point mate. The FFA "re-invented" the game/clubs to appeal to a new audience and that has not materialised. All it did was alienate a segment of the old audience forever and bring in a an equivalent number (possibly marginally more than what was "lost" but only slightly) of new fans and then wonder why, after 17 years the TV audience and match day attendance is still where it was in the 90s.......... The new model did find a much bigger audience but then through rank mismanagement on every level alienated that audience. Now it's time gone and I agree it's not coming back. The A League was dubbed the NSL with a coat of paint. It was the same closed off franchise model that existed at the end of the NSL. It wasnt the model that found a new audience but a promising new organisation for digging our game out of a hole that every fan of the Australian game got behind. Also one that could attract government and commercial fundingI've always argued that the first 2 or 3 years of the league were necessary evils. Some people agree. Some dont. Some think there should have been 2 teams from Melbourne / Sydney. Other will argue there should have been a 2nd tier from day 1 The problem was those in charge decided to cement the initial model and sell it as the product. Season 7 was the start of the end of the A League Umm, are you sure about this statement? Myself and thousands of others did not "get behind it" as for the hundreds of thousands of so called "eurosnobs" that love football in this country and have done so for decades upon decades they didn't even realise the franchises existed...... and never will. That post has to be read within the context of my post above it. The 80/20 rule. I know I'm preaching to the converted so take this as more of an elaboration rather than a counter point Interest in the Australian game was low. You might have 100% of football fans follow football, 50% follow the Aussie NTs, 20% follow the national league (just as a very loose example). The point of the A League was to engage with the 20%, not the 100%. The fact the euro snobs didnt follow the initial league was moot, as with AFL fans I did a lot of stats at the start of the league and effectively it was just a consolidated NSL with money. Some NSL fans such as yourself may not have gotten on board but most did. It wasnt bye bye fans of Sydney teams and hello new fans for Sydney FC. They were the same. There was no way an unproven league for a historically mismanaged sport could have attracted a new audience like that. It was the NSL but with 8 clubs Then after the world cup the Australian game received a boom. In my made up figures above it would have been say 70% for the Aussie NTs and 35% for the local league. Peak interest can be seen in all teams in season 3 The A League was without a shadow of a doubt a successful and viable league. It had the corporate backing, investment, TV dollars, sponsorship and even player pool that the NSL couldnt touch. It just could never be a 100% model like the AFL / NRL. If the focus was on the 35% instead of the 65% it would be an established and stable part of the Australian sports market by now Fact is I don't care about whether you would watch it any more than I care about whether sad CCM fans would watch if if their team starts losing. The only thing the league needs to do is be competitive (not rigged) and a pathway for all clubs and players. The focus has to be on viability instead of popularity. Selling our game to be in a prime time slot on one of three networks shows we're a long way off learning that Will have to agree to disagree bluebird... I was not and will never be a statistician however anecdotally can state that most people I come across who are fans of the Aleague tend to mention in the same breath that they where also not fans of the old NSL .... you know the same old garbage arguments I get into on here all the time "blah blah, didn't like the wog teams, didn't feel safe, was scared by foreigners, soccer hooligans, Croatian flags etc etc etc" Yes some of the original NSL crowds migrated over ( please pardon the very laboured pun) but I think you will find the vast majority, like myself for a long time, just switched off altogether and watched EPL and euro leagues instead..... There is a dormant "ex NSL club" following out there which only comes out very very rarely ( big derby, final or FFA cup game), how many they are God only knows but they are still around and alot of them, have past on the madness to their kids.... The APL doesn't interact with these people and never will, you may dismiss us as being insignificant and you don't care if we watch the Aleague or not, that's fine, but you should care if the CCM fans "consume" the product because if they don't the APL and silverlake will pull the plug and you won't HAVE a league to follow.... The original A League support came from somewhere. It wasnt manufactured from a few board meetings and a brand new audience, one in, one out The fact remains that you have 100% of football fans, and x% for Australian league. The interest in the Australian "league" game has always been the smallest portion of football following as a whole and this isnt something that can be replicated in identical numbers over night If I had to guess I would say 80% of the A League year 1 fans had some original tie to the NSL whether it was a casual fan for big games, a historic fan who was disengaged towards the end, or somebody who just wanted to see the Australian game work, or a hardened fan I'm not dismissing NSL fans as insignificant. I'm simply saying that interest in the league will always be the smallest portion of fans so there is no need to try to appease to all football fans. Let them come over in their own time, if at all. The game simply has to be viable, not popular. If 60%-70% of football fans in this country are not fans of the national league, the vast majority of people are always "not" following the Australian league, so the league needs to appeal to those who are The AFL / NRL model for artificially stimulating growth in disinterested markets simply wasnt translatable to our game. Our approach should have been to simply "have" a league, and capitalise on the inevitable interest in the top league of a big sport, backed with the recent commercial interest that didnt exist before. The league would have continued to roll on year after year and a natural market would have determined which teams were in / out, and which fans were in / out they/we are members and fans of a specific club, not of a league. That's all there is to this debate, people follow a club and despie the initial goodwill from many football fans to support the local top league (me included) AL has squandered this with gimmicks and staleness. Football is the most popular game in the world for a reason and all APL needs to do is copy what other small football leagues do rather than trying to provide a AFL/NRL comp with a round ball Exactly.
People that follow professional competitions follow clubs - not just the league itself.
Souths fans follow the Bunnies bc their grandparents did. Same as a Collingwood fans or Hawthorn fans.
We need that sort of generational club support for our clubs. It takes decades. Some of the AFL clubs have been around since the 1860s. That's a century and a half of generational support. It's something that cannot easily be synthesised. Clubs like MV, SFC and WSW work because their population density is so high. All they need to do is win trophies and they work.WSW is the perfect demonstration of this. Grew rapidly due to onfield results. Declined when the results evaporated. When you don't have history, all you can rely on is success. Problem is success is difficult to sustain. Sorry mate but that is bollocks. Passion is passion, club is club. Even the AFL and NRL guys know that, some clubs haven't won a single thing in 50, 60 years yet still have die hard support. That's 100% right The mentality you responded to comes from the AFL / NRL approach I described above. There is no NRL in Victoria and any team would be weak. So the governing body puts a team in, sends their best players, and guarentees success. The market is artificially established. Over the course of 10 years, "fans" are trained to only watch when their team is winning. The game ends up with a conundrum Football took the same approach after season 6. For the first time introducing concessions to boost new markets. Since then it has been stuck in a Robin Hood paradox (continual rob from the rich and give to the poor). The result is obvious based on some of the plastic support dribble I read on here A competitive open league will be new and it will be scary to some here, no doubt about it. But the irony is these same fans already follow several sports and leagues around the Australia and the world with the same model This is what the post he responded to was saying. You both seem to be objecting to a post that makes the same point your making, but better. AFL clubs like Essendon and Carlton haven't had success for decades, but still draw big crowds. They are entrenched, generational clubs, with a fanatical base support that means even prolonged periods of relative failure doesn't see support collapse. A club like GWS needs to win and be successful. Its why Gold Coast support sucks. However, its also why West Coast succeeded in the long run. Despite being a created 'plastic' franchise, which had some initial trouble, its based in an AFL city. So, a period of success saw WAFL followers switch allegiances to WC. Now, not only does its support dwarf that of a lot of old Victorian teams, that support is entrenched. They emulated the support of old big Victorian clubs, and did it in only a couple of decades. Glory had something similar going, to a lesser extent. If the FFA expansion was following an AFL model, which I doubt, it was West Coast, not GWS or Gold Coast they aspired to. Its the whole, fish where the fish are, model. However, they bungled it. Or maybe they didn't, and it was just never going to work. I dont know. I have always thought part of the reason for the AFLs relative success compared to football, was lack of choice. People might follow a local team and an AFL team, but if they find the AFL a bit on the nose, other than just watching local footy at the ground, they have limited options, so they hold their nose, and keep supporting. An A league fan that is disillusioned has plenty of other options to watch top flight football, so they just leave. +x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x[quote]Of course there's a problem in the A-league. Think about the number of football fans that have been abandoned/alienated due denying their club access to the top flight in order to keep the fans of the 12 franchises and casual sport supporters happy. The A-L can't even embrace all the football fans in Australia. What...the 500 people at Sydney Olympic, Sydney United, Woolongong etc? Half the South Melbourne supporters converted to Victory anyway. I bet alot of the turncoats have really enjoyed the increase in popularity and validity they feel as soccer fans now that they went to McVictory... "Football but not as you know it" really proved to be a huge mainstream success eh? Its not about whether South Melbourne will get 500 or 50000. And this is the mentality that has broken our game The AFL is a league where 99% of Aussie Rules fans follow the AFL. Same as the NFL. And same as other invitational only sports. Thats their model We will never have that model. Fact. Reality. Accept it. Football can only thrive with the next best economic model which is the 80/20 rule (where 80% of revenue / support comes from 20% of clubs). The rest is just filler. The game needs a big MV, SFC, WSW, BR and another club. People arent going to turn in Saturday night to see top vs bottom For the NRL to succeed it needed a strong Victorian team to capitalise on 100% of Victorian support so they manufactured one. Same as what the AFL did progressively over their foreign markets. We dont need a strong Central Coast Mariners or a strong Canberra. Thats not our model. The pittance these regions can bring at the expense of having our most valuable shit kicking at the bottom of the league just isnt worth it There is no such thing as an AFL fan or an NFL fan or a Cycling fan etc... People are dynamic sports fans. They watch the AFL expecting one thing, they watch the EPL expecting another, they watch golf or track expecting another. Fans of our game are used to big clubs, and internationally competitive instead of just locally. They dont tune in to say "herp de derp, last year MV bad, this year MV good. Me happy. Not bored" The FFA started with the answer. We must have an AFL model. We must be on one of three networks. In any other model South Melbourne would have been part of the league by now and nobody would give a shit what their crowds or ratings unless they ended up being one of the team 80% of people are interested in Pretty much my point mate. The FFA "re-invented" the game/clubs to appeal to a new audience and that has not materialised. All it did was alienate a segment of the old audience forever and bring in a an equivalent number (possibly marginally more than what was "lost" but only slightly) of new fans and then wonder why, after 17 years the TV audience and match day attendance is still where it was in the 90s.......... The new model did find a much bigger audience but then through rank mismanagement on every level alienated that audience. Now it's time gone and I agree it's not coming back. The A League was dubbed the NSL with a coat of paint. It was the same closed off franchise model that existed at the end of the NSL. It wasnt the model that found a new audience but a promising new organisation for digging our game out of a hole that every fan of the Australian game got behind. Also one that could attract government and commercial fundingI've always argued that the first 2 or 3 years of the league were necessary evils. Some people agree. Some dont. Some think there should have been 2 teams from Melbourne / Sydney. Other will argue there should have been a 2nd tier from day 1 The problem was those in charge decided to cement the initial model and sell it as the product. Season 7 was the start of the end of the A League Umm, are you sure about this statement? Myself and thousands of others did not "get behind it" as for the hundreds of thousands of so called "eurosnobs" that love football in this country and have done so for decades upon decades they didn't even realise the franchises existed...... and never will. That post has to be read within the context of my post above it. The 80/20 rule. I know I'm preaching to the converted so take this as more of an elaboration rather than a counter point Interest in the Australian game was low. You might have 100% of football fans follow football, 50% follow the Aussie NTs, 20% follow the national league (just as a very loose example). The point of the A League was to engage with the 20%, not the 100%. The fact the euro snobs didnt follow the initial league was moot, as with AFL fans I did a lot of stats at the start of the league and effectively it was just a consolidated NSL with money. Some NSL fans such as yourself may not have gotten on board but most did. It wasnt bye bye fans of Sydney teams and hello new fans for Sydney FC. They were the same. There was no way an unproven league for a historically mismanaged sport could have attracted a new audience like that. It was the NSL but with 8 clubs Then after the world cup the Australian game received a boom. In my made up figures above it would have been say 70% for the Aussie NTs and 35% for the local league. Peak interest can be seen in all teams in season 3 The A League was without a shadow of a doubt a successful and viable league. It had the corporate backing, investment, TV dollars, sponsorship and even player pool that the NSL couldnt touch. It just could never be a 100% model like the AFL / NRL. If the focus was on the 35% instead of the 65% it would be an established and stable part of the Australian sports market by now Fact is I don't care about whether you would watch it any more than I care about whether sad CCM fans would watch if if their team starts losing. The only thing the league needs to do is be competitive (not rigged) and a pathway for all clubs and players. The focus has to be on viability instead of popularity. Selling our game to be in a prime time slot on one of three networks shows we're a long way off learning that Will have to agree to disagree bluebird... I was not and will never be a statistician however anecdotally can state that most people I come across who are fans of the Aleague tend to mention in the same breath that they where also not fans of the old NSL .... you know the same old garbage arguments I get into on here all the time "blah blah, didn't like the wog teams, didn't feel safe, was scared by foreigners, soccer hooligans, Croatian flags etc etc etc" Yes some of the original NSL crowds migrated over ( please pardon the very laboured pun) but I think you will find the vast majority, like myself for a long time, just switched off altogether and watched EPL and euro leagues instead..... There is a dormant "ex NSL club" following out there which only comes out very very rarely ( big derby, final or FFA cup game), how many they are God only knows but they are still around and alot of them, have past on the madness to their kids.... The APL doesn't interact with these people and never will, you may dismiss us as being insignificant and you don't care if we watch the Aleague or not, that's fine, but you should care if the CCM fans "consume" the product because if they don't the APL and silverlake will pull the plug and you won't HAVE a league to follow.... The original A League support came from somewhere. It wasnt manufactured from a few board meetings and a brand new audience, one in, one out The fact remains that you have 100% of football fans, and x% for Australian league. The interest in the Australian "league" game has always been the smallest portion of football following as a whole and this isnt something that can be replicated in identical numbers over night If I had to guess I would say 80% of the A League year 1 fans had some original tie to the NSL whether it was a casual fan for big games, a historic fan who was disengaged towards the end, or somebody who just wanted to see the Australian game work, or a hardened fan I'm not dismissing NSL fans as insignificant. I'm simply saying that interest in the league will always be the smallest portion of fans so there is no need to try to appease to all football fans. Let them come over in their own time, if at all. The game simply has to be viable, not popular. If 60%-70% of football fans in this country are not fans of the national league, the vast majority of people are always "not" following the Australian league, so the league needs to appeal to those who are The AFL / NRL model for artificially stimulating growth in disinterested markets simply wasnt translatable to our game. Our approach should have been to simply "have" a league, and capitalise on the inevitable interest in the top league of a big sport, backed with the recent commercial interest that didnt exist before. The league would have continued to roll on year after year and a natural market would have determined which teams were in / out, and which fans were in / out they/we are members and fans of a specific club, not of a league. That's all there is to this debate, people follow a club and despie the initial goodwill from many football fans to support the local top league (me included) AL has squandered this with gimmicks and staleness. Football is the most popular game in the world for a reason and all APL needs to do is copy what other small football leagues do rather than trying to provide a AFL/NRL comp with a round ball Exactly.
People that follow professional competitions follow clubs - not just the league itself.
Souths fans follow the Bunnies bc their grandparents did. Same as a Collingwood fans or Hawthorn fans.
We need that sort of generational club support for our clubs. It takes decades. Some of the AFL clubs have been around since the 1860s. That's a century and a half of generational support. It's something that cannot easily be synthesised. Clubs like MV, SFC and WSW work because their population density is so high. All they need to do is win trophies and they work.WSW is the perfect demonstration of this. Grew rapidly due to onfield results. Declined when the results evaporated. When you don't have history, all you can rely on is success. Problem is success is difficult to sustain. Sorry mate but that is bollocks. Passion is passion, club is club. Even the AFL and NRL guys know that, some clubs haven't won a single thing in 50, 60 years yet still have die hard support. That's 100% right The mentality you responded to comes from the AFL / NRL approach I described above. There is no NRL in Victoria and any team would be weak. So the governing body puts a team in, sends their best players, and guarentees success. The market is artificially established. Over the course of 10 years, "fans" are trained to only watch when their team is winning. The game ends up with a conundrum Football took the same approach after season 6. For the first time introducing concessions to boost new markets. Since then it has been stuck in a Robin Hood paradox (continual rob from the rich and give to the poor). The result is obvious based on some of the plastic support dribble I read on here A competitive open league will be new and it will be scary to some here, no doubt about it. But the irony is these same fans already follow several sports and leagues around the Australia and the world with the same model If the FFA expansion was following an AFL model, which I doubt, it was West Coast, not GWS or Gold Coast they aspired to. Its the whole, fish where the fish are, model. However, they bungled it. Or maybe they didn't, and it was just never going to work. I dont know. I have always thought part of the reason for the AFLs relative success compared to football, was lack of choice. People might follow a local team and an AFL team, but if they find the AFL a bit on the nose, other than just watching local footy at the ground, they have limited options, so they hold their nose, and keep supporting. An A league fan that is disillusioned has plenty of other options to watch top flight football, so they just leave. You answered your own question. The reason for WCE's success was due to lack of options, not because of success. There would have been plenty more successful teams in the WAFL but elite sports fans demand elite sport. Having a team in a professional national competition was always going to take fans away from having a team in a local competition The AFL had a crush, kill, destroy mentality that is synonymous with leagues like the NRL, NFL and other stand alone leagues. Its a model that only works when the governing body has a monopoly, which we dont This was never going to work for football. Never. Even _if_ the model could work, which it can't, as you rightfully pointed out there was a 10-20 year period for teams like West Coast and Storm to be ingrained in their respective codes. When our starting point was 8 unknown teams, which 2 teams were we supposed to give 15 years of support and what would that have meant for the other 6 teams struggling for 15 years in the interim? There is no "one way" to have a successful sport. The AFL and NRL were successful in approaches that worked for them. Our situation is different. The A League has had many attempts to artificially boost metrics and they have all failed in the long run. And there is no need I'll put this a slightly different way. Imagine you are trying to establish McDonalds in an Asian country that doesnt have McDonalds. Your fear is they wont like it so you use the same brand and colours, but you serve Asian cuisine instead. This will fail because it wont be McDonalds enough for fans of McDonalds, and it wont be top notch Asian cuisine for those who prefer Asian food. Thats the conundrum the A League is in. Either there is demand for a football league in this country, or there isnt The FA were put in charge to establish a competitive football league. If the starting point for the FA is to state "there is no demand for a competitive national football league in this country" then they are simply the wrong people for the job So how do you tap into it? I contend that you can't do it when far better quality football exists elsewhere As I said, its about tapping into the 30% of people who are willing to follow and Australian league instead of the 70% who arent All the FA had to do is put together a league, worry about the financial viability components, and then let it evolve down a sensible pathway. Exactly what they started doing season 1-6 At first sign of danger they hit the abort button and introduced concessions, cemented the salary cap, established the top 6 "exciting" finals, and all other gimmicks at the finger tips of the dime a dozen Australian sports administrators reading from the same pamphlet You can read through the last few pages of this thread and see lots of ideas and opinions of what will work and what wont work and how to get those extra fans. We dont even have to guess. A natural approach will get us success faster than a manufactured approach What have the FA done differently this year than the last 16 years though? You mention that the first 6 years where a good approach yet this was the very beginning ( the root of all evil if you will) of the manufacturing process you so dislike. Not only did the FFA establish a league, they funded some of the newly created teams and, through a shopping centre MLS lite model they manufactured the other participants in this farce. The 30% of existing soccer fans ( pre Aleague) who would be willing to follow an Australian league are still out there, they haven't died off yet, they just need a reason to attend or watch on TV..... that reason is THEIR club....,,,,
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Midfielder
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+x+xAt the end of the day it comes down to what people expect.... Second we need to cut out myths and half truths spoken about as if they are the absolute truth...dispelling some myths below and puts on helmet... Myth 1.... we have never had a professional league and we don't have established competitions above grass roots.... Myth 2 .... since the mid 70's the migrant demographic has shifted from European to Indian / Asian / Middle Eastern.... these groups simply don't bring the same level of skill and likening of Football as Europeans did... Myth 3 ... we have never ever aside from the golden gen had a great local Australian side most of the 74 side were born oversees... many of that golden gen were actually developed by the AIS .... Myth 4... the NSL ... however successful that league may have been or who they developed... the mix of teams in the NSL was never ever and even now going to get broad stream community support and acceptance... Myth 5... we have never had good management... jury still out on JJ and Townsend... Myth 6 ... the answer is simple.... Myth 7 ... its an easy fix... Myth 8.... it can be done quickly ... Reflecting on this list, I have this starting point. Some 18 years ago, the then Aust PM handpicked one man to start over. This man happened to be the wealthiest Australian and probably one of the most influential. In aid of this re-set, the Commonwealth Govt paid out tens of millions of dollars in debt, owed by Soccer australia, and from there, we get the FFA and A-League starting with clean sheets. That series of events was a once in a century thing, don't expect to see that again in our lifetime. So I disagree with anyone who thinks we have to blow it all up and start again (not referring to you here, just a general comment). We already did blow it all up and start again. That's it, already happened, ain't going to happen again. Furthermore, we've gone from a situation where that one wealthy, powerful man could dictate terms to everyone, and get away with it, to now having a situation where power has become a bit more diffuse, but worse than that, we've allowed a handful of foreign entities to take on a lot of control of key elements of Australian football. Good thing or bad thing? No one can say one way or the other, but there are now some very powerful vested interests involved, and there is no guarantee that we're on a path to something a whole lot better. You kinda nailed Australian Football history.... 1955 a bunch of wealthy men took over and over from the then ruling associations in NSW... The NSL same.... wealthy men and wealthy groups controlling the game... A-League a richer and more elite bunch of wealthy men take over..... We have had over 60 years of the same thing recycled mostly by the same man in Frank Lowy leading the charge in all three....from 1955 to 2022 is 67 years .... thats a lot to unwrap and a long time for little powerful groups to develop... I honestly don't know the answer... as built into the belief system is the ..."""'If Only""" myth and this myth has believers thinking nay has believers having blind faith in to fix the problems is both easy and simple...
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Monoethnic Social Club
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+xMidfielder - 2 Jan 2022 11:45 PM At the end of the day it comes down to what people expect.... Second we need to cut out myths and half truths spoken about as if they are the absolute truth...dispelling some myths below and puts on helmet... Myth 1.... we have never had a professional league and we don't have established competitions above grass roots.... Myth 2 .... since the mid 70's the migrant demographic has shifted from European to Indian / Asian / Middle Eastern.... these groups simply don't bring the same level of skill and likening of Football as Europeans did... Myth 3 ... we have never ever aside from the golden gen had a great local Australian side most of the 74 side were born oversees... many of that golden gen were actually developed by the AIS .... Myth 4... the NSL ... however successful that league may have been or who they developed... the mix of teams in the NSL was never ever and even now going to get broad stream community support and acceptance... Myth 5... we have never had good management... jury still out on JJ and Townsend... Myth 6 ... the answer is simple.... Myth 7 ... its an easy fix... Myth 8.... it can be done quickly ... I'll try and dispell these myths if yours mate :) Myth 1.... we have never had a professional league and we don't have established competitions above grass roots.... Partially true, depending on your definition of "professional" Myth 2 .... since the mid 70's the migrant demographic has shifted from European to Indian / Asian / Middle Eastern.... these groups simply don't bring the same level of skill and likening of Football as Europeans did.. Rubbish, I watch some of these Chinese international students play a weekly tournament in the local park and some of them are fantastic, maybe soccer is it as important to them as it was to European migrants earlier, but the skills are there and it won't be long before Asian and Middle,Eastern clubs start popping up and doing well,in state leagues across the land.
Myth 3 ... we have never ever aside from the golden gen had a great local Australian side most of the 74 side were born oversees... many of that golden gen were actually developed by the AIS ... So the AIS just went and picked them up,off the street did they?
Myth 4... the NSL ... however successful that league may have been or who they developed... the mix of teams in the NSL was never ever and even now going to get broad stream community support and acceptance... This is indeed a myth I agree. Sadly it is a myth perpetuated by the very people who stand to lose the most from true multiculturalism. Racist attitudes in soccer and in fact in general life, in what is supposed to be, legally at least, a multicultural and NOT assimilationist fascist country is NOT a myth though. The fact FFA and Soccer Australia before them did their utmost to "whitewash" Australian citizens of any trace of their uniqueness is illegal, immoral and disgusting... One day we too will,have the PM say "Sorry" in parliament....Myth 5... we have never had good management... jury still out on JJ and Townsend... not a myth, we have never and probably will never have someone who does whats best for all of soccer and not just the part they are being paid from. Townsend is just looking out for the interests of his paymasters mate, good on him, its got nothing to do with football in Australia its just the big bash website streaming entertainment show ( that happens to be on for 90 mins with 11 players on each side) ... JJ on the other hand, now has great chance to give us all what Australian soccer never had.... a future. Will he or, will the lure of petrodollars prove to be far too strong? Tbc.
Myth 6 ... the answer is simple.... Myth 7 ... its an easy fix... Myth 8.... it can be done quickly ... These last three are just "hopes" not myths mate. The "fix" is simple and can be done quickly but the fact is that the APL don't want it and have the clout and finances to get their way.....
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df1982
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+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x[quote]Of course there's a problem in the A-league. Think about the number of football fans that have been abandoned/alienated due denying their club access to the top flight in order to keep the fans of the 12 franchises and casual sport supporters happy. The A-L can't even embrace all the football fans in Australia. What...the 500 people at Sydney Olympic, Sydney United, Woolongong etc? Half the South Melbourne supporters converted to Victory anyway. I bet alot of the turncoats have really enjoyed the increase in popularity and validity they feel as soccer fans now that they went to McVictory... "Football but not as you know it" really proved to be a huge mainstream success eh? Its not about whether South Melbourne will get 500 or 50000. And this is the mentality that has broken our game The AFL is a league where 99% of Aussie Rules fans follow the AFL. Same as the NFL. And same as other invitational only sports. Thats their model We will never have that model. Fact. Reality. Accept it. Football can only thrive with the next best economic model which is the 80/20 rule (where 80% of revenue / support comes from 20% of clubs). The rest is just filler. The game needs a big MV, SFC, WSW, BR and another club. People arent going to turn in Saturday night to see top vs bottom For the NRL to succeed it needed a strong Victorian team to capitalise on 100% of Victorian support so they manufactured one. Same as what the AFL did progressively over their foreign markets. We dont need a strong Central Coast Mariners or a strong Canberra. Thats not our model. The pittance these regions can bring at the expense of having our most valuable shit kicking at the bottom of the league just isnt worth it There is no such thing as an AFL fan or an NFL fan or a Cycling fan etc... People are dynamic sports fans. They watch the AFL expecting one thing, they watch the EPL expecting another, they watch golf or track expecting another. Fans of our game are used to big clubs, and internationally competitive instead of just locally. They dont tune in to say "herp de derp, last year MV bad, this year MV good. Me happy. Not bored" The FFA started with the answer. We must have an AFL model. We must be on one of three networks. In any other model South Melbourne would have been part of the league by now and nobody would give a shit what their crowds or ratings unless they ended up being one of the team 80% of people are interested in Pretty much my point mate. The FFA "re-invented" the game/clubs to appeal to a new audience and that has not materialised. All it did was alienate a segment of the old audience forever and bring in a an equivalent number (possibly marginally more than what was "lost" but only slightly) of new fans and then wonder why, after 17 years the TV audience and match day attendance is still where it was in the 90s.......... The new model did find a much bigger audience but then through rank mismanagement on every level alienated that audience. Now it's time gone and I agree it's not coming back. The A League was dubbed the NSL with a coat of paint. It was the same closed off franchise model that existed at the end of the NSL. It wasnt the model that found a new audience but a promising new organisation for digging our game out of a hole that every fan of the Australian game got behind. Also one that could attract government and commercial fundingI've always argued that the first 2 or 3 years of the league were necessary evils. Some people agree. Some dont. Some think there should have been 2 teams from Melbourne / Sydney. Other will argue there should have been a 2nd tier from day 1 The problem was those in charge decided to cement the initial model and sell it as the product. Season 7 was the start of the end of the A League Umm, are you sure about this statement? Myself and thousands of others did not "get behind it" as for the hundreds of thousands of so called "eurosnobs" that love football in this country and have done so for decades upon decades they didn't even realise the franchises existed...... and never will. That post has to be read within the context of my post above it. The 80/20 rule. I know I'm preaching to the converted so take this as more of an elaboration rather than a counter point Interest in the Australian game was low. You might have 100% of football fans follow football, 50% follow the Aussie NTs, 20% follow the national league (just as a very loose example). The point of the A League was to engage with the 20%, not the 100%. The fact the euro snobs didnt follow the initial league was moot, as with AFL fans I did a lot of stats at the start of the league and effectively it was just a consolidated NSL with money. Some NSL fans such as yourself may not have gotten on board but most did. It wasnt bye bye fans of Sydney teams and hello new fans for Sydney FC. They were the same. There was no way an unproven league for a historically mismanaged sport could have attracted a new audience like that. It was the NSL but with 8 clubs Then after the world cup the Australian game received a boom. In my made up figures above it would have been say 70% for the Aussie NTs and 35% for the local league. Peak interest can be seen in all teams in season 3 The A League was without a shadow of a doubt a successful and viable league. It had the corporate backing, investment, TV dollars, sponsorship and even player pool that the NSL couldnt touch. It just could never be a 100% model like the AFL / NRL. If the focus was on the 35% instead of the 65% it would be an established and stable part of the Australian sports market by now Fact is I don't care about whether you would watch it any more than I care about whether sad CCM fans would watch if if their team starts losing. The only thing the league needs to do is be competitive (not rigged) and a pathway for all clubs and players. The focus has to be on viability instead of popularity. Selling our game to be in a prime time slot on one of three networks shows we're a long way off learning that Will have to agree to disagree bluebird... I was not and will never be a statistician however anecdotally can state that most people I come across who are fans of the Aleague tend to mention in the same breath that they where also not fans of the old NSL .... you know the same old garbage arguments I get into on here all the time "blah blah, didn't like the wog teams, didn't feel safe, was scared by foreigners, soccer hooligans, Croatian flags etc etc etc" Yes some of the original NSL crowds migrated over ( please pardon the very laboured pun) but I think you will find the vast majority, like myself for a long time, just switched off altogether and watched EPL and euro leagues instead..... There is a dormant "ex NSL club" following out there which only comes out very very rarely ( big derby, final or FFA cup game), how many they are God only knows but they are still around and alot of them, have past on the madness to their kids.... The APL doesn't interact with these people and never will, you may dismiss us as being insignificant and you don't care if we watch the Aleague or not, that's fine, but you should care if the CCM fans "consume" the product because if they don't the APL and silverlake will pull the plug and you won't HAVE a league to follow.... The original A League support came from somewhere. It wasnt manufactured from a few board meetings and a brand new audience, one in, one out The fact remains that you have 100% of football fans, and x% for Australian league. The interest in the Australian "league" game has always been the smallest portion of football following as a whole and this isnt something that can be replicated in identical numbers over night If I had to guess I would say 80% of the A League year 1 fans had some original tie to the NSL whether it was a casual fan for big games, a historic fan who was disengaged towards the end, or somebody who just wanted to see the Australian game work, or a hardened fan I'm not dismissing NSL fans as insignificant. I'm simply saying that interest in the league will always be the smallest portion of fans so there is no need to try to appease to all football fans. Let them come over in their own time, if at all. The game simply has to be viable, not popular. If 60%-70% of football fans in this country are not fans of the national league, the vast majority of people are always "not" following the Australian league, so the league needs to appeal to those who are The AFL / NRL model for artificially stimulating growth in disinterested markets simply wasnt translatable to our game. Our approach should have been to simply "have" a league, and capitalise on the inevitable interest in the top league of a big sport, backed with the recent commercial interest that didnt exist before. The league would have continued to roll on year after year and a natural market would have determined which teams were in / out, and which fans were in / out they/we are members and fans of a specific club, not of a league. That's all there is to this debate, people follow a club and despie the initial goodwill from many football fans to support the local top league (me included) AL has squandered this with gimmicks and staleness. Football is the most popular game in the world for a reason and all APL needs to do is copy what other small football leagues do rather than trying to provide a AFL/NRL comp with a round ball Exactly.
People that follow professional competitions follow clubs - not just the league itself.
Souths fans follow the Bunnies bc their grandparents did. Same as a Collingwood fans or Hawthorn fans.
We need that sort of generational club support for our clubs. It takes decades. Some of the AFL clubs have been around since the 1860s. That's a century and a half of generational support. It's something that cannot easily be synthesised. Clubs like MV, SFC and WSW work because their population density is so high. All they need to do is win trophies and they work.WSW is the perfect demonstration of this. Grew rapidly due to onfield results. Declined when the results evaporated. When you don't have history, all you can rely on is success. Problem is success is difficult to sustain. Sorry mate but that is bollocks. Passion is passion, club is club. Even the AFL and NRL guys know that, some clubs haven't won a single thing in 50, 60 years yet still have die hard support. That's 100% right The mentality you responded to comes from the AFL / NRL approach I described above. There is no NRL in Victoria and any team would be weak. So the governing body puts a team in, sends their best players, and guarentees success. The market is artificially established. Over the course of 10 years, "fans" are trained to only watch when their team is winning. The game ends up with a conundrum Football took the same approach after season 6. For the first time introducing concessions to boost new markets. Since then it has been stuck in a Robin Hood paradox (continual rob from the rich and give to the poor). The result is obvious based on some of the plastic support dribble I read on here A competitive open league will be new and it will be scary to some here, no doubt about it. But the irony is these same fans already follow several sports and leagues around the Australia and the world with the same model This is what the post he responded to was saying. You both seem to be objecting to a post that makes the same point your making, but better. AFL clubs like Essendon and Carlton haven't had success for decades, but still draw big crowds. They are entrenched, generational clubs, with a fanatical base support that means even prolonged periods of relative failure doesn't see support collapse. A club like GWS needs to win and be successful. Its why Gold Coast support sucks. However, its also why West Coast succeeded in the long run. Despite being a created 'plastic' franchise, which had some initial trouble, its based in an AFL city. So, a period of success saw WAFL followers switch allegiances to WC. Now, not only does its support dwarf that of a lot of old Victorian teams, that support is entrenched. They emulated the support of old big Victorian clubs, and did it in only a couple of decades. Glory had something similar going, to a lesser extent. If the FFA expansion was following an AFL model, which I doubt, it was West Coast, not GWS or Gold Coast they aspired to. Its the whole, fish where the fish are, model. However, they bungled it. Or maybe they didn't, and it was just never going to work. I dont know. I have always thought part of the reason for the AFLs relative success compared to football, was lack of choice. People might follow a local team and an AFL team, but if they find the AFL a bit on the nose, other than just watching local footy at the ground, they have limited options, so they hold their nose, and keep supporting. An A league fan that is disillusioned has plenty of other options to watch top flight football, so they just leave. +x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x[quote]Of course there's a problem in the A-league. Think about the number of football fans that have been abandoned/alienated due denying their club access to the top flight in order to keep the fans of the 12 franchises and casual sport supporters happy. The A-L can't even embrace all the football fans in Australia. What...the 500 people at Sydney Olympic, Sydney United, Woolongong etc? Half the South Melbourne supporters converted to Victory anyway. I bet alot of the turncoats have really enjoyed the increase in popularity and validity they feel as soccer fans now that they went to McVictory... "Football but not as you know it" really proved to be a huge mainstream success eh? Its not about whether South Melbourne will get 500 or 50000. And this is the mentality that has broken our game The AFL is a league where 99% of Aussie Rules fans follow the AFL. Same as the NFL. And same as other invitational only sports. Thats their model We will never have that model. Fact. Reality. Accept it. Football can only thrive with the next best economic model which is the 80/20 rule (where 80% of revenue / support comes from 20% of clubs). The rest is just filler. The game needs a big MV, SFC, WSW, BR and another club. People arent going to turn in Saturday night to see top vs bottom For the NRL to succeed it needed a strong Victorian team to capitalise on 100% of Victorian support so they manufactured one. Same as what the AFL did progressively over their foreign markets. We dont need a strong Central Coast Mariners or a strong Canberra. Thats not our model. The pittance these regions can bring at the expense of having our most valuable shit kicking at the bottom of the league just isnt worth it There is no such thing as an AFL fan or an NFL fan or a Cycling fan etc... People are dynamic sports fans. They watch the AFL expecting one thing, they watch the EPL expecting another, they watch golf or track expecting another. Fans of our game are used to big clubs, and internationally competitive instead of just locally. They dont tune in to say "herp de derp, last year MV bad, this year MV good. Me happy. Not bored" The FFA started with the answer. We must have an AFL model. We must be on one of three networks. In any other model South Melbourne would have been part of the league by now and nobody would give a shit what their crowds or ratings unless they ended up being one of the team 80% of people are interested in Pretty much my point mate. The FFA "re-invented" the game/clubs to appeal to a new audience and that has not materialised. All it did was alienate a segment of the old audience forever and bring in a an equivalent number (possibly marginally more than what was "lost" but only slightly) of new fans and then wonder why, after 17 years the TV audience and match day attendance is still where it was in the 90s.......... The new model did find a much bigger audience but then through rank mismanagement on every level alienated that audience. Now it's time gone and I agree it's not coming back. The A League was dubbed the NSL with a coat of paint. It was the same closed off franchise model that existed at the end of the NSL. It wasnt the model that found a new audience but a promising new organisation for digging our game out of a hole that every fan of the Australian game got behind. Also one that could attract government and commercial fundingI've always argued that the first 2 or 3 years of the league were necessary evils. Some people agree. Some dont. Some think there should have been 2 teams from Melbourne / Sydney. Other will argue there should have been a 2nd tier from day 1 The problem was those in charge decided to cement the initial model and sell it as the product. Season 7 was the start of the end of the A League Umm, are you sure about this statement? Myself and thousands of others did not "get behind it" as for the hundreds of thousands of so called "eurosnobs" that love football in this country and have done so for decades upon decades they didn't even realise the franchises existed...... and never will. That post has to be read within the context of my post above it. The 80/20 rule. I know I'm preaching to the converted so take this as more of an elaboration rather than a counter point Interest in the Australian game was low. You might have 100% of football fans follow football, 50% follow the Aussie NTs, 20% follow the national league (just as a very loose example). The point of the A League was to engage with the 20%, not the 100%. The fact the euro snobs didnt follow the initial league was moot, as with AFL fans I did a lot of stats at the start of the league and effectively it was just a consolidated NSL with money. Some NSL fans such as yourself may not have gotten on board but most did. It wasnt bye bye fans of Sydney teams and hello new fans for Sydney FC. They were the same. There was no way an unproven league for a historically mismanaged sport could have attracted a new audience like that. It was the NSL but with 8 clubs Then after the world cup the Australian game received a boom. In my made up figures above it would have been say 70% for the Aussie NTs and 35% for the local league. Peak interest can be seen in all teams in season 3 The A League was without a shadow of a doubt a successful and viable league. It had the corporate backing, investment, TV dollars, sponsorship and even player pool that the NSL couldnt touch. It just could never be a 100% model like the AFL / NRL. If the focus was on the 35% instead of the 65% it would be an established and stable part of the Australian sports market by now Fact is I don't care about whether you would watch it any more than I care about whether sad CCM fans would watch if if their team starts losing. The only thing the league needs to do is be competitive (not rigged) and a pathway for all clubs and players. The focus has to be on viability instead of popularity. Selling our game to be in a prime time slot on one of three networks shows we're a long way off learning that Will have to agree to disagree bluebird... I was not and will never be a statistician however anecdotally can state that most people I come across who are fans of the Aleague tend to mention in the same breath that they where also not fans of the old NSL .... you know the same old garbage arguments I get into on here all the time "blah blah, didn't like the wog teams, didn't feel safe, was scared by foreigners, soccer hooligans, Croatian flags etc etc etc" Yes some of the original NSL crowds migrated over ( please pardon the very laboured pun) but I think you will find the vast majority, like myself for a long time, just switched off altogether and watched EPL and euro leagues instead..... There is a dormant "ex NSL club" following out there which only comes out very very rarely ( big derby, final or FFA cup game), how many they are God only knows but they are still around and alot of them, have past on the madness to their kids.... The APL doesn't interact with these people and never will, you may dismiss us as being insignificant and you don't care if we watch the Aleague or not, that's fine, but you should care if the CCM fans "consume" the product because if they don't the APL and silverlake will pull the plug and you won't HAVE a league to follow.... The original A League support came from somewhere. It wasnt manufactured from a few board meetings and a brand new audience, one in, one out The fact remains that you have 100% of football fans, and x% for Australian league. The interest in the Australian "league" game has always been the smallest portion of football following as a whole and this isnt something that can be replicated in identical numbers over night If I had to guess I would say 80% of the A League year 1 fans had some original tie to the NSL whether it was a casual fan for big games, a historic fan who was disengaged towards the end, or somebody who just wanted to see the Australian game work, or a hardened fan I'm not dismissing NSL fans as insignificant. I'm simply saying that interest in the league will always be the smallest portion of fans so there is no need to try to appease to all football fans. Let them come over in their own time, if at all. The game simply has to be viable, not popular. If 60%-70% of football fans in this country are not fans of the national league, the vast majority of people are always "not" following the Australian league, so the league needs to appeal to those who are The AFL / NRL model for artificially stimulating growth in disinterested markets simply wasnt translatable to our game. Our approach should have been to simply "have" a league, and capitalise on the inevitable interest in the top league of a big sport, backed with the recent commercial interest that didnt exist before. The league would have continued to roll on year after year and a natural market would have determined which teams were in / out, and which fans were in / out they/we are members and fans of a specific club, not of a league. That's all there is to this debate, people follow a club and despie the initial goodwill from many football fans to support the local top league (me included) AL has squandered this with gimmicks and staleness. Football is the most popular game in the world for a reason and all APL needs to do is copy what other small football leagues do rather than trying to provide a AFL/NRL comp with a round ball Exactly.
People that follow professional competitions follow clubs - not just the league itself.
Souths fans follow the Bunnies bc their grandparents did. Same as a Collingwood fans or Hawthorn fans.
We need that sort of generational club support for our clubs. It takes decades. Some of the AFL clubs have been around since the 1860s. That's a century and a half of generational support. It's something that cannot easily be synthesised. Clubs like MV, SFC and WSW work because their population density is so high. All they need to do is win trophies and they work.WSW is the perfect demonstration of this. Grew rapidly due to onfield results. Declined when the results evaporated. When you don't have history, all you can rely on is success. Problem is success is difficult to sustain. Sorry mate but that is bollocks. Passion is passion, club is club. Even the AFL and NRL guys know that, some clubs haven't won a single thing in 50, 60 years yet still have die hard support. That's 100% right The mentality you responded to comes from the AFL / NRL approach I described above. There is no NRL in Victoria and any team would be weak. So the governing body puts a team in, sends their best players, and guarentees success. The market is artificially established. Over the course of 10 years, "fans" are trained to only watch when their team is winning. The game ends up with a conundrum Football took the same approach after season 6. For the first time introducing concessions to boost new markets. Since then it has been stuck in a Robin Hood paradox (continual rob from the rich and give to the poor). The result is obvious based on some of the plastic support dribble I read on here A competitive open league will be new and it will be scary to some here, no doubt about it. But the irony is these same fans already follow several sports and leagues around the Australia and the world with the same model If the FFA expansion was following an AFL model, which I doubt, it was West Coast, not GWS or Gold Coast they aspired to. Its the whole, fish where the fish are, model. However, they bungled it. Or maybe they didn't, and it was just never going to work. I dont know. I have always thought part of the reason for the AFLs relative success compared to football, was lack of choice. People might follow a local team and an AFL team, but if they find the AFL a bit on the nose, other than just watching local footy at the ground, they have limited options, so they hold their nose, and keep supporting. An A league fan that is disillusioned has plenty of other options to watch top flight football, so they just leave. You answered your own question. The reason for WCE's success was due to lack of options, not because of success. There would have been plenty more successful teams in the WAFL but elite sports fans demand elite sport. Having a team in a professional national competition was always going to take fans away from having a team in a local competition The AFL had a crush, kill, destroy mentality that is synonymous with leagues like the NRL, NFL and other stand alone leagues. Its a model that only works when the governing body has a monopoly, which we dont This was never going to work for football. Never. Even _if_ the model could work, which it can't, as you rightfully pointed out there was a 10-20 year period for teams like West Coast and Storm to be ingrained in their respective codes. When our starting point was 8 unknown teams, which 2 teams were we supposed to give 15 years of support and what would that have meant for the other 6 teams struggling for 15 years in the interim? There is no "one way" to have a successful sport. The AFL and NRL were successful in approaches that worked for them. Our situation is different. The A League has had many attempts to artificially boost metrics and they have all failed in the long run. And there is no need I'll put this a slightly different way. Imagine you are trying to establish McDonalds in an Asian country that doesnt have McDonalds. Your fear is they wont like it so you use the same brand and colours, but you serve Asian cuisine instead. This will fail because it wont be McDonalds enough for fans of McDonalds, and it wont be top notch Asian cuisine for those who prefer Asian food. Thats the conundrum the A League is in. Either there is demand for a football league in this country, or there isnt The FA were put in charge to establish a competitive football league. If the starting point for the FA is to state "there is no demand for a competitive national football league in this country" then they are simply the wrong people for the job So how do you tap into it? I contend that you can't do it when far better quality football exists elsewhere As I said, its about tapping into the 30% of people who are willing to follow and Australian league instead of the 70% who arent All the FA had to do is put together a league, worry about the financial viability components, and then let it evolve down a sensible pathway. Exactly what they started doing season 1-6 At first sign of danger they hit the abort button and introduced concessions, cemented the salary cap, established the top 6 "exciting" finals, and all other gimmicks at the finger tips of the dime a dozen Australian sports administrators reading from the same pamphlet You can read through the last few pages of this thread and see lots of ideas and opinions of what will work and what wont work and how to get those extra fans. We dont even have to guess. A natural approach will get us success faster than a manufactured approach What have the FA done differently this year than the last 16 years though? You mention that the first 6 years where a good approach yet this was the very beginning ( the root of all evil if you will) of the manufacturing process you so dislike. Not only did the FFA establish a league, they funded some of the newly created teams and, through a shopping centre MLS lite model they manufactured the other participants in this farce. The 30% of existing soccer fans ( pre Aleague) who would be willing to follow an Australian league are still out there, they haven't died off yet, they just need a reason to attend or watch on TV..... that reason is THEIR club....,,,, Yeah if anything seasons 1-6 were more franchise-y than the league was later. 8 teams (one town one team), a 21-round season, and way more centralised operations (e.g. every team playing in the same Reebok kits). It's actually become more like a "proper" football league in recent years.
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They should just implement P&R now. It really is that simple. Just do what the rest of the world does - its not hard ! The clubs already exist here to do it ! Just do it already !!
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+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x[quote]+x[quote]Of course there's a problem in the A-league. Think about the number of football fans that have been abandoned/alienated due denying their club access to the top flight in order to keep the fans of the 12 franchises and casual sport supporters happy. The A-L can't even embrace all the football fans in Australia. What...the 500 people at Sydney Olympic, Sydney United, Woolongong etc? Half the South Melbourne supporters converted to Victory anyway. I bet alot of the turncoats have really enjoyed the increase in popularity and validity they feel as soccer fans now that they went to McVictory... "Football but not as you know it" really proved to be a huge mainstream success eh? Its not about whether South Melbourne will get 500 or 50000. And this is the mentality that has broken our game The AFL is a league where 99% of Aussie Rules fans follow the AFL. Same as the NFL. And same as other invitational only sports. Thats their model We will never have that model. Fact. Reality. Accept it. Football can only thrive with the next best economic model which is the 80/20 rule (where 80% of revenue / support comes from 20% of clubs). The rest is just filler. The game needs a big MV, SFC, WSW, BR and another club. People arent going to turn in Saturday night to see top vs bottom For the NRL to succeed it needed a strong Victorian team to capitalise on 100% of Victorian support so they manufactured one. Same as what the AFL did progressively over their foreign markets. We dont need a strong Central Coast Mariners or a strong Canberra. Thats not our model. The pittance these regions can bring at the expense of having our most valuable shit kicking at the bottom of the league just isnt worth it There is no such thing as an AFL fan or an NFL fan or a Cycling fan etc... People are dynamic sports fans. They watch the AFL expecting one thing, they watch the EPL expecting another, they watch golf or track expecting another. Fans of our game are used to big clubs, and internationally competitive instead of just locally. They dont tune in to say "herp de derp, last year MV bad, this year MV good. Me happy. Not bored" The FFA started with the answer. We must have an AFL model. We must be on one of three networks. In any other model South Melbourne would have been part of the league by now and nobody would give a shit what their crowds or ratings unless they ended up being one of the team 80% of people are interested in Pretty much my point mate. The FFA "re-invented" the game/clubs to appeal to a new audience and that has not materialised. All it did was alienate a segment of the old audience forever and bring in a an equivalent number (possibly marginally more than what was "lost" but only slightly) of new fans and then wonder why, after 17 years the TV audience and match day attendance is still where it was in the 90s.......... The new model did find a much bigger audience but then through rank mismanagement on every level alienated that audience. Now it's time gone and I agree it's not coming back. The A League was dubbed the NSL with a coat of paint. It was the same closed off franchise model that existed at the end of the NSL. It wasnt the model that found a new audience but a promising new organisation for digging our game out of a hole that every fan of the Australian game got behind. Also one that could attract government and commercial fundingI've always argued that the first 2 or 3 years of the league were necessary evils. Some people agree. Some dont. Some think there should have been 2 teams from Melbourne / Sydney. Other will argue there should have been a 2nd tier from day 1 The problem was those in charge decided to cement the initial model and sell it as the product. Season 7 was the start of the end of the A League Umm, are you sure about this statement? Myself and thousands of others did not "get behind it" as for the hundreds of thousands of so called "eurosnobs" that love football in this country and have done so for decades upon decades they didn't even realise the franchises existed...... and never will. That post has to be read within the context of my post above it. The 80/20 rule. I know I'm preaching to the converted so take this as more of an elaboration rather than a counter point Interest in the Australian game was low. You might have 100% of football fans follow football, 50% follow the Aussie NTs, 20% follow the national league (just as a very loose example). The point of the A League was to engage with the 20%, not the 100%. The fact the euro snobs didnt follow the initial league was moot, as with AFL fans I did a lot of stats at the start of the league and effectively it was just a consolidated NSL with money. Some NSL fans such as yourself may not have gotten on board but most did. It wasnt bye bye fans of Sydney teams and hello new fans for Sydney FC. They were the same. There was no way an unproven league for a historically mismanaged sport could have attracted a new audience like that. It was the NSL but with 8 clubs Then after the world cup the Australian game received a boom. In my made up figures above it would have been say 70% for the Aussie NTs and 35% for the local league. Peak interest can be seen in all teams in season 3 The A League was without a shadow of a doubt a successful and viable league. It had the corporate backing, investment, TV dollars, sponsorship and even player pool that the NSL couldnt touch. It just could never be a 100% model like the AFL / NRL. If the focus was on the 35% instead of the 65% it would be an established and stable part of the Australian sports market by now Fact is I don't care about whether you would watch it any more than I care about whether sad CCM fans would watch if if their team starts losing. The only thing the league needs to do is be competitive (not rigged) and a pathway for all clubs and players. The focus has to be on viability instead of popularity. Selling our game to be in a prime time slot on one of three networks shows we're a long way off learning that Will have to agree to disagree bluebird... I was not and will never be a statistician however anecdotally can state that most people I come across who are fans of the Aleague tend to mention in the same breath that they where also not fans of the old NSL .... you know the same old garbage arguments I get into on here all the time "blah blah, didn't like the wog teams, didn't feel safe, was scared by foreigners, soccer hooligans, Croatian flags etc etc etc" Yes some of the original NSL crowds migrated over ( please pardon the very laboured pun) but I think you will find the vast majority, like myself for a long time, just switched off altogether and watched EPL and euro leagues instead..... There is a dormant "ex NSL club" following out there which only comes out very very rarely ( big derby, final or FFA cup game), how many they are God only knows but they are still around and alot of them, have past on the madness to their kids.... The APL doesn't interact with these people and never will, you may dismiss us as being insignificant and you don't care if we watch the Aleague or not, that's fine, but you should care if the CCM fans "consume" the product because if they don't the APL and silverlake will pull the plug and you won't HAVE a league to follow.... The original A League support came from somewhere. It wasnt manufactured from a few board meetings and a brand new audience, one in, one out The fact remains that you have 100% of football fans, and x% for Australian league. The interest in the Australian "league" game has always been the smallest portion of football following as a whole and this isnt something that can be replicated in identical numbers over night If I had to guess I would say 80% of the A League year 1 fans had some original tie to the NSL whether it was a casual fan for big games, a historic fan who was disengaged towards the end, or somebody who just wanted to see the Australian game work, or a hardened fan I'm not dismissing NSL fans as insignificant. I'm simply saying that interest in the league will always be the smallest portion of fans so there is no need to try to appease to all football fans. Let them come over in their own time, if at all. The game simply has to be viable, not popular. If 60%-70% of football fans in this country are not fans of the national league, the vast majority of people are always "not" following the Australian league, so the league needs to appeal to those who are The AFL / NRL model for artificially stimulating growth in disinterested markets simply wasnt translatable to our game. Our approach should have been to simply "have" a league, and capitalise on the inevitable interest in the top league of a big sport, backed with the recent commercial interest that didnt exist before. The league would have continued to roll on year after year and a natural market would have determined which teams were in / out, and which fans were in / out they/we are members and fans of a specific club, not of a league. That's all there is to this debate, people follow a club and despie the initial goodwill from many football fans to support the local top league (me included) AL has squandered this with gimmicks and staleness. Football is the most popular game in the world for a reason and all APL needs to do is copy what other small football leagues do rather than trying to provide a AFL/NRL comp with a round ball Exactly.
People that follow professional competitions follow clubs - not just the league itself.
Souths fans follow the Bunnies bc their grandparents did. Same as a Collingwood fans or Hawthorn fans.
We need that sort of generational club support for our clubs. It takes decades. Some of the AFL clubs have been around since the 1860s. That's a century and a half of generational support. It's something that cannot easily be synthesised. Clubs like MV, SFC and WSW work because their population density is so high. All they need to do is win trophies and they work.WSW is the perfect demonstration of this. Grew rapidly due to onfield results. Declined when the results evaporated. When you don't have history, all you can rely on is success. Problem is success is difficult to sustain. Sorry mate but that is bollocks. Passion is passion, club is club. Even the AFL and NRL guys know that, some clubs haven't won a single thing in 50, 60 years yet still have die hard support. That's 100% right The mentality you responded to comes from the AFL / NRL approach I described above. There is no NRL in Victoria and any team would be weak. So the governing body puts a team in, sends their best players, and guarentees success. The market is artificially established. Over the course of 10 years, "fans" are trained to only watch when their team is winning. The game ends up with a conundrum Football took the same approach after season 6. For the first time introducing concessions to boost new markets. Since then it has been stuck in a Robin Hood paradox (continual rob from the rich and give to the poor). The result is obvious based on some of the plastic support dribble I read on here A competitive open league will be new and it will be scary to some here, no doubt about it. But the irony is these same fans already follow several sports and leagues around the Australia and the world with the same model This is what the post he responded to was saying. You both seem to be objecting to a post that makes the same point your making, but better. AFL clubs like Essendon and Carlton haven't had success for decades, but still draw big crowds. They are entrenched, generational clubs, with a fanatical base support that means even prolonged periods of relative failure doesn't see support collapse. A club like GWS needs to win and be successful. Its why Gold Coast support sucks. However, its also why West Coast succeeded in the long run. Despite being a created 'plastic' franchise, which had some initial trouble, its based in an AFL city. So, a period of success saw WAFL followers switch allegiances to WC. Now, not only does its support dwarf that of a lot of old Victorian teams, that support is entrenched. They emulated the support of old big Victorian clubs, and did it in only a couple of decades. Glory had something similar going, to a lesser extent. If the FFA expansion was following an AFL model, which I doubt, it was West Coast, not GWS or Gold Coast they aspired to. Its the whole, fish where the fish are, model. However, they bungled it. Or maybe they didn't, and it was just never going to work. I dont know. I have always thought part of the reason for the AFLs relative success compared to football, was lack of choice. People might follow a local team and an AFL team, but if they find the AFL a bit on the nose, other than just watching local footy at the ground, they have limited options, so they hold their nose, and keep supporting. An A league fan that is disillusioned has plenty of other options to watch top flight football, so they just leave. +x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x[quote]Of course there's a problem in the A-league. Think about the number of football fans that have been abandoned/alienated due denying their club access to the top flight in order to keep the fans of the 12 franchises and casual sport supporters happy. The A-L can't even embrace all the football fans in Australia. What...the 500 people at Sydney Olympic, Sydney United, Woolongong etc? Half the South Melbourne supporters converted to Victory anyway. I bet alot of the turncoats have really enjoyed the increase in popularity and validity they feel as soccer fans now that they went to McVictory... "Football but not as you know it" really proved to be a huge mainstream success eh? Its not about whether South Melbourne will get 500 or 50000. And this is the mentality that has broken our game The AFL is a league where 99% of Aussie Rules fans follow the AFL. Same as the NFL. And same as other invitational only sports. Thats their model We will never have that model. Fact. Reality. Accept it. Football can only thrive with the next best economic model which is the 80/20 rule (where 80% of revenue / support comes from 20% of clubs). The rest is just filler. The game needs a big MV, SFC, WSW, BR and another club. People arent going to turn in Saturday night to see top vs bottom For the NRL to succeed it needed a strong Victorian team to capitalise on 100% of Victorian support so they manufactured one. Same as what the AFL did progressively over their foreign markets. We dont need a strong Central Coast Mariners or a strong Canberra. Thats not our model. The pittance these regions can bring at the expense of having our most valuable shit kicking at the bottom of the league just isnt worth it There is no such thing as an AFL fan or an NFL fan or a Cycling fan etc... People are dynamic sports fans. They watch the AFL expecting one thing, they watch the EPL expecting another, they watch golf or track expecting another. Fans of our game are used to big clubs, and internationally competitive instead of just locally. They dont tune in to say "herp de derp, last year MV bad, this year MV good. Me happy. Not bored" The FFA started with the answer. We must have an AFL model. We must be on one of three networks. In any other model South Melbourne would have been part of the league by now and nobody would give a shit what their crowds or ratings unless they ended up being one of the team 80% of people are interested in Pretty much my point mate. The FFA "re-invented" the game/clubs to appeal to a new audience and that has not materialised. All it did was alienate a segment of the old audience forever and bring in a an equivalent number (possibly marginally more than what was "lost" but only slightly) of new fans and then wonder why, after 17 years the TV audience and match day attendance is still where it was in the 90s.......... The new model did find a much bigger audience but then through rank mismanagement on every level alienated that audience. Now it's time gone and I agree it's not coming back. The A League was dubbed the NSL with a coat of paint. It was the same closed off franchise model that existed at the end of the NSL. It wasnt the model that found a new audience but a promising new organisation for digging our game out of a hole that every fan of the Australian game got behind. Also one that could attract government and commercial fundingI've always argued that the first 2 or 3 years of the league were necessary evils. Some people agree. Some dont. Some think there should have been 2 teams from Melbourne / Sydney. Other will argue there should have been a 2nd tier from day 1 The problem was those in charge decided to cement the initial model and sell it as the product. Season 7 was the start of the end of the A League Umm, are you sure about this statement? Myself and thousands of others did not "get behind it" as for the hundreds of thousands of so called "eurosnobs" that love football in this country and have done so for decades upon decades they didn't even realise the franchises existed...... and never will. That post has to be read within the context of my post above it. The 80/20 rule. I know I'm preaching to the converted so take this as more of an elaboration rather than a counter point Interest in the Australian game was low. You might have 100% of football fans follow football, 50% follow the Aussie NTs, 20% follow the national league (just as a very loose example). The point of the A League was to engage with the 20%, not the 100%. The fact the euro snobs didnt follow the initial league was moot, as with AFL fans I did a lot of stats at the start of the league and effectively it was just a consolidated NSL with money. Some NSL fans such as yourself may not have gotten on board but most did. It wasnt bye bye fans of Sydney teams and hello new fans for Sydney FC. They were the same. There was no way an unproven league for a historically mismanaged sport could have attracted a new audience like that. It was the NSL but with 8 clubs Then after the world cup the Australian game received a boom. In my made up figures above it would have been say 70% for the Aussie NTs and 35% for the local league. Peak interest can be seen in all teams in season 3 The A League was without a shadow of a doubt a successful and viable league. It had the corporate backing, investment, TV dollars, sponsorship and even player pool that the NSL couldnt touch. It just could never be a 100% model like the AFL / NRL. If the focus was on the 35% instead of the 65% it would be an established and stable part of the Australian sports market by now Fact is I don't care about whether you would watch it any more than I care about whether sad CCM fans would watch if if their team starts losing. The only thing the league needs to do is be competitive (not rigged) and a pathway for all clubs and players. The focus has to be on viability instead of popularity. Selling our game to be in a prime time slot on one of three networks shows we're a long way off learning that Will have to agree to disagree bluebird... I was not and will never be a statistician however anecdotally can state that most people I come across who are fans of the Aleague tend to mention in the same breath that they where also not fans of the old NSL .... you know the same old garbage arguments I get into on here all the time "blah blah, didn't like the wog teams, didn't feel safe, was scared by foreigners, soccer hooligans, Croatian flags etc etc etc" Yes some of the original NSL crowds migrated over ( please pardon the very laboured pun) but I think you will find the vast majority, like myself for a long time, just switched off altogether and watched EPL and euro leagues instead..... There is a dormant "ex NSL club" following out there which only comes out very very rarely ( big derby, final or FFA cup game), how many they are God only knows but they are still around and alot of them, have past on the madness to their kids.... The APL doesn't interact with these people and never will, you may dismiss us as being insignificant and you don't care if we watch the Aleague or not, that's fine, but you should care if the CCM fans "consume" the product because if they don't the APL and silverlake will pull the plug and you won't HAVE a league to follow.... The original A League support came from somewhere. It wasnt manufactured from a few board meetings and a brand new audience, one in, one out The fact remains that you have 100% of football fans, and x% for Australian league. The interest in the Australian "league" game has always been the smallest portion of football following as a whole and this isnt something that can be replicated in identical numbers over night If I had to guess I would say 80% of the A League year 1 fans had some original tie to the NSL whether it was a casual fan for big games, a historic fan who was disengaged towards the end, or somebody who just wanted to see the Australian game work, or a hardened fan I'm not dismissing NSL fans as insignificant. I'm simply saying that interest in the league will always be the smallest portion of fans so there is no need to try to appease to all football fans. Let them come over in their own time, if at all. The game simply has to be viable, not popular. If 60%-70% of football fans in this country are not fans of the national league, the vast majority of people are always "not" following the Australian league, so the league needs to appeal to those who are The AFL / NRL model for artificially stimulating growth in disinterested markets simply wasnt translatable to our game. Our approach should have been to simply "have" a league, and capitalise on the inevitable interest in the top league of a big sport, backed with the recent commercial interest that didnt exist before. The league would have continued to roll on year after year and a natural market would have determined which teams were in / out, and which fans were in / out they/we are members and fans of a specific club, not of a league. That's all there is to this debate, people follow a club and despie the initial goodwill from many football fans to support the local top league (me included) AL has squandered this with gimmicks and staleness. Football is the most popular game in the world for a reason and all APL needs to do is copy what other small football leagues do rather than trying to provide a AFL/NRL comp with a round ball Exactly.
People that follow professional competitions follow clubs - not just the league itself.
Souths fans follow the Bunnies bc their grandparents did. Same as a Collingwood fans or Hawthorn fans.
We need that sort of generational club support for our clubs. It takes decades. Some of the AFL clubs have been around since the 1860s. That's a century and a half of generational support. It's something that cannot easily be synthesised. Clubs like MV, SFC and WSW work because their population density is so high. All they need to do is win trophies and they work.WSW is the perfect demonstration of this. Grew rapidly due to onfield results. Declined when the results evaporated. When you don't have history, all you can rely on is success. Problem is success is difficult to sustain. Sorry mate but that is bollocks. Passion is passion, club is club. Even the AFL and NRL guys know that, some clubs haven't won a single thing in 50, 60 years yet still have die hard support. That's 100% right The mentality you responded to comes from the AFL / NRL approach I described above. There is no NRL in Victoria and any team would be weak. So the governing body puts a team in, sends their best players, and guarentees success. The market is artificially established. Over the course of 10 years, "fans" are trained to only watch when their team is winning. The game ends up with a conundrum Football took the same approach after season 6. For the first time introducing concessions to boost new markets. Since then it has been stuck in a Robin Hood paradox (continual rob from the rich and give to the poor). The result is obvious based on some of the plastic support dribble I read on here A competitive open league will be new and it will be scary to some here, no doubt about it. But the irony is these same fans already follow several sports and leagues around the Australia and the world with the same model If the FFA expansion was following an AFL model, which I doubt, it was West Coast, not GWS or Gold Coast they aspired to. Its the whole, fish where the fish are, model. However, they bungled it. Or maybe they didn't, and it was just never going to work. I dont know. I have always thought part of the reason for the AFLs relative success compared to football, was lack of choice. People might follow a local team and an AFL team, but if they find the AFL a bit on the nose, other than just watching local footy at the ground, they have limited options, so they hold their nose, and keep supporting. An A league fan that is disillusioned has plenty of other options to watch top flight football, so they just leave. You answered your own question. The reason for WCE's success was due to lack of options, not because of success. There would have been plenty more successful teams in the WAFL but elite sports fans demand elite sport. Having a team in a professional national competition was always going to take fans away from having a team in a local competition The AFL had a crush, kill, destroy mentality that is synonymous with leagues like the NRL, NFL and other stand alone leagues. Its a model that only works when the governing body has a monopoly, which we dont This was never going to work for football. Never. Even _if_ the model could work, which it can't, as you rightfully pointed out there was a 10-20 year period for teams like West Coast and Storm to be ingrained in their respective codes. When our starting point was 8 unknown teams, which 2 teams were we supposed to give 15 years of support and what would that have meant for the other 6 teams struggling for 15 years in the interim? There is no "one way" to have a successful sport. The AFL and NRL were successful in approaches that worked for them. Our situation is different. The A League has had many attempts to artificially boost metrics and they have all failed in the long run. And there is no need I'll put this a slightly different way. Imagine you are trying to establish McDonalds in an Asian country that doesnt have McDonalds. Your fear is they wont like it so you use the same brand and colours, but you serve Asian cuisine instead. This will fail because it wont be McDonalds enough for fans of McDonalds, and it wont be top notch Asian cuisine for those who prefer Asian food. Thats the conundrum the A League is in. Either there is demand for a football league in this country, or there isnt The FA were put in charge to establish a competitive football league. If the starting point for the FA is to state "there is no demand for a competitive national football league in this country" then they are simply the wrong people for the job So how do you tap into it? I contend that you can't do it when far better quality football exists elsewhere As I said, its about tapping into the 30% of people who are willing to follow and Australian league instead of the 70% who arent All the FA had to do is put together a league, worry about the financial viability components, and then let it evolve down a sensible pathway. Exactly what they started doing season 1-6 At first sign of danger they hit the abort button and introduced concessions, cemented the salary cap, established the top 6 "exciting" finals, and all other gimmicks at the finger tips of the dime a dozen Australian sports administrators reading from the same pamphlet You can read through the last few pages of this thread and see lots of ideas and opinions of what will work and what wont work and how to get those extra fans. We dont even have to guess. A natural approach will get us success faster than a manufactured approach What have the FA done differently this year than the last 16 years though? You mention that the first 6 years where a good approach yet this was the very beginning ( the root of all evil if you will) of the manufacturing process you so dislike. Not only did the FFA establish a league, they funded some of the newly created teams and, through a shopping centre MLS lite model they manufactured the other participants in this farce. The 30% of existing soccer fans ( pre Aleague) who would be willing to follow an Australian league are still out there, they haven't died off yet, they just need a reason to attend or watch on TV..... that reason is THEIR club....,,,, [/quote]Yeah if anything seasons 1-6 were more franchise-y than the league was later. 8 teams (one town one team), a 21-round season, and way more centralised operations (e.g. every team playing in the same Reebok kits). It's actually become more like a "proper" football league in recent years. Hahahah I had forgotten about the Reebok clone kits.....
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+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x[quote]Of course there's a problem in the A-league. Think about the number of football fans that have been abandoned/alienated due denying their club access to the top flight in order to keep the fans of the 12 franchises and casual sport supporters happy. The A-L can't even embrace all the football fans in Australia. What...the 500 people at Sydney Olympic, Sydney United, Woolongong etc? Half the South Melbourne supporters converted to Victory anyway. I bet alot of the turncoats have really enjoyed the increase in popularity and validity they feel as soccer fans now that they went to McVictory... "Football but not as you know it" really proved to be a huge mainstream success eh? Its not about whether South Melbourne will get 500 or 50000. And this is the mentality that has broken our game The AFL is a league where 99% of Aussie Rules fans follow the AFL. Same as the NFL. And same as other invitational only sports. Thats their model We will never have that model. Fact. Reality. Accept it. Football can only thrive with the next best economic model which is the 80/20 rule (where 80% of revenue / support comes from 20% of clubs). The rest is just filler. The game needs a big MV, SFC, WSW, BR and another club. People arent going to turn in Saturday night to see top vs bottom For the NRL to succeed it needed a strong Victorian team to capitalise on 100% of Victorian support so they manufactured one. Same as what the AFL did progressively over their foreign markets. We dont need a strong Central Coast Mariners or a strong Canberra. Thats not our model. The pittance these regions can bring at the expense of having our most valuable shit kicking at the bottom of the league just isnt worth it There is no such thing as an AFL fan or an NFL fan or a Cycling fan etc... People are dynamic sports fans. They watch the AFL expecting one thing, they watch the EPL expecting another, they watch golf or track expecting another. Fans of our game are used to big clubs, and internationally competitive instead of just locally. They dont tune in to say "herp de derp, last year MV bad, this year MV good. Me happy. Not bored" The FFA started with the answer. We must have an AFL model. We must be on one of three networks. In any other model South Melbourne would have been part of the league by now and nobody would give a shit what their crowds or ratings unless they ended up being one of the team 80% of people are interested in Pretty much my point mate. The FFA "re-invented" the game/clubs to appeal to a new audience and that has not materialised. All it did was alienate a segment of the old audience forever and bring in a an equivalent number (possibly marginally more than what was "lost" but only slightly) of new fans and then wonder why, after 17 years the TV audience and match day attendance is still where it was in the 90s.......... The new model did find a much bigger audience but then through rank mismanagement on every level alienated that audience. Now it's time gone and I agree it's not coming back. The A League was dubbed the NSL with a coat of paint. It was the same closed off franchise model that existed at the end of the NSL. It wasnt the model that found a new audience but a promising new organisation for digging our game out of a hole that every fan of the Australian game got behind. Also one that could attract government and commercial fundingI've always argued that the first 2 or 3 years of the league were necessary evils. Some people agree. Some dont. Some think there should have been 2 teams from Melbourne / Sydney. Other will argue there should have been a 2nd tier from day 1 The problem was those in charge decided to cement the initial model and sell it as the product. Season 7 was the start of the end of the A League Umm, are you sure about this statement? Myself and thousands of others did not "get behind it" as for the hundreds of thousands of so called "eurosnobs" that love football in this country and have done so for decades upon decades they didn't even realise the franchises existed...... and never will. That post has to be read within the context of my post above it. The 80/20 rule. I know I'm preaching to the converted so take this as more of an elaboration rather than a counter point Interest in the Australian game was low. You might have 100% of football fans follow football, 50% follow the Aussie NTs, 20% follow the national league (just as a very loose example). The point of the A League was to engage with the 20%, not the 100%. The fact the euro snobs didnt follow the initial league was moot, as with AFL fans I did a lot of stats at the start of the league and effectively it was just a consolidated NSL with money. Some NSL fans such as yourself may not have gotten on board but most did. It wasnt bye bye fans of Sydney teams and hello new fans for Sydney FC. They were the same. There was no way an unproven league for a historically mismanaged sport could have attracted a new audience like that. It was the NSL but with 8 clubs Then after the world cup the Australian game received a boom. In my made up figures above it would have been say 70% for the Aussie NTs and 35% for the local league. Peak interest can be seen in all teams in season 3 The A League was without a shadow of a doubt a successful and viable league. It had the corporate backing, investment, TV dollars, sponsorship and even player pool that the NSL couldnt touch. It just could never be a 100% model like the AFL / NRL. If the focus was on the 35% instead of the 65% it would be an established and stable part of the Australian sports market by now Fact is I don't care about whether you would watch it any more than I care about whether sad CCM fans would watch if if their team starts losing. The only thing the league needs to do is be competitive (not rigged) and a pathway for all clubs and players. The focus has to be on viability instead of popularity. Selling our game to be in a prime time slot on one of three networks shows we're a long way off learning that Will have to agree to disagree bluebird... I was not and will never be a statistician however anecdotally can state that most people I come across who are fans of the Aleague tend to mention in the same breath that they where also not fans of the old NSL .... you know the same old garbage arguments I get into on here all the time "blah blah, didn't like the wog teams, didn't feel safe, was scared by foreigners, soccer hooligans, Croatian flags etc etc etc" Yes some of the original NSL crowds migrated over ( please pardon the very laboured pun) but I think you will find the vast majority, like myself for a long time, just switched off altogether and watched EPL and euro leagues instead..... There is a dormant "ex NSL club" following out there which only comes out very very rarely ( big derby, final or FFA cup game), how many they are God only knows but they are still around and alot of them, have past on the madness to their kids.... The APL doesn't interact with these people and never will, you may dismiss us as being insignificant and you don't care if we watch the Aleague or not, that's fine, but you should care if the CCM fans "consume" the product because if they don't the APL and silverlake will pull the plug and you won't HAVE a league to follow.... The original A League support came from somewhere. It wasnt manufactured from a few board meetings and a brand new audience, one in, one out The fact remains that you have 100% of football fans, and x% for Australian league. The interest in the Australian "league" game has always been the smallest portion of football following as a whole and this isnt something that can be replicated in identical numbers over night If I had to guess I would say 80% of the A League year 1 fans had some original tie to the NSL whether it was a casual fan for big games, a historic fan who was disengaged towards the end, or somebody who just wanted to see the Australian game work, or a hardened fan I'm not dismissing NSL fans as insignificant. I'm simply saying that interest in the league will always be the smallest portion of fans so there is no need to try to appease to all football fans. Let them come over in their own time, if at all. The game simply has to be viable, not popular. If 60%-70% of football fans in this country are not fans of the national league, the vast majority of people are always "not" following the Australian league, so the league needs to appeal to those who are The AFL / NRL model for artificially stimulating growth in disinterested markets simply wasnt translatable to our game. Our approach should have been to simply "have" a league, and capitalise on the inevitable interest in the top league of a big sport, backed with the recent commercial interest that didnt exist before. The league would have continued to roll on year after year and a natural market would have determined which teams were in / out, and which fans were in / out they/we are members and fans of a specific club, not of a league. That's all there is to this debate, people follow a club and despie the initial goodwill from many football fans to support the local top league (me included) AL has squandered this with gimmicks and staleness. Football is the most popular game in the world for a reason and all APL needs to do is copy what other small football leagues do rather than trying to provide a AFL/NRL comp with a round ball Exactly.
People that follow professional competitions follow clubs - not just the league itself.
Souths fans follow the Bunnies bc their grandparents did. Same as a Collingwood fans or Hawthorn fans.
We need that sort of generational club support for our clubs. It takes decades. Some of the AFL clubs have been around since the 1860s. That's a century and a half of generational support. It's something that cannot easily be synthesised. Clubs like MV, SFC and WSW work because their population density is so high. All they need to do is win trophies and they work.WSW is the perfect demonstration of this. Grew rapidly due to onfield results. Declined when the results evaporated. When you don't have history, all you can rely on is success. Problem is success is difficult to sustain. Sorry mate but that is bollocks. Passion is passion, club is club. Even the AFL and NRL guys know that, some clubs haven't won a single thing in 50, 60 years yet still have die hard support. That's 100% right The mentality you responded to comes from the AFL / NRL approach I described above. There is no NRL in Victoria and any team would be weak. So the governing body puts a team in, sends their best players, and guarentees success. The market is artificially established. Over the course of 10 years, "fans" are trained to only watch when their team is winning. The game ends up with a conundrum Football took the same approach after season 6. For the first time introducing concessions to boost new markets. Since then it has been stuck in a Robin Hood paradox (continual rob from the rich and give to the poor). The result is obvious based on some of the plastic support dribble I read on here A competitive open league will be new and it will be scary to some here, no doubt about it. But the irony is these same fans already follow several sports and leagues around the Australia and the world with the same model This is what the post he responded to was saying. You both seem to be objecting to a post that makes the same point your making, but better. AFL clubs like Essendon and Carlton haven't had success for decades, but still draw big crowds. They are entrenched, generational clubs, with a fanatical base support that means even prolonged periods of relative failure doesn't see support collapse. A club like GWS needs to win and be successful. Its why Gold Coast support sucks. However, its also why West Coast succeeded in the long run. Despite being a created 'plastic' franchise, which had some initial trouble, its based in an AFL city. So, a period of success saw WAFL followers switch allegiances to WC. Now, not only does its support dwarf that of a lot of old Victorian teams, that support is entrenched. They emulated the support of old big Victorian clubs, and did it in only a couple of decades. Glory had something similar going, to a lesser extent. If the FFA expansion was following an AFL model, which I doubt, it was West Coast, not GWS or Gold Coast they aspired to. Its the whole, fish where the fish are, model. However, they bungled it. Or maybe they didn't, and it was just never going to work. I dont know. I have always thought part of the reason for the AFLs relative success compared to football, was lack of choice. People might follow a local team and an AFL team, but if they find the AFL a bit on the nose, other than just watching local footy at the ground, they have limited options, so they hold their nose, and keep supporting. An A league fan that is disillusioned has plenty of other options to watch top flight football, so they just leave. +x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x[quote]Of course there's a problem in the A-league. Think about the number of football fans that have been abandoned/alienated due denying their club access to the top flight in order to keep the fans of the 12 franchises and casual sport supporters happy. The A-L can't even embrace all the football fans in Australia. What...the 500 people at Sydney Olympic, Sydney United, Woolongong etc? Half the South Melbourne supporters converted to Victory anyway. I bet alot of the turncoats have really enjoyed the increase in popularity and validity they feel as soccer fans now that they went to McVictory... "Football but not as you know it" really proved to be a huge mainstream success eh? Its not about whether South Melbourne will get 500 or 50000. And this is the mentality that has broken our game The AFL is a league where 99% of Aussie Rules fans follow the AFL. Same as the NFL. And same as other invitational only sports. Thats their model We will never have that model. Fact. Reality. Accept it. Football can only thrive with the next best economic model which is the 80/20 rule (where 80% of revenue / support comes from 20% of clubs). The rest is just filler. The game needs a big MV, SFC, WSW, BR and another club. People arent going to turn in Saturday night to see top vs bottom For the NRL to succeed it needed a strong Victorian team to capitalise on 100% of Victorian support so they manufactured one. Same as what the AFL did progressively over their foreign markets. We dont need a strong Central Coast Mariners or a strong Canberra. Thats not our model. The pittance these regions can bring at the expense of having our most valuable shit kicking at the bottom of the league just isnt worth it There is no such thing as an AFL fan or an NFL fan or a Cycling fan etc... People are dynamic sports fans. They watch the AFL expecting one thing, they watch the EPL expecting another, they watch golf or track expecting another. Fans of our game are used to big clubs, and internationally competitive instead of just locally. They dont tune in to say "herp de derp, last year MV bad, this year MV good. Me happy. Not bored" The FFA started with the answer. We must have an AFL model. We must be on one of three networks. In any other model South Melbourne would have been part of the league by now and nobody would give a shit what their crowds or ratings unless they ended up being one of the team 80% of people are interested in Pretty much my point mate. The FFA "re-invented" the game/clubs to appeal to a new audience and that has not materialised. All it did was alienate a segment of the old audience forever and bring in a an equivalent number (possibly marginally more than what was "lost" but only slightly) of new fans and then wonder why, after 17 years the TV audience and match day attendance is still where it was in the 90s.......... The new model did find a much bigger audience but then through rank mismanagement on every level alienated that audience. Now it's time gone and I agree it's not coming back. The A League was dubbed the NSL with a coat of paint. It was the same closed off franchise model that existed at the end of the NSL. It wasnt the model that found a new audience but a promising new organisation for digging our game out of a hole that every fan of the Australian game got behind. Also one that could attract government and commercial fundingI've always argued that the first 2 or 3 years of the league were necessary evils. Some people agree. Some dont. Some think there should have been 2 teams from Melbourne / Sydney. Other will argue there should have been a 2nd tier from day 1 The problem was those in charge decided to cement the initial model and sell it as the product. Season 7 was the start of the end of the A League Umm, are you sure about this statement? Myself and thousands of others did not "get behind it" as for the hundreds of thousands of so called "eurosnobs" that love football in this country and have done so for decades upon decades they didn't even realise the franchises existed...... and never will. That post has to be read within the context of my post above it. The 80/20 rule. I know I'm preaching to the converted so take this as more of an elaboration rather than a counter point Interest in the Australian game was low. You might have 100% of football fans follow football, 50% follow the Aussie NTs, 20% follow the national league (just as a very loose example). The point of the A League was to engage with the 20%, not the 100%. The fact the euro snobs didnt follow the initial league was moot, as with AFL fans I did a lot of stats at the start of the league and effectively it was just a consolidated NSL with money. Some NSL fans such as yourself may not have gotten on board but most did. It wasnt bye bye fans of Sydney teams and hello new fans for Sydney FC. They were the same. There was no way an unproven league for a historically mismanaged sport could have attracted a new audience like that. It was the NSL but with 8 clubs Then after the world cup the Australian game received a boom. In my made up figures above it would have been say 70% for the Aussie NTs and 35% for the local league. Peak interest can be seen in all teams in season 3 The A League was without a shadow of a doubt a successful and viable league. It had the corporate backing, investment, TV dollars, sponsorship and even player pool that the NSL couldnt touch. It just could never be a 100% model like the AFL / NRL. If the focus was on the 35% instead of the 65% it would be an established and stable part of the Australian sports market by now Fact is I don't care about whether you would watch it any more than I care about whether sad CCM fans would watch if if their team starts losing. The only thing the league needs to do is be competitive (not rigged) and a pathway for all clubs and players. The focus has to be on viability instead of popularity. Selling our game to be in a prime time slot on one of three networks shows we're a long way off learning that Will have to agree to disagree bluebird... I was not and will never be a statistician however anecdotally can state that most people I come across who are fans of the Aleague tend to mention in the same breath that they where also not fans of the old NSL .... you know the same old garbage arguments I get into on here all the time "blah blah, didn't like the wog teams, didn't feel safe, was scared by foreigners, soccer hooligans, Croatian flags etc etc etc" Yes some of the original NSL crowds migrated over ( please pardon the very laboured pun) but I think you will find the vast majority, like myself for a long time, just switched off altogether and watched EPL and euro leagues instead..... There is a dormant "ex NSL club" following out there which only comes out very very rarely ( big derby, final or FFA cup game), how many they are God only knows but they are still around and alot of them, have past on the madness to their kids.... The APL doesn't interact with these people and never will, you may dismiss us as being insignificant and you don't care if we watch the Aleague or not, that's fine, but you should care if the CCM fans "consume" the product because if they don't the APL and silverlake will pull the plug and you won't HAVE a league to follow.... The original A League support came from somewhere. It wasnt manufactured from a few board meetings and a brand new audience, one in, one out The fact remains that you have 100% of football fans, and x% for Australian league. The interest in the Australian "league" game has always been the smallest portion of football following as a whole and this isnt something that can be replicated in identical numbers over night If I had to guess I would say 80% of the A League year 1 fans had some original tie to the NSL whether it was a casual fan for big games, a historic fan who was disengaged towards the end, or somebody who just wanted to see the Australian game work, or a hardened fan I'm not dismissing NSL fans as insignificant. I'm simply saying that interest in the league will always be the smallest portion of fans so there is no need to try to appease to all football fans. Let them come over in their own time, if at all. The game simply has to be viable, not popular. If 60%-70% of football fans in this country are not fans of the national league, the vast majority of people are always "not" following the Australian league, so the league needs to appeal to those who are The AFL / NRL model for artificially stimulating growth in disinterested markets simply wasnt translatable to our game. Our approach should have been to simply "have" a league, and capitalise on the inevitable interest in the top league of a big sport, backed with the recent commercial interest that didnt exist before. The league would have continued to roll on year after year and a natural market would have determined which teams were in / out, and which fans were in / out they/we are members and fans of a specific club, not of a league. That's all there is to this debate, people follow a club and despie the initial goodwill from many football fans to support the local top league (me included) AL has squandered this with gimmicks and staleness. Football is the most popular game in the world for a reason and all APL needs to do is copy what other small football leagues do rather than trying to provide a AFL/NRL comp with a round ball Exactly.
People that follow professional competitions follow clubs - not just the league itself.
Souths fans follow the Bunnies bc their grandparents did. Same as a Collingwood fans or Hawthorn fans.
We need that sort of generational club support for our clubs. It takes decades. Some of the AFL clubs have been around since the 1860s. That's a century and a half of generational support. It's something that cannot easily be synthesised. Clubs like MV, SFC and WSW work because their population density is so high. All they need to do is win trophies and they work.WSW is the perfect demonstration of this. Grew rapidly due to onfield results. Declined when the results evaporated. When you don't have history, all you can rely on is success. Problem is success is difficult to sustain. Sorry mate but that is bollocks. Passion is passion, club is club. Even the AFL and NRL guys know that, some clubs haven't won a single thing in 50, 60 years yet still have die hard support. That's 100% right The mentality you responded to comes from the AFL / NRL approach I described above. There is no NRL in Victoria and any team would be weak. So the governing body puts a team in, sends their best players, and guarentees success. The market is artificially established. Over the course of 10 years, "fans" are trained to only watch when their team is winning. The game ends up with a conundrum Football took the same approach after season 6. For the first time introducing concessions to boost new markets. Since then it has been stuck in a Robin Hood paradox (continual rob from the rich and give to the poor). The result is obvious based on some of the plastic support dribble I read on here A competitive open league will be new and it will be scary to some here, no doubt about it. But the irony is these same fans already follow several sports and leagues around the Australia and the world with the same model If the FFA expansion was following an AFL model, which I doubt, it was West Coast, not GWS or Gold Coast they aspired to. Its the whole, fish where the fish are, model. However, they bungled it. Or maybe they didn't, and it was just never going to work. I dont know. I have always thought part of the reason for the AFLs relative success compared to football, was lack of choice. People might follow a local team and an AFL team, but if they find the AFL a bit on the nose, other than just watching local footy at the ground, they have limited options, so they hold their nose, and keep supporting. An A league fan that is disillusioned has plenty of other options to watch top flight football, so they just leave. You answered your own question. The reason for WCE's success was due to lack of options, not because of success. There would have been plenty more successful teams in the WAFL but elite sports fans demand elite sport. Having a team in a professional national competition was always going to take fans away from having a team in a local competition The AFL had a crush, kill, destroy mentality that is synonymous with leagues like the NRL, NFL and other stand alone leagues. Its a model that only works when the governing body has a monopoly, which we dont This was never going to work for football. Never. Even _if_ the model could work, which it can't, as you rightfully pointed out there was a 10-20 year period for teams like West Coast and Storm to be ingrained in their respective codes. When our starting point was 8 unknown teams, which 2 teams were we supposed to give 15 years of support and what would that have meant for the other 6 teams struggling for 15 years in the interim? There is no "one way" to have a successful sport. The AFL and NRL were successful in approaches that worked for them. Our situation is different. The A League has had many attempts to artificially boost metrics and they have all failed in the long run. And there is no need I'll put this a slightly different way. Imagine you are trying to establish McDonalds in an Asian country that doesnt have McDonalds. Your fear is they wont like it so you use the same brand and colours, but you serve Asian cuisine instead. This will fail because it wont be McDonalds enough for fans of McDonalds, and it wont be top notch Asian cuisine for those who prefer Asian food. Thats the conundrum the A League is in. Either there is demand for a football league in this country, or there isnt The FA were put in charge to establish a competitive football league. If the starting point for the FA is to state "there is no demand for a competitive national football league in this country" then they are simply the wrong people for the job So how do you tap into it? I contend that you can't do it when far better quality football exists elsewhere. The code should revert to a winter competition, starting mid April and finishing in the first week of December (34 weeks). I don't expect huge crowds initially, and I would prioritize viability over crowd numbers. Hence, grounds should meet a certain standard, but the 10,000 per game will not be an attainable goal for all teams, hence the facility should be consistent with supporter base. Therefore, for about half the season there would minimal quality competition from say European football (15 weeks), and have a little from their season start, and some from final weeks of a season. One would only a very few percent of global football fans to get a decent number of TV viewers. . I pretty much agree with the thinking behind this sentiment. Instead of conceiving of A-League clubs as being akin to AFL or NRL franchises, they should be understood as part of the global ecosystem of football. This puts a much bigger premium on player development, because if you can unearth and develop a top-notch player and have the wits to sell him for true market value (something which A-League clubs have been pretty hopeless at), then you should be able to bring millions of dollars into the game. This is a potential resource AFL and NRL clubs don't have. But the ideal environment for player development is not a Big Bash League style league with short seasons but big fan interest. It's a full-length season (9-10 months, so 30+ rounds in the regular season), and played in winter which is more conducive to good football. And you need an integrated pyramid with pro-rel for clubs to adopt a more cut-throat mentality. This logically also means no more salary cap either, allowing clubs to sign players onto longer-term contracts so they could on-sell them for a decent price. Below A-League level, clubs would decide on an individual basis whether to go full time or stay part time. The lower divisions (a national second division, then regional divisions below that) should also make sure they cover all regional areas so that we have a universal player catchment. This means lower tier clubs in places like Geelong, Wollongong, Sunshine Coast, Townsville, Hobart, and even Albury-Wodonga, Ballarat, Coffs Harbour, Toowoomba and the like (these should even be subsidised by a regional football fund if necessary). The flipside of this is you no longer have a league with 10-12 clubs who all think they can win the league next year. The A-League would become more Darwinian, and you'd probably end up with something like a Big 4: Sydney, Wanderers, Victory and City. Between them they would hoover up the best players, win the league most years and be nearly ever-present in the ACL (where hopefully they could actually start to be a bit competitive). Clubs like Brisbane and Perth might get a look in every now and again, but the commercial gulf between big and small clubs would get bigger. The rest of the A-League would be a rotation of smaller clubs who are either yoyo-ing with the second division or treading water in the top flight. Either way the prize for them is not winning the A-League, it's being in the A-League. They should be happy with modest crowds in suitably sized stadiums, playing for the sake of local pride, and adopting the role of selling clubs, off-loading promising players to the big boys when the time is ripe. You don't quite want to get to the point of Portugal or Scotland where the same 2-3 clubs win the league absolutely every year, but it would be heading more in that direction. This is probably a more sustainable future than the current trajectory of the game. Pretty much bang on in agreement with all,of this. PROVIDED the regional, geographic spread you desire is not used as a hindrance to merit based competition and promotion and or relegation than all good otherwise. You'd still have merit-based competitions, but I think the FA and the state feds should assist financially and logistically in ensuring that regional cities have decent representation at semi-pro level at least. It's a crying shame that decently sized places like Bendigo, Coffs Harbour or Townsville have nothing above district football. I know in some cases they made efforts at NPL participation which went awry, hence the call for a regional football fund that would help set teams up in places outside the major metro areas, leverage financing for improving facilities and in extremis bail them out if they run into financial difficulties so as to provide a basic level of stability. But you wouldn't quarantine them from relegation if it happens.
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+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x[quote]+x[quote]Of course there's a problem in the A-league. Think about the number of football fans that have been abandoned/alienated due denying their club access to the top flight in order to keep the fans of the 12 franchises and casual sport supporters happy. The A-L can't even embrace all the football fans in Australia. What...the 500 people at Sydney Olympic, Sydney United, Woolongong etc? Half the South Melbourne supporters converted to Victory anyway. I bet alot of the turncoats have really enjoyed the increase in popularity and validity they feel as soccer fans now that they went to McVictory... "Football but not as you know it" really proved to be a huge mainstream success eh? Its not about whether South Melbourne will get 500 or 50000. And this is the mentality that has broken our game The AFL is a league where 99% of Aussie Rules fans follow the AFL. Same as the NFL. And same as other invitational only sports. Thats their model We will never have that model. Fact. Reality. Accept it. Football can only thrive with the next best economic model which is the 80/20 rule (where 80% of revenue / support comes from 20% of clubs). The rest is just filler. The game needs a big MV, SFC, WSW, BR and another club. People arent going to turn in Saturday night to see top vs bottom For the NRL to succeed it needed a strong Victorian team to capitalise on 100% of Victorian support so they manufactured one. Same as what the AFL did progressively over their foreign markets. We dont need a strong Central Coast Mariners or a strong Canberra. Thats not our model. The pittance these regions can bring at the expense of having our most valuable shit kicking at the bottom of the league just isnt worth it There is no such thing as an AFL fan or an NFL fan or a Cycling fan etc... People are dynamic sports fans. They watch the AFL expecting one thing, they watch the EPL expecting another, they watch golf or track expecting another. Fans of our game are used to big clubs, and internationally competitive instead of just locally. They dont tune in to say "herp de derp, last year MV bad, this year MV good. Me happy. Not bored" The FFA started with the answer. We must have an AFL model. We must be on one of three networks. In any other model South Melbourne would have been part of the league by now and nobody would give a shit what their crowds or ratings unless they ended up being one of the team 80% of people are interested in Pretty much my point mate. The FFA "re-invented" the game/clubs to appeal to a new audience and that has not materialised. All it did was alienate a segment of the old audience forever and bring in a an equivalent number (possibly marginally more than what was "lost" but only slightly) of new fans and then wonder why, after 17 years the TV audience and match day attendance is still where it was in the 90s.......... The new model did find a much bigger audience but then through rank mismanagement on every level alienated that audience. Now it's time gone and I agree it's not coming back. The A League was dubbed the NSL with a coat of paint. It was the same closed off franchise model that existed at the end of the NSL. It wasnt the model that found a new audience but a promising new organisation for digging our game out of a hole that every fan of the Australian game got behind. Also one that could attract government and commercial fundingI've always argued that the first 2 or 3 years of the league were necessary evils. Some people agree. Some dont. Some think there should have been 2 teams from Melbourne / Sydney. Other will argue there should have been a 2nd tier from day 1 The problem was those in charge decided to cement the initial model and sell it as the product. Season 7 was the start of the end of the A League Umm, are you sure about this statement? Myself and thousands of others did not "get behind it" as for the hundreds of thousands of so called "eurosnobs" that love football in this country and have done so for decades upon decades they didn't even realise the franchises existed...... and never will. That post has to be read within the context of my post above it. The 80/20 rule. I know I'm preaching to the converted so take this as more of an elaboration rather than a counter point Interest in the Australian game was low. You might have 100% of football fans follow football, 50% follow the Aussie NTs, 20% follow the national league (just as a very loose example). The point of the A League was to engage with the 20%, not the 100%. The fact the euro snobs didnt follow the initial league was moot, as with AFL fans I did a lot of stats at the start of the league and effectively it was just a consolidated NSL with money. Some NSL fans such as yourself may not have gotten on board but most did. It wasnt bye bye fans of Sydney teams and hello new fans for Sydney FC. They were the same. There was no way an unproven league for a historically mismanaged sport could have attracted a new audience like that. It was the NSL but with 8 clubs Then after the world cup the Australian game received a boom. In my made up figures above it would have been say 70% for the Aussie NTs and 35% for the local league. Peak interest can be seen in all teams in season 3 The A League was without a shadow of a doubt a successful and viable league. It had the corporate backing, investment, TV dollars, sponsorship and even player pool that the NSL couldnt touch. It just could never be a 100% model like the AFL / NRL. If the focus was on the 35% instead of the 65% it would be an established and stable part of the Australian sports market by now Fact is I don't care about whether you would watch it any more than I care about whether sad CCM fans would watch if if their team starts losing. The only thing the league needs to do is be competitive (not rigged) and a pathway for all clubs and players. The focus has to be on viability instead of popularity. Selling our game to be in a prime time slot on one of three networks shows we're a long way off learning that Will have to agree to disagree bluebird... I was not and will never be a statistician however anecdotally can state that most people I come across who are fans of the Aleague tend to mention in the same breath that they where also not fans of the old NSL .... you know the same old garbage arguments I get into on here all the time "blah blah, didn't like the wog teams, didn't feel safe, was scared by foreigners, soccer hooligans, Croatian flags etc etc etc" Yes some of the original NSL crowds migrated over ( please pardon the very laboured pun) but I think you will find the vast majority, like myself for a long time, just switched off altogether and watched EPL and euro leagues instead..... There is a dormant "ex NSL club" following out there which only comes out very very rarely ( big derby, final or FFA cup game), how many they are God only knows but they are still around and alot of them, have past on the madness to their kids.... The APL doesn't interact with these people and never will, you may dismiss us as being insignificant and you don't care if we watch the Aleague or not, that's fine, but you should care if the CCM fans "consume" the product because if they don't the APL and silverlake will pull the plug and you won't HAVE a league to follow.... The original A League support came from somewhere. It wasnt manufactured from a few board meetings and a brand new audience, one in, one out The fact remains that you have 100% of football fans, and x% for Australian league. The interest in the Australian "league" game has always been the smallest portion of football following as a whole and this isnt something that can be replicated in identical numbers over night If I had to guess I would say 80% of the A League year 1 fans had some original tie to the NSL whether it was a casual fan for big games, a historic fan who was disengaged towards the end, or somebody who just wanted to see the Australian game work, or a hardened fan I'm not dismissing NSL fans as insignificant. I'm simply saying that interest in the league will always be the smallest portion of fans so there is no need to try to appease to all football fans. Let them come over in their own time, if at all. The game simply has to be viable, not popular. If 60%-70% of football fans in this country are not fans of the national league, the vast majority of people are always "not" following the Australian league, so the league needs to appeal to those who are The AFL / NRL model for artificially stimulating growth in disinterested markets simply wasnt translatable to our game. Our approach should have been to simply "have" a league, and capitalise on the inevitable interest in the top league of a big sport, backed with the recent commercial interest that didnt exist before. The league would have continued to roll on year after year and a natural market would have determined which teams were in / out, and which fans were in / out they/we are members and fans of a specific club, not of a league. That's all there is to this debate, people follow a club and despie the initial goodwill from many football fans to support the local top league (me included) AL has squandered this with gimmicks and staleness. Football is the most popular game in the world for a reason and all APL needs to do is copy what other small football leagues do rather than trying to provide a AFL/NRL comp with a round ball Exactly.
People that follow professional competitions follow clubs - not just the league itself.
Souths fans follow the Bunnies bc their grandparents did. Same as a Collingwood fans or Hawthorn fans.
We need that sort of generational club support for our clubs. It takes decades. Some of the AFL clubs have been around since the 1860s. That's a century and a half of generational support. It's something that cannot easily be synthesised. Clubs like MV, SFC and WSW work because their population density is so high. All they need to do is win trophies and they work.WSW is the perfect demonstration of this. Grew rapidly due to onfield results. Declined when the results evaporated. When you don't have history, all you can rely on is success. Problem is success is difficult to sustain. Sorry mate but that is bollocks. Passion is passion, club is club. Even the AFL and NRL guys know that, some clubs haven't won a single thing in 50, 60 years yet still have die hard support. That's 100% right The mentality you responded to comes from the AFL / NRL approach I described above. There is no NRL in Victoria and any team would be weak. So the governing body puts a team in, sends their best players, and guarentees success. The market is artificially established. Over the course of 10 years, "fans" are trained to only watch when their team is winning. The game ends up with a conundrum Football took the same approach after season 6. For the first time introducing concessions to boost new markets. Since then it has been stuck in a Robin Hood paradox (continual rob from the rich and give to the poor). The result is obvious based on some of the plastic support dribble I read on here A competitive open league will be new and it will be scary to some here, no doubt about it. But the irony is these same fans already follow several sports and leagues around the Australia and the world with the same model This is what the post he responded to was saying. You both seem to be objecting to a post that makes the same point your making, but better. AFL clubs like Essendon and Carlton haven't had success for decades, but still draw big crowds. They are entrenched, generational clubs, with a fanatical base support that means even prolonged periods of relative failure doesn't see support collapse. A club like GWS needs to win and be successful. Its why Gold Coast support sucks. However, its also why West Coast succeeded in the long run. Despite being a created 'plastic' franchise, which had some initial trouble, its based in an AFL city. So, a period of success saw WAFL followers switch allegiances to WC. Now, not only does its support dwarf that of a lot of old Victorian teams, that support is entrenched. They emulated the support of old big Victorian clubs, and did it in only a couple of decades. Glory had something similar going, to a lesser extent. If the FFA expansion was following an AFL model, which I doubt, it was West Coast, not GWS or Gold Coast they aspired to. Its the whole, fish where the fish are, model. However, they bungled it. Or maybe they didn't, and it was just never going to work. I dont know. I have always thought part of the reason for the AFLs relative success compared to football, was lack of choice. People might follow a local team and an AFL team, but if they find the AFL a bit on the nose, other than just watching local footy at the ground, they have limited options, so they hold their nose, and keep supporting. An A league fan that is disillusioned has plenty of other options to watch top flight football, so they just leave. +x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x[quote]Of course there's a problem in the A-league. Think about the number of football fans that have been abandoned/alienated due denying their club access to the top flight in order to keep the fans of the 12 franchises and casual sport supporters happy. The A-L can't even embrace all the football fans in Australia. What...the 500 people at Sydney Olympic, Sydney United, Woolongong etc? Half the South Melbourne supporters converted to Victory anyway. I bet alot of the turncoats have really enjoyed the increase in popularity and validity they feel as soccer fans now that they went to McVictory... "Football but not as you know it" really proved to be a huge mainstream success eh? Its not about whether South Melbourne will get 500 or 50000. And this is the mentality that has broken our game The AFL is a league where 99% of Aussie Rules fans follow the AFL. Same as the NFL. And same as other invitational only sports. Thats their model We will never have that model. Fact. Reality. Accept it. Football can only thrive with the next best economic model which is the 80/20 rule (where 80% of revenue / support comes from 20% of clubs). The rest is just filler. The game needs a big MV, SFC, WSW, BR and another club. People arent going to turn in Saturday night to see top vs bottom For the NRL to succeed it needed a strong Victorian team to capitalise on 100% of Victorian support so they manufactured one. Same as what the AFL did progressively over their foreign markets. We dont need a strong Central Coast Mariners or a strong Canberra. Thats not our model. The pittance these regions can bring at the expense of having our most valuable shit kicking at the bottom of the league just isnt worth it There is no such thing as an AFL fan or an NFL fan or a Cycling fan etc... People are dynamic sports fans. They watch the AFL expecting one thing, they watch the EPL expecting another, they watch golf or track expecting another. Fans of our game are used to big clubs, and internationally competitive instead of just locally. They dont tune in to say "herp de derp, last year MV bad, this year MV good. Me happy. Not bored" The FFA started with the answer. We must have an AFL model. We must be on one of three networks. In any other model South Melbourne would have been part of the league by now and nobody would give a shit what their crowds or ratings unless they ended up being one of the team 80% of people are interested in Pretty much my point mate. The FFA "re-invented" the game/clubs to appeal to a new audience and that has not materialised. All it did was alienate a segment of the old audience forever and bring in a an equivalent number (possibly marginally more than what was "lost" but only slightly) of new fans and then wonder why, after 17 years the TV audience and match day attendance is still where it was in the 90s.......... The new model did find a much bigger audience but then through rank mismanagement on every level alienated that audience. Now it's time gone and I agree it's not coming back. The A League was dubbed the NSL with a coat of paint. It was the same closed off franchise model that existed at the end of the NSL. It wasnt the model that found a new audience but a promising new organisation for digging our game out of a hole that every fan of the Australian game got behind. Also one that could attract government and commercial fundingI've always argued that the first 2 or 3 years of the league were necessary evils. Some people agree. Some dont. Some think there should have been 2 teams from Melbourne / Sydney. Other will argue there should have been a 2nd tier from day 1 The problem was those in charge decided to cement the initial model and sell it as the product. Season 7 was the start of the end of the A League Umm, are you sure about this statement? Myself and thousands of others did not "get behind it" as for the hundreds of thousands of so called "eurosnobs" that love football in this country and have done so for decades upon decades they didn't even realise the franchises existed...... and never will. That post has to be read within the context of my post above it. The 80/20 rule. I know I'm preaching to the converted so take this as more of an elaboration rather than a counter point Interest in the Australian game was low. You might have 100% of football fans follow football, 50% follow the Aussie NTs, 20% follow the national league (just as a very loose example). The point of the A League was to engage with the 20%, not the 100%. The fact the euro snobs didnt follow the initial league was moot, as with AFL fans I did a lot of stats at the start of the league and effectively it was just a consolidated NSL with money. Some NSL fans such as yourself may not have gotten on board but most did. It wasnt bye bye fans of Sydney teams and hello new fans for Sydney FC. They were the same. There was no way an unproven league for a historically mismanaged sport could have attracted a new audience like that. It was the NSL but with 8 clubs Then after the world cup the Australian game received a boom. In my made up figures above it would have been say 70% for the Aussie NTs and 35% for the local league. Peak interest can be seen in all teams in season 3 The A League was without a shadow of a doubt a successful and viable league. It had the corporate backing, investment, TV dollars, sponsorship and even player pool that the NSL couldnt touch. It just could never be a 100% model like the AFL / NRL. If the focus was on the 35% instead of the 65% it would be an established and stable part of the Australian sports market by now Fact is I don't care about whether you would watch it any more than I care about whether sad CCM fans would watch if if their team starts losing. The only thing the league needs to do is be competitive (not rigged) and a pathway for all clubs and players. The focus has to be on viability instead of popularity. Selling our game to be in a prime time slot on one of three networks shows we're a long way off learning that Will have to agree to disagree bluebird... I was not and will never be a statistician however anecdotally can state that most people I come across who are fans of the Aleague tend to mention in the same breath that they where also not fans of the old NSL .... you know the same old garbage arguments I get into on here all the time "blah blah, didn't like the wog teams, didn't feel safe, was scared by foreigners, soccer hooligans, Croatian flags etc etc etc" Yes some of the original NSL crowds migrated over ( please pardon the very laboured pun) but I think you will find the vast majority, like myself for a long time, just switched off altogether and watched EPL and euro leagues instead..... There is a dormant "ex NSL club" following out there which only comes out very very rarely ( big derby, final or FFA cup game), how many they are God only knows but they are still around and alot of them, have past on the madness to their kids.... The APL doesn't interact with these people and never will, you may dismiss us as being insignificant and you don't care if we watch the Aleague or not, that's fine, but you should care if the CCM fans "consume" the product because if they don't the APL and silverlake will pull the plug and you won't HAVE a league to follow.... The original A League support came from somewhere. It wasnt manufactured from a few board meetings and a brand new audience, one in, one out The fact remains that you have 100% of football fans, and x% for Australian league. The interest in the Australian "league" game has always been the smallest portion of football following as a whole and this isnt something that can be replicated in identical numbers over night If I had to guess I would say 80% of the A League year 1 fans had some original tie to the NSL whether it was a casual fan for big games, a historic fan who was disengaged towards the end, or somebody who just wanted to see the Australian game work, or a hardened fan I'm not dismissing NSL fans as insignificant. I'm simply saying that interest in the league will always be the smallest portion of fans so there is no need to try to appease to all football fans. Let them come over in their own time, if at all. The game simply has to be viable, not popular. If 60%-70% of football fans in this country are not fans of the national league, the vast majority of people are always "not" following the Australian league, so the league needs to appeal to those who are The AFL / NRL model for artificially stimulating growth in disinterested markets simply wasnt translatable to our game. Our approach should have been to simply "have" a league, and capitalise on the inevitable interest in the top league of a big sport, backed with the recent commercial interest that didnt exist before. The league would have continued to roll on year after year and a natural market would have determined which teams were in / out, and which fans were in / out they/we are members and fans of a specific club, not of a league. That's all there is to this debate, people follow a club and despie the initial goodwill from many football fans to support the local top league (me included) AL has squandered this with gimmicks and staleness. Football is the most popular game in the world for a reason and all APL needs to do is copy what other small football leagues do rather than trying to provide a AFL/NRL comp with a round ball Exactly.
People that follow professional competitions follow clubs - not just the league itself.
Souths fans follow the Bunnies bc their grandparents did. Same as a Collingwood fans or Hawthorn fans.
We need that sort of generational club support for our clubs. It takes decades. Some of the AFL clubs have been around since the 1860s. That's a century and a half of generational support. It's something that cannot easily be synthesised. Clubs like MV, SFC and WSW work because their population density is so high. All they need to do is win trophies and they work.WSW is the perfect demonstration of this. Grew rapidly due to onfield results. Declined when the results evaporated. When you don't have history, all you can rely on is success. Problem is success is difficult to sustain. Sorry mate but that is bollocks. Passion is passion, club is club. Even the AFL and NRL guys know that, some clubs haven't won a single thing in 50, 60 years yet still have die hard support. That's 100% right The mentality you responded to comes from the AFL / NRL approach I described above. There is no NRL in Victoria and any team would be weak. So the governing body puts a team in, sends their best players, and guarentees success. The market is artificially established. Over the course of 10 years, "fans" are trained to only watch when their team is winning. The game ends up with a conundrum Football took the same approach after season 6. For the first time introducing concessions to boost new markets. Since then it has been stuck in a Robin Hood paradox (continual rob from the rich and give to the poor). The result is obvious based on some of the plastic support dribble I read on here A competitive open league will be new and it will be scary to some here, no doubt about it. But the irony is these same fans already follow several sports and leagues around the Australia and the world with the same model If the FFA expansion was following an AFL model, which I doubt, it was West Coast, not GWS or Gold Coast they aspired to. Its the whole, fish where the fish are, model. However, they bungled it. Or maybe they didn't, and it was just never going to work. I dont know. I have always thought part of the reason for the AFLs relative success compared to football, was lack of choice. People might follow a local team and an AFL team, but if they find the AFL a bit on the nose, other than just watching local footy at the ground, they have limited options, so they hold their nose, and keep supporting. An A league fan that is disillusioned has plenty of other options to watch top flight football, so they just leave. You answered your own question. The reason for WCE's success was due to lack of options, not because of success. There would have been plenty more successful teams in the WAFL but elite sports fans demand elite sport. Having a team in a professional national competition was always going to take fans away from having a team in a local competition The AFL had a crush, kill, destroy mentality that is synonymous with leagues like the NRL, NFL and other stand alone leagues. Its a model that only works when the governing body has a monopoly, which we dont This was never going to work for football. Never. Even _if_ the model could work, which it can't, as you rightfully pointed out there was a 10-20 year period for teams like West Coast and Storm to be ingrained in their respective codes. When our starting point was 8 unknown teams, which 2 teams were we supposed to give 15 years of support and what would that have meant for the other 6 teams struggling for 15 years in the interim? There is no "one way" to have a successful sport. The AFL and NRL were successful in approaches that worked for them. Our situation is different. The A League has had many attempts to artificially boost metrics and they have all failed in the long run. And there is no need I'll put this a slightly different way. Imagine you are trying to establish McDonalds in an Asian country that doesnt have McDonalds. Your fear is they wont like it so you use the same brand and colours, but you serve Asian cuisine instead. This will fail because it wont be McDonalds enough for fans of McDonalds, and it wont be top notch Asian cuisine for those who prefer Asian food. Thats the conundrum the A League is in. Either there is demand for a football league in this country, or there isnt The FA were put in charge to establish a competitive football league. If the starting point for the FA is to state "there is no demand for a competitive national football league in this country" then they are simply the wrong people for the job So how do you tap into it? I contend that you can't do it when far better quality football exists elsewhere. The code should revert to a winter competition, starting mid April and finishing in the first week of December (34 weeks). I don't expect huge crowds initially, and I would prioritize viability over crowd numbers. Hence, grounds should meet a certain standard, but the 10,000 per game will not be an attainable goal for all teams, hence the facility should be consistent with supporter base. Therefore, for about half the season there would minimal quality competition from say European football (15 weeks), and have a little from their season start, and some from final weeks of a season. One would only a very few percent of global football fans to get a decent number of TV viewers. . I pretty much agree with the thinking behind this sentiment. Instead of conceiving of A-League clubs as being akin to AFL or NRL franchises, they should be understood as part of the global ecosystem of football. This puts a much bigger premium on player development, because if you can unearth and develop a top-notch player and have the wits to sell him for true market value (something which A-League clubs have been pretty hopeless at), then you should be able to bring millions of dollars into the game. This is a potential resource AFL and NRL clubs don't have. But the ideal environment for player development is not a Big Bash League style league with short seasons but big fan interest. It's a full-length season (9-10 months, so 30+ rounds in the regular season), and played in winter which is more conducive to good football. And you need an integrated pyramid with pro-rel for clubs to adopt a more cut-throat mentality. This logically also means no more salary cap either, allowing clubs to sign players onto longer-term contracts so they could on-sell them for a decent price. Below A-League level, clubs would decide on an individual basis whether to go full time or stay part time. The lower divisions (a national second division, then regional divisions below that) should also make sure they cover all regional areas so that we have a universal player catchment. This means lower tier clubs in places like Geelong, Wollongong, Sunshine Coast, Townsville, Hobart, and even Albury-Wodonga, Ballarat, Coffs Harbour, Toowoomba and the like (these should even be subsidised by a regional football fund if necessary). The flipside of this is you no longer have a league with 10-12 clubs who all think they can win the league next year. The A-League would become more Darwinian, and you'd probably end up with something like a Big 4: Sydney, Wanderers, Victory and City. Between them they would hoover up the best players, win the league most years and be nearly ever-present in the ACL (where hopefully they could actually start to be a bit competitive). Clubs like Brisbane and Perth might get a look in every now and again, but the commercial gulf between big and small clubs would get bigger. The rest of the A-League would be a rotation of smaller clubs who are either yoyo-ing with the second division or treading water in the top flight. Either way the prize for them is not winning the A-League, it's being in the A-League. They should be happy with modest crowds in suitably sized stadiums, playing for the sake of local pride, and adopting the role of selling clubs, off-loading promising players to the big boys when the time is ripe. You don't quite want to get to the point of Portugal or Scotland where the same 2-3 clubs win the league absolutely every year, but it would be heading more in that direction. This is probably a more sustainable future than the current trajectory of the game. Pretty much bang on in agreement with all,of this. PROVIDED the regional, geographic spread you desire is not used as a hindrance to merit based competition and promotion and or relegation than all good otherwise. [/quote]You'd still have merit-based competitions, but I think the FA and the state feds should assist financially and logistically in ensuring that regional cities have decent representation at semi-pro level at least. It's a crying shame that decently sized places like Bendigo, Coffs Harbour or Townsville have nothing above district football. I know in some cases they made efforts at NPL participation which went awry, hence the call for a regional football fund that would help set teams up in places outside the major metro areas, leverage financing for improving facilities and in extremis bail them out if they run into financial difficulties so as to provide a basic level of stability. But you wouldn't quarantine them from relegation if it happens. Absolutely nothing against this either...... in fact I think its a great idea. If nothing else forcing the state gov to pour funds into tangible assets like grounds and training centres for these regional clubs can only "grow the pie".... and bring more participants to the sport.
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bluebird2
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+xWhat have the FA done differently this year than the last 16 years though? You mention that the first 6 years where a good approach yet this was the very beginning ( the root of all evil if you will) of the manufacturing process you so dislike. Not only did the FFA establish a league, they funded some of the newly created teams and, through a shopping centre MLS lite model they manufactured the other participants in this farce. The 30% of existing soccer fans ( pre Aleague) who would be willing to follow an Australian league are still out there, they haven't died off yet, they just need a reason to attend or watch on TV..... that reason is THEIR club....,,,, It's not action, but intent. I'll give one example Season 5: Top 6 established with view for 14 team competition (2 x H/A and top 6). Introduced early to cement season start and end date into sports calendar and establish pattern Season 7 or 8: Top 6 re-established. Finals are exciting and if more teams can make it then we get crowds til the end of the year plus with one chance only its super duper exciting and anybody can win, and oh wow!, think about the upsets we are going to have Thats the difference between seasons 1-6 and onwards. Direction and philosophy Every single league established in Australia will have the same starting point because it will be a low cost model that needs to be expanded. Even the J League and K League started with the same model. But its the blue print, intent and direction that makes it a sensible model. This is an egg, that is an egg, but its about what hatches out of it. Not just saying they are both eggs The starting point for the league was a necessary evil. One team per city, salary cap, invitational only... The problem was when the FFA decided to box it, label it, and present it as the finished product in season 7 with their consolidation approach. And every gimmick that came thereafter
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Stenson
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+xAt the end of the day it comes down to what people expect.... Second we need to cut out myths and half truths spoken about as if they are the absolute truth...dispelling some myths below and puts on helmet... Myth 1.... we have never had a professional league and we don't have established competitions above grass roots.... Myth 2 .... since the mid 70's the migrant demographic has shifted from European to Indian / Asian / Middle Eastern.... these groups simply don't bring the same level of skill and likening of Football as Europeans did... Myth 3 ... we have never ever aside from the golden gen had a great local Australian side most of the 74 side were born oversees... many of that golden gen were actually developed by the AIS .... Myth 4... the NSL ... however successful that league may have been or who they developed... the mix of teams in the NSL was never ever and even now going to get broad stream community support and acceptance... Myth 5... we have never had good management... jury still out on JJ and Townsend... Myth 6 ... the answer is simple.... Myth 7 ... its an easy fix... Myth 8.... it can be done quickly ... With unification of three top tiers in football, Aleague, Nsd & Npl, you get unification of football. Teams are falling over themselves to gain entry into a second tier of football. American investment has come in as well of late, therefore keeping football in a 'Fractured State', will only ever get you current results. Lets not blame covid 21 squarely on this. Australian 'Soccer' doesn't need to be the best league either, it needs to focus on being tribal and the fans will come as it will create more interest as time moves on. Club owners of Macarthur fc have to stop charging like a 'wounded bull'. Their fans are in very much a working class, vast area, If they continue with the unsustainable pricing levels, this franchise will continue to have no fans. Might be the best option that Bulls management relinquish their responsibilities of owning a license, this would give another entity a go at A League. The Macarthur ownership are in it for the wrong reasons, as evidenced.
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df1982
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+x+xAt the end of the day it comes down to what people expect.... Second we need to cut out myths and half truths spoken about as if they are the absolute truth...dispelling some myths below and puts on helmet... Myth 1.... we have never had a professional league and we don't have established competitions above grass roots.... Myth 2 .... since the mid 70's the migrant demographic has shifted from European to Indian / Asian / Middle Eastern.... these groups simply don't bring the same level of skill and likening of Football as Europeans did... Myth 3 ... we have never ever aside from the golden gen had a great local Australian side most of the 74 side were born oversees... many of that golden gen were actually developed by the AIS .... Myth 4... the NSL ... however successful that league may have been or who they developed... the mix of teams in the NSL was never ever and even now going to get broad stream community support and acceptance... Myth 5... we have never had good management... jury still out on JJ and Townsend... Myth 6 ... the answer is simple.... Myth 7 ... its an easy fix... Myth 8.... it can be done quickly ... With unification of three top tiers in football, Aleague, Nsd & Npl, you get unification of football. Teams are falling over themselves to gain entry into a second tier of football. American investment has come in as well of late, therefore keeping football in a 'Fractured State', will only ever get you current results. Lets not blame covid 21 squarely on this. Australian 'Soccer' doesn't need to be the best league either, it needs to focus on being tribal and the fans will come as it will create more interest as time moves on. Club owners of Macarthur fc have to stop charging like a 'wounded bull'. Their fans are in very much a working class, vast area, If they continue with the unsustainable pricing levels, this franchise will continue to have no fans. Might be the best option that Bulls management relinquish their responsibilities of owning a license, this would give another entity a go at A League. The Macarthur ownership are in it for the wrong reasons, as evidenced. I think letting WU and Macarthur in was a big mistake, but now that they're there it would be a disaster to cut them out of the league. It would poison the well for a generation or more in those areas. We'll just have to wear the low engagement for a while and hope that they can build slowly through population growth (and in WU's case their magical new stadium), but even in a best case scenario they'll probably end up more like the Mariners than the Wanderers in terms of fanbase. Both teams are doing pretty well on the park, so it's not like even pro-rel would see them drop down a division.
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AnthonyC
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+x+x+xAt the end of the day it comes down to what people expect.... Second we need to cut out myths and half truths spoken about as if they are the absolute truth...dispelling some myths below and puts on helmet... Myth 1.... we have never had a professional league and we don't have established competitions above grass roots.... Myth 2 .... since the mid 70's the migrant demographic has shifted from European to Indian / Asian / Middle Eastern.... these groups simply don't bring the same level of skill and likening of Football as Europeans did... Myth 3 ... we have never ever aside from the golden gen had a great local Australian side most of the 74 side were born oversees... many of that golden gen were actually developed by the AIS .... Myth 4... the NSL ... however successful that league may have been or who they developed... the mix of teams in the NSL was never ever and even now going to get broad stream community support and acceptance... Myth 5... we have never had good management... jury still out on JJ and Townsend... Myth 6 ... the answer is simple.... Myth 7 ... its an easy fix... Myth 8.... it can be done quickly ... With unification of three top tiers in football, Aleague, Nsd & Npl, you get unification of football. Teams are falling over themselves to gain entry into a second tier of football. American investment has come in as well of late, therefore keeping football in a 'Fractured State', will only ever get you current results. Lets not blame covid 21 squarely on this. Australian 'Soccer' doesn't need to be the best league either, it needs to focus on being tribal and the fans will come as it will create more interest as time moves on. Club owners of Macarthur fc have to stop charging like a 'wounded bull'. Their fans are in very much a working class, vast area, If they continue with the unsustainable pricing levels, this franchise will continue to have no fans. Might be the best option that Bulls management relinquish their responsibilities of owning a license, this would give another entity a go at A League. The Macarthur ownership are in it for the wrong reasons, as evidenced. I think letting WU and Macarthur in was a big mistake, but now that they're there it would be a disaster to cut them out of the league. It would poison the well for a generation or more in those areas. We'll just have to wear the low engagement for a while and hope that they can build slowly through population growth (and in WU's case their magical new stadium), but even in a best case scenario they'll probably end up more like the Mariners than the Wanderers in terms of fanbase. Both teams are doing pretty well on the park, so it's not like even pro-rel would see them drop down a division. And yet, I can get more to my backyard bbq than they get to watch they're games. The problem is nobody is watching, why, because people know it's a 2nd division comp. Those teams that are not getting any ,at ground, support should open the gates and let free access. If you get no-one to the game you know you have a problem ,but, if you get a big crowd the question then is why aren't they paying to watch. Within the first 3 yrs from the establishment of the aleague there should've been a reserve grade comp brought in instead of that waste of time NYL.
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Gyfox
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The issue that Macarthur have to overcome is that the region has never had a team in any elite football competition because it wasn't an ethnic heartland and any football fans there had the choice of being a euro snob, a Socceroo fan or be casually interested in the game but not committed. Many drifted to follow other sports. Very few would travel to another area to follow a team unless they had an ethnic or familial connection.
When the new, professional A-League started quite a number who weren't committed anywhere decided to follow Sydney FC and from memory there were 2-3,000 members from the region. When Wanderers were brought into the competition and performed well about 4,000 signed up as members including quite a number who transferred their allegiance from Sydney.
Macarthur then is operating in a region where the first 5,000 or so most likely fans are committed to other A-League clubs leaving the club to find supporters from the groups that few if any A-League clubs have cracked to date. That it has found a few thousand who have signed up as members is quite a good start but from here on in it will be a slow grind driven by performance and population growth.
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Monoethnic Social Club
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+x+xWhat have the FA done differently this year than the last 16 years though? You mention that the first 6 years where a good approach yet this was the very beginning ( the root of all evil if you will) of the manufacturing process you so dislike. Not only did the FFA establish a league, they funded some of the newly created teams and, through a shopping centre MLS lite model they manufactured the other participants in this farce. The 30% of existing soccer fans ( pre Aleague) who would be willing to follow an Australian league are still out there, they haven't died off yet, they just need a reason to attend or watch on TV..... that reason is THEIR club....,,,, It's not action, but intent. I'll give one example Season 5: Top 6 established with view for 14 team competition (2 x H/A and top 6). Introduced early to cement season start and end date into sports calendar and establish pattern Season 7 or 8: Top 6 re-established. Finals are exciting and if more teams can make it then we get crowds til the end of the year plus with one chance only its super duper exciting and anybody can win, and oh wow!, think about the upsets we are going to have Thats the difference between seasons 1-6 and onwards. Direction and philosophy Every single league established in Australia will have the same starting point because it will be a low cost model that needs to be expanded. Even the J League and K League started with the same model. But its the blue print, intent and direction that makes it a sensible model. This is an egg, that is an egg, but its about what hatches out of it. Not just saying they are both eggs The starting point for the league was a necessary evil. One team per city, salary cap, invitational only... The problem was when the FFA decided to box it, label it, and present it as the finished product in season 7 with their consolidation approach. And every gimmick that came thereafter Sorry bluebird, I just don't see the difference between establishing a league with 8 new made up franchises and leaving out existing clubs and then 6 years later doing the same thing. Intent or no intent to grow the league, it has and WAS never intended to be via sporting merit or to the benefit of soccer at any level in Australia. It is and will remain a closed off series of entertainment events (just like a TV series each year with its run of episodes) with no sporting merit, no concern for the development of a player pool for the national squads and no concern for building and defining the football culture we all seem to be wanting, old fans and new.
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df1982
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+x+x+xWhat have the FA done differently this year than the last 16 years though? You mention that the first 6 years where a good approach yet this was the very beginning ( the root of all evil if you will) of the manufacturing process you so dislike. Not only did the FFA establish a league, they funded some of the newly created teams and, through a shopping centre MLS lite model they manufactured the other participants in this farce. The 30% of existing soccer fans ( pre Aleague) who would be willing to follow an Australian league are still out there, they haven't died off yet, they just need a reason to attend or watch on TV..... that reason is THEIR club....,,,, It's not action, but intent. I'll give one example Season 5: Top 6 established with view for 14 team competition (2 x H/A and top 6). Introduced early to cement season start and end date into sports calendar and establish pattern Season 7 or 8: Top 6 re-established. Finals are exciting and if more teams can make it then we get crowds til the end of the year plus with one chance only its super duper exciting and anybody can win, and oh wow!, think about the upsets we are going to have Thats the difference between seasons 1-6 and onwards. Direction and philosophy Every single league established in Australia will have the same starting point because it will be a low cost model that needs to be expanded. Even the J League and K League started with the same model. But its the blue print, intent and direction that makes it a sensible model. This is an egg, that is an egg, but its about what hatches out of it. Not just saying they are both eggs The starting point for the league was a necessary evil. One team per city, salary cap, invitational only... The problem was when the FFA decided to box it, label it, and present it as the finished product in season 7 with their consolidation approach. And every gimmick that came thereafter Sorry bluebird, I just don't see the difference between establishing a league with 8 new made up franchises and leaving out existing clubs and then 6 years later doing the same thing. Intent or no intent to grow the league, it has and WAS never intended to be via sporting merit or to the benefit of soccer at any level in Australia. It is and will remain a closed off series of entertainment events (just like a TV series each year with its run of episodes) with no sporting merit, no concern for the development of a player pool for the national squads and no concern for building and defining the football culture we all seem to be wanting, old fans and new. You know it was only 2 out of the 8 that were brand new: Sydney and Victory. Perth, Adelaide and Newcastle were already in the NSL, Roar were founded by an ex-NSL club, while NZ Knights (Football Kingz) and Central Coast Mariners (Northern Spirit) had connections with NSL predecessors.
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df1982
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+xThe issue that Macarthur have to overcome is that the region has never had a team in any elite football competition because it wasn't an ethnic heartland and any football fans there had the choice of being a euro snob, a Socceroo fan or be casually interested in the game but not committed. Many drifted to follow other sports. Very few would travel to another area to follow a team unless they had an ethnic or familial connection. When the new, professional A-League started quite a number who weren't committed anywhere decided to follow Sydney FC and from memory there were 2-3,000 members from the region. When Wanderers were brought into the competition and performed well about 4,000 signed up as members including quite a number who transferred their allegiance from Sydney. Macarthur then is operating in a region where the first 5,000 or so most likely fans are committed to other A-League clubs leaving the club to find supporters from the groups that few if any A-League clubs have cracked to date. That it has found a few thousand who have signed up as members is quite a good start but from here on in it will be a slow grind driven by performance and population growth. You've just described in a nutshell the fallacy of Gallop's "fish where the fish are" approach. Anyone could have told him this but no, they went steamrolled ahead with it and we're seeing the results now.
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bettega
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+xThe issue that Macarthur have to overcome is that the region has never had a team in any elite football competition because it wasn't an ethnic heartland and any football fans there had the choice of being a euro snob, a Socceroo fan or be casually interested in the game but not committed. Many drifted to follow other sports. Very few would travel to another area to follow a team unless they had an ethnic or familial connection. When the new, professional A-League started quite a number who weren't committed anywhere decided to follow Sydney FC and from memory there were 2-3,000 members from the region. When Wanderers were brought into the competition and performed well about 4,000 signed up as members including quite a number who transferred their allegiance from Sydney. Macarthur then is operating in a region where the first 5,000 or so most likely fans are committed to other A-League clubs leaving the club to find supporters from the groups that few if any A-League clubs have cracked to date. That it has found a few thousand who have signed up as members is quite a good start but from here on in it will be a slow grind driven by performance and population growth. This will be an issue in every capital city forever more.
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CityHarrison
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+x+xThe issue that Macarthur have to overcome is that the region has never had a team in any elite football competition because it wasn't an ethnic heartland and any football fans there had the choice of being a euro snob, a Socceroo fan or be casually interested in the game but not committed. Many drifted to follow other sports. Very few would travel to another area to follow a team unless they had an ethnic or familial connection. When the new, professional A-League started quite a number who weren't committed anywhere decided to follow Sydney FC and from memory there were 2-3,000 members from the region. When Wanderers were brought into the competition and performed well about 4,000 signed up as members including quite a number who transferred their allegiance from Sydney. Macarthur then is operating in a region where the first 5,000 or so most likely fans are committed to other A-League clubs leaving the club to find supporters from the groups that few if any A-League clubs have cracked to date. That it has found a few thousand who have signed up as members is quite a good start but from here on in it will be a slow grind driven by performance and population growth. This will be an issue in every capital city forever more. The one team, one city model was flawed. It guaranteed a decent following for the first few seasons (a city of a few million is a big pond after all) but it's not exactly future-proof. Rivalry based along state lines is popular in this country but not in every sport. With the benefit of hindsight, a two/three team per state model might've worked better because the rivalries are stronger and they might've grown the pie, so to speak. Even then I'm not convinced. Those early days look incredible and we all think that they can be recaptured with newly created teams and a fresh coat of paint. But the novelty has well and truly worn off now and the league seems to be in a sort of terminal decline. New teams aren't bringing in any excitement and with the exception of Canberra there just doesn't seem to be that many markets left. The unbundling and reset might bring some fans back, it's too soon to tell, but the early signs aren't exactly promising. I think we're seeing the limits that were baked into the original model.
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Footyball
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More postponements so cancel the season. Not re-newing subscription.
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bluebird2
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+x+x+xThe issue that Macarthur have to overcome is that the region has never had a team in any elite football competition because it wasn't an ethnic heartland and any football fans there had the choice of being a euro snob, a Socceroo fan or be casually interested in the game but not committed. Many drifted to follow other sports. Very few would travel to another area to follow a team unless they had an ethnic or familial connection. When the new, professional A-League started quite a number who weren't committed anywhere decided to follow Sydney FC and from memory there were 2-3,000 members from the region. When Wanderers were brought into the competition and performed well about 4,000 signed up as members including quite a number who transferred their allegiance from Sydney. Macarthur then is operating in a region where the first 5,000 or so most likely fans are committed to other A-League clubs leaving the club to find supporters from the groups that few if any A-League clubs have cracked to date. That it has found a few thousand who have signed up as members is quite a good start but from here on in it will be a slow grind driven by performance and population growth. This will be an issue in every capital city forever more. The one team, one city model was flawed It was necessary and critical for growth. Sydney and Melbourne both had teams with 20k support but if there were 2 or 3 teams that number would have been divided outside of core geographic support. The biggest issue with the NSL was the sheer amount of Vic and NSW teams with followings in the hundreds, folding every week The 1 city, 1 team model wasn't a forever thing. It had a very clear shelf life. It was simply a starting point When you talk about big club rivalries and derbies you are talking about things that only existed from the initial structure. New clubs and fans of new clubs wanted to pit themselves against big clubs. If the starting point was 2 or 3 teams nobody would have turned up to see anonymous NSW club 1 to play anonymous NSW club 3 The premise of this whole discussion is support can't be manufactured. It would have failed. Guaranteed Seasons 1-6 weren't perfect and in hindsight things could have happened differently and at different rates, but the basic structure was a necessary evil. There was just no sense pressing the abort button and changing direction at the half way point of a long and difficult journey. Right Coronavirus response teams?
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df1982
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+x+x+x+xThe issue that Macarthur have to overcome is that the region has never had a team in any elite football competition because it wasn't an ethnic heartland and any football fans there had the choice of being a euro snob, a Socceroo fan or be casually interested in the game but not committed. Many drifted to follow other sports. Very few would travel to another area to follow a team unless they had an ethnic or familial connection. When the new, professional A-League started quite a number who weren't committed anywhere decided to follow Sydney FC and from memory there were 2-3,000 members from the region. When Wanderers were brought into the competition and performed well about 4,000 signed up as members including quite a number who transferred their allegiance from Sydney. Macarthur then is operating in a region where the first 5,000 or so most likely fans are committed to other A-League clubs leaving the club to find supporters from the groups that few if any A-League clubs have cracked to date. That it has found a few thousand who have signed up as members is quite a good start but from here on in it will be a slow grind driven by performance and population growth. This will be an issue in every capital city forever more. The one team, one city model was flawed It was necessary and critical for growth. Sydney and Melbourne both had teams with 20k support but if there were 2 or 3 teams that number would have been divided outside of core geographic support. The biggest issue with the NSL was the sheer amount of Vic and NSW teams with followings in the hundreds, folding every week The 1 city, 1 team model wasn't a forever thing. It had a very clear shelf life. It was simply a starting point When you talk about big club rivalries and derbies you are talking about things that only existed from the initial structure. New clubs and fans of new clubs wanted to pit themselves against big clubs. If the starting point was 2 or 3 teams nobody would have turned up to see anonymous NSW club 1 to play anonymous NSW club 3 The premise of this whole discussion is support can't be manufactured. It would have failed. Guaranteed Seasons 1-6 weren't perfect and in hindsight things could have happened differently and at different rates, but the basic structure was a necessary evil. There was just no sense pressing the abort button and changing direction at the half way point of a long and difficult journey. Right Coronavirus response teams? I do wonder what would have happened if it had been a 10-team league from the start, with two teams in Sydney and Melbourne. Sydney has a natural rivalry as the Wanderers have shown, so it could have worked from Day 1. The only problem being the Western Sydney team avoiding being associated with Parramatta Power, which had just been wound down. Then in Melbourne what if it had been Victory and South Melbourne, with a Greeks vs the rest rivalry? The suits probably would have found it too risky as a concept, but it could have made for some pretty intense derbies.
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Melbcityguy
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What I don’t get about the argument is how come the Ffa cup is not exactly setting the world on fire with ratings and attendance? That’s new football vs old football
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