for those interested
https://www.theroar.com.au/2024/08/08/bloated-administration-a-deep-dive-into-australian-footballs-financials/

To quote from the (your?) article, "Football just isn’t a sport that converts a large portion of participants into spectators like NRL, NFL or AFL."

My gut feel from a Queensland perspective is that the portion of NRL spectators that are rugby league participants is quite small, especially for teens and adults, significantly smaller than the portion of football crowds who are are football participants. For some reason NRL attracts spectators who otherwise have no involvement with the sport, maybe it's an historical/cultural thing which is heavily assisted by the mass media.

My feeling is that AFL is similar to NRL, maybe with a higher portion than NRL but not as large as football.

interesting, I suspect a high percentage of people who play rugby league and afl watch a national club though. I agree that is a point I didn't support. I think the more people play the more likely they are to watch, but football gets such massive participation that it only needs to convert a small number of supporters

If you're talking about watching it on TV, then I agree with that.

Football does not get much of a conversion because the product at the top end is not at the level it needs to be. Not to mention the amount of politics that exists within football administration. 

Brisbane Roar is a prime example. Once played the stunning football that they did and they were bringing in crowds and setting the standard for the game. Then it all fell apart, and no one really took the mantle on continuing what they started. Instead, we praised Arnie and his turgid football and chased our best ever coach out of the National Team. 

the conversion rate is only half what you would expect for our participation rate post covid and twice what you would expect for our average wages

If you grow the participation rate you grow the people watching which grows the wages which grows the people watching imo

Remember the battle years ago resulting in banning posts from the roar? Oh the good ol days when people gave a shit about our league. 

i do remember that...are we allowed to post links?

That was completely unhinged. I remember spamming these forum when I hit a milestone.

Now no one gives a shit.

LOL who cares? Who's gonna pull you up? Kevin? Are there even any mods anymore? 

Post the article if you want.

It is pretty tricky analysing our financials.

First of all, not every state federation releases a budget publicly – at least, that I can find. Second, the line by line items in the budget are grouped in vague categories which makes it difficult to compare what we do with other countries.

Finally, there has been so much change in Australian football that it is hard to talk about a “typical year”. It was only a few years ago Football Australia unbundled from the APL and immediately after came COVID. However, from what Is available I can tell a tentative story that we don’t spend nearly enough on the grassroots and growing the participation rate.

What is football’s financial state?

Football Australia collected $113 million in 2023, which is around 12 per cent of what the English FA collects with one-seventh of the participants. Unlike England, we have state FAs, which I estimate to collect a total of $67 million.

Cumulatively this puts our revenue per participant around 50 per cent higher than what England rake in. So a comparison with what the English spend their money on actually seems fair despite the massive financial might of English club football.

The English use around a third of their revenue in grassroots grants. By contrast, grants from FA is around one per cent of revenue. Things look better when you include state federations, but you still only get to a shave under four per cent at all levels spent on grassroots.

In Australia, the extra money was partly spent on $25 million in travel expenses. Without further information it is difficult to tell if this is reasonable, but this presumably covers the costs of both male and female teams at all age levels.

More importantly, we have a much bigger staff budget. England spend around a sixth of their budget on staff whereas in Australia we spend around 40 per cent both federally and at the state level. England also give information on what their staff do, 70 per cent spend their time promoting football and trying to get everyone in England kicking a ball with their local club.

England, like most football powerhouses, absolutely smoke us with their participation rate and it looks like most of their energy is given to growing the participation base. We don’t give information on what our staff do, unfortunately.

However, the picture that seems to be emerging is that, despite revenue per participant being similar to England, we spend very little on grassroots and growing our base. The strength of the EPL seems almost irrelevant to these financial decisions.

Health of the A-League

For most of Football Australia’s history they have also run the A-League and a lot of effort has been spent on trying to turn it into the Aussie EPL, or at least the football version of the NRL/AFL.

Constantly we hear the argument that we have a massive participation base and if we could just turn a fraction of such fans into A-League fans we could make football explode in this country.

After looking at the data, I’ve become pretty sceptical of this argument. Football crowds are very closely correlated with average wages in the league. For the mathematically inclined, I analysed 33 first, second and third divisions across the world and find a very strong correlation between the logarithm of the wages and the crowd sizes that does not seem to vary much by division or confederation.

Remarkably, the A-League actually punches above its weight in crowds, even in the post-COVID era. For the crowds we had last season, we can expect wages to be more than double what they are now. We already have fantastic, passionate crowds, we need to be better at making a competition this size financially viable.

If we can’t find a way to make crowds this big viable, those problems may not be solved even if we grow. In a previous blog I gave some ideas on how to get there.

Crowds also seem to be correlated with participation rate, but even here the A-League isn’t massively underperforming. Even if I add the weekly attendance of all leagues together, we do roughly as well at converting participants to bums on seats as Italy and about half as well as England and Scotland.

Football just isn’t a sport that converts a large portion of participants into spectators like NRL, NFL or AFL. It is a sport that doesn’t need to because usually its participation numbers are huge.

Conclusion – is the money being well spent?

Football in Australia is often said to be top heavy with too much spent on bloated administration and I have to admit, the publicly available information does little to reassure. We have revenues that are similar for our size compared to England, but too little seems to be spent on growing the grassroots.

Our participation rate could easily triple if we match the participation rates of football powerhouses and there seems to be much more room to grow the base than there is converting the base. Things could be better than they look, as many items in the budget are vague, however what we can see does not look good.

Football in Australia has for as long as I can remember called itself the sleeping giant about to take over. However, I worry we’ve been misled as to what makes football a giant. Rather than converting a large number of a decent participation base, football works by converting a small fraction of an astronomically huge base.

Football giants have a one-two punch for growing this base which affects all levels. First promotion and relegation benefits the country through the fact that local clubs near a promoted team have a surge in participants but relegated teams result in no decline.

If we cannot afford a proper pyramid, we should at least aim for some sort of hybrid that protects some clubs from dropping too low and gives them an easier path to getting promoted.

Second, the central governing bodies spend big on growing the base. If you want to know why we aren’t a football nation, to quote Bill Clinton, it’s the participation rate, stupid – and every effort at every level should be spent on growing it. And if not, what little media we have should apply the blowtorch in discovering why.

Ouff

The whole admin thing sounds like a mess, mate. We definitely need more focus on grassroots if we want the sport to grow. Pro/rel could shake things up too.

Yeah that was an epic fail lol

Looks like it worked making it its own thread

Id apologize, but very few mods

Yep not much that was reassuring in the state or federal budgets

Some of the travel budget probably cant be helped, but even then...

That formating .... oooofff lol.

My 2 cents on the correlation between participation and attendance is purely an observation from the sidelines.

I have yet to meet and AFL fan or a fan of football from anywhere in the world apart from Australia that identifies as a fan of "the AFL" or the "EPL" or "Serie A".

Some may have a EPL club and a local club they support, or even have multiple clubs in different leagues they support  but it is ALWAYS support fopr the sport THROUGH the club ... 

Every single person in Melbourne ( a huge portion of them because of cultural conditioning I guess) will tell you they are a Collingwood fan or a Tigers fan or a Hawks member or whatever... nobody syas "I just like AFL in general but dont follow a team" I dont know much about NRL but I would assume this is similar in the two states that care about it?

Its NOT just an Australia sports fan thing, it seems to just be an Australian Aleague thing.... 

The only time it has ever come up in conversation where a "fan" is just happy to watch any team is with the US sports lovers in overseas markets.... People I know watch NFL and are not tied to one particular franchsie or NBA where they may want Golden State, Celtic and Lakers to all do well for example.... 

Are you saying that there are football fans in Australia who "follow" the A League without following a particular club (sorry franchise ;)? I'm not sure that would be the case, I would think that almost everyone in Australia who follows the A league also follows a particular club.

Sorry if I have misinterpreted what you wrote, just trying to clarify.

haha fixed the formatting

I'm an A league fan rather than a brisbane roar fan. But that is because they don't feel like a qld club. If they make more steps in the right direction of playing more queenslanders I'll be more attached. But at the moment if a young aussie talent scores the winning goal against us I'm not upset

hoping that changes because obviously it is more fun if you care!

Most people watching seem to be club fans though.

Our crowd numbers are higher than you would expect for our average wages, even in the post covid era. I think our problem isn't the crowds, but we have to find a way to make it profitable. I had another blog on how to pull that off
https://www.theroar.com.au/2024/07/05/a-seven-point-plan-for-the-a-league-to-get-out-of-the-financial-doldrums/ 

yeah almost everyone in my experience. In my case I follow the a league though since Brisbane roar don't feel like a qld club. I still watch their games, I just care more about any young up and comers than i do about brisbane winning. If they had 6-7 QLDers in the starting line up I'd start to care though. They are making moves in that direction

Not sure I agree because if growing participation meant it would increase viewers, we'd not have a viewership problem. 

When the Roar was pulling in big crowds and media regularly, it was due to the standard of football. The Matildas have dragged in crowds because of their run and the fact that they have played decent football. Not to mention that the players are playing for top clubs. 

Participation rate is also hard to grow due to cost of playing at a the local level, and the requirements of parents to sustain it over a long period of time. Not to mention how incredibly messed up our leadership is. 

If you have a good product, you will grow viewership. Viewers are not just players, but also just general fans of the sport. 

wages are a proxy for quality and are correlated with crowd sizes across 33 leagues. Our leagues has significantly larger crowds than you would expect for our wages

This is probably because we have small wages for our participation rate. But if we increased the participation rate some fraction would also convert into a league fans which could leader to higher wages etc.

If there are systemic barriers to a low participation rate that is where fa money and state league money should be spent!

I'm one. I don't live anywhere near a club and because of the simply follow the League, watching whichever club is playing there best football, with the exception of Western United, who are the worst thing to happen to the A League. Never watch a game they are involved in. 

The problem is you are saying it as if it is an easy fix and just requires this simple solution. Increase participation and suddenly everything else will improve. 

That's not the reality. There is plenty of people who play the sport that don't watch the local product, but watch an overseas one. Quality of product is important and increasing the wages will not instantly increase the quality. It has to come at a foundational technical and tactical level. Some NPL clubs sign a player for a year because they offer them a huge wage to hope that that player can help them stay in the top league for example. The problem is then that they don't have enough to pay the other players as high a wage and so a player might leave to go to another club that will offer them. 

NPL players are essentially full time. Train 3 nights a week, sometimes 4, and play on weekends, plus have full time jobs outside of it. It's not allowing for this increase in wages that you are suggesting, especially when you consider that some of these NPL games only get about 50-100 people watching if lucky. 

We saw a massive increase in Women's A-league memberships on the back of the World Cup. However, I know for a fact that not everyone is signing back up for a Roar womens membership. The quality of what we saw in the World Cup is vastly different to the local league and people can't justify that spend on an inferior product. You need to offer something that people yearn and are willing to part their money for. With so many sports competing for the small population we have, you need to have a damn good product to bring the crowds. 

Very well put zimbos.
No matter what others say it’s the product period especially talking AL as the Pro league.
For the numbers I know between 2 football passionate sons and many of their team mates they don’t bother with the AL but for the odd occasion derby for a night out after their games.
They don’t rate it much and at times go watch a NPL1 game for they have connections instead.
These mid twenty and 30’s large group are the target they are struggling to draw to apl games let alone connect with a club of it.
There is buckets loads of these kids who do not care about AL.

"The problem is you are saying it as if it is an easy fix and just requires this simple solution. Increase participation and suddenly everything else will improve. "

How on earth is doubling participation an "easy" fix? Also the point of the article isn't to fix the a league, that would be a side effect though of focussing on participation

"There is plenty of people who play the sport that don't watch the local product, but watch an overseas one."

I say in the article that football converts a very small fraction of participants into fans and we aren't a big outlier. How is it a rebuttal to say that there are plenty of people who play the sport but don't watch the local product?

The rest I also don't follow. You seem to say quality matters then it doesn't then it does again. The solutions I offer to increase the participation rate involve fa and state fed investment/focus on that issue as well as P&R. Did you read the article?

The point of the article isn't to fix the a league, did you read the article? Fixing participation would fix the a league as a side effect (and the methods to do so are a mixture of P&R and fa focus+investment in participation and grassroots)

In the article I mention that football converts a small percent of participants into fans. So I don't see how pointing out that your kids are participants but not fans engages with my points. Did you read the article?

I wasn't talking about the article. I was responding to your post on the forum. You also said,

But if we increased the participation rate some fraction would also convert into a league fans which could leader to higher wages etc.

Are you not saying that if we increase participation, we would automatically get more a-league fans? 

I did not switch and change on saying quality matters. I've always maintained that the A-league product as a whole is below par. It the thing that Damien De Bohun and others called me a "Eurosnob" for. It's the reason I was excluded from an A-league press conference. Criticising Arnie was the last straw because suddenly I had Robbie Slater having a go at me on twitter. It's why I eventually left football journalism and changed careers. 

I dont think you can understand where im coming from without reading the article and we will just ralk past each other

Sorry to here you changed careers and hope your new career is enjoyable

Wasn't there a feature that fixed it up for you. Ah well.

I read the article. I think my points still stand. I'm not really sure what the point is you are trying to make in your article too. You mention a lot about participation rate and that if we increase that, we imrpove everything else? Correct me if i'm wrong. 

I'd love to see the figures for attendances being on par with Italy. Are you talking Serie A?