A-League pre-season needs more balance

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By NUFCMVFC, 17 Jul 2009 The Crowd is a Roar Pro

Tagged:: A-League, Adelaide United, AFC Champions League, football, Sydney FC, World Football

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Gold Coast United FC player Tahj Minniecon during the United A-league team's first training session at Southport on the Gold Coast, Tuesday April 7, 2009. AAP Image/Tony Phillips

After reading Mike Tuckermans’s recent Eurosnobs article, a tangent of it caused me to think about what constitutes the best pre-season approach for A-League clubs to take in regards to their pre-seasons.

Thankfully, the old pre-season cup is gone. This works well for the AFL, but football is a different kettle of fish, and such a competition is not ideal.

For football, there are basically three dimensions which are in the club’s best interests to cater for in its pre-season: the local grassroots dimension, the Asian dimension, and the European dimension.

All serve important purposes.

Firstly, the local grassroots dimension. This is important to establish resonance with the hardcore grassroots community, the fans who follow State League teams and extend this to their local A League club.

This is also important in getting fans of A League clubs who woudn’t normally venture out into the suburban State League grounds and hopefully encourages them to make the trip back to watch State League teams.

Through that and the Canteen Sales, this ensures good revenue down into the lower reaches of the local football economy, while the prospect of higher membership/season ticket numbers helps to facilitate a stable upflow from football’s potent grassroots level into the fledgling upper tiers.

Sydney FC have had to learn the value of this the hard way, and they have commendably moved to correct mistakes made of “ignoring the grassroots” through an extensive grassroots tour this pre-season.

Melbourne’s previous pre-seasons often involved a reasonable number of pre-season games at suburban grassroots venues.

Not so this year, unfortunately, with a number of matches even ending up being behind closed doors. And that is something this Melbourne fan advises the MVFC administrators to seriously reconsider.

The second dimension is Asia.

This is important, primarily because they are important relationship building exercises, which is of extreme importance given Australia’s entry into the AFC Confederation and the fact there are some hostile quarters.

This is, thankfully, being done through Melbourne’s Lord Mayor trophy, played with Melbourne’s Chinese sister city (Tianjin) and other friendlies, such as against Ghangzhou.

Then there is also the forging of sister club relationships such as Sydney FC and Shanghai. The proposed friendly, despite not going ahead, was still a worthwhile venture.

Another reason is because these trips and the logistical challenges and insights they facilitate help to develop institutional know-how within the Australian football fraternity on managing teams to perform within Asia, and ensure competitiveness within the AFC Champions League and Asian Cup. t

The 2007 Asian Cup farce is an infamous example of the impact of a lack of institutional know-how – where Australia’s famed sports science capability and the high ability of the players were undone by a lack of practical understanding gained only through experience.

Experience through their first ACL campaign was also a reason quoted in helping to underpin Adelaide United’s dream run to the ACL final at their second attempt.

Another reason is that these tours help to familiarise local fans better with clubs and leagues within the Asian region.

The third dimension is the Europe.

As has been commented in some quarters, this has freshened up the A League pre-season, providing good quality opposition while getting some new bums on seats in terms of people who wouldn’t have gone otherwise. This thereby opens up new people to the possibility of going along to the games.

There’s also the mainstream media exposure in the lead-up to the start of the A League right in the middle of winter when other codes are in full flight and media space is at a premium.

Finally, A League clubs would do well to consider the format of their pre-seasons, not to just hold friendlies, but also to consider Dutch pre-season mini tournaments often consisting of four teams.

A local example could be the Far North Queensland Trophy, which Melbourne played in and won a couple of years ago.

But in this sense, what I suggest is to try and and host mini-tournaments consisting of touring EPL/Euro sides, as recommended by SBS commentators, but expand on that by involving Asian club sides as well, hopefully meaning we can see Asian sides locally, encourage Asian clubs sides to come to Australia, as well as facilitating good relations generally.

There is a need to balance the three nicely, though, which hasn’t yet occurred

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The Crowd Says (19) | Page 1 of Comments

melbvictory87 said | July 17th 2009 @ 3:07am | Report comment

as you probably know from my previous comments in the other discussion I agree with you (and i follow melbourne victory). put it this way
1. euro games are only a somewhat effective marketting tool and one which i am undecided on. us vs juventus was a good short term success. we got 40k it was a great vibe and as a short term solution it was terrific. fulham on the other hand was not so good. this is the point: if your going to get a team here, make it a well followed team by the football followers that are’nt on the mvfc bandwagon. juventus qualifies perfectly, fulham does not. the idea of bringing olympiacos (just a rumour) is another good idea and ill be surprised if that doesnt sell out etihad completely. if your going to get an english team, you need a team more followed than fulham. However, at the end its only a short term fix.

2. Asian teams, its great for building relations but im undecided on how it gauges local interest. i know someone here can prove me really wrong here and i would actually like to here some responses on this.

3. local teams. there are so many reasons why they are so important. how can you have 1million or so registered players and not spend more time with the locals. IMO that we need to form sister relationships with great community clubs like melbourne knights, preston lions, south melbourne etc. firstly we can provide these proven footballer producing factories with extra clinics to help develop more of their crop into professionals (surely which team would not want this) and even more so because these clubs have about 30 teams all the way up from u6′s. by playing their senior squads they can pack out their stadium and turn in greater profits. how does it benefit us, simple, form alliances with them and that will increase more of their players and families desire to be affilaited with our local professional league. i am aware that the new national curriculum has addresses this somewhat. i also know that we have scrapped the vis and instead our clubs will act as schools for elite footballers, but we still need to reach out to our talent hotbeds and local communities.

would love to hear others feedback.

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melbvictory87 said | July 17th 2009 @ 3:11am | Report comment

i am the strongest advocate of placing more resources into forming strategic alliances with our vpl and state league buddies. we provide them a realistic path to becoming professional and run some clinics for them. by doing this we can connect with our untapped local communities. this is the more sensible long term solutions. having european teams (only big european teams) is great but its only short term. i dont know if this is a sign but does anyone remember how after season 2 we played south melbourne hellas in a friendly that sold out their stadium. our memberships hit record levels that year. sydney is on course to set record memberships this year. is that not a sign??????????

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melbvictory87 said | July 17th 2009 @ 3:12am | Report comment

sorry about typing that twice, i thought the original post did not go through

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whiskeymac said | July 17th 2009 @ 10:09am | Report comment

i thought fulham was a good choice for touring oz if the idea is too see how the teams stackup, player development and performance indicators. they also had Liejer and shwarzer playing and the crowds weren’t bad despte some opportunistic ticket pricing.

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Pippinu said | July 17th 2009 @ 10:33am | Report comment

NU
good article – all points well made.

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GeneralAshnak said | July 17th 2009 @ 12:30pm | Report comment

Really like the idea of the 4 team tournaments, this could actually work very well – but only if there were TV rights sold and gate prices dropped. There are some great teams all through out Asia and we need to get more involved with them, the thrust of this article is spot on. Well written NUFCMVFC.

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Pippinu said | July 17th 2009 @ 3:07pm | Report comment

Given that June/July is the time when we’d be looking at such an idea (of four team tournaments) – how does that fit in with what the Asian leagues are doing?

Aren’t most of them already up and running by then??

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MVDave said | July 17th 2009 @ 4:39pm | Report comment

Remember back in the late 70s early 80s there was a tournament in Oz featuring Socceroos, Red Star Belgrade, Celtic and Arsenal played in Melb (OP), Syd and l think Bris/Adelaide. It was a cracker with capacity crowd at OP of 30,000 plus for the Celtic v Red Star game and i cant recal the other game in Melb. Cant even remember who won the tournament but l do remember it had good publicity a big monetary prize and the games were full on. The Celtic Red Star game finished 1-1 with 20,000 Scots, 10,000 Yugoslavs and a few brave Aussies in the crowd. It was mostly standing room back them and the closest atmosphere to a big Euro game l’d ever been to (at that time).
If it could be organised would certainly add some interest with a couple of HAL teams perhaps playing, with a Greek and perhaps Italian/British team.
BTW MV are scheduled to play Green Gully of the VPL next week…although not sure if spectators will be allowed in?

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melbvictory87 said | July 17th 2009 @ 5:46pm | Report comment

hope they are allowed in, should be an interesting match as green gully are an established side and have consistenly produced super league teams in the junior divisions

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Timmo said | July 17th 2009 @ 6:00pm | Report comment

Easy more games make it tougher, much more competitive and build on the quality of teams you play. So far the two teams who are clearly making a good dig in the pre-season are Sydney FC and Gold Coast United. Sydney might only be playing State League opposition but they are playing regular competitive matches, sorting out formation players playing for positions and by the time the Regular Season comes around they would have played well over 10 pre-season games. Look out for this team to perform. If they build there team on speed, passing, flow and creativity they will be hard to beat.

Also Gold Coast have travelled to all over the place for their pre-season, I expect them to start off well.

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