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Melbourne Victory's Archie Thompson (right) walks past as the Central Coast Mariners players celebrate winning round 1 of the 2009/10 A-League season in Melbourne, Thursday, Aug. 6, 2009. The Mariners beat Victory 2-0. AAP Image/Joe Castro
As a spectacle, Round 3 of the A-League left a lot to be desired. After the excitement of Round 2 and the Melbourne-Brisbane clash, it was confirmation that, despite the enormous strides, the league has a long development path still to trek, one that might be best if it’s played out on pay television.
Fans insist that for the A-League to break through the current public malaise, it needs to be on free to air.
Fair enough. Fox Sports is obviously limited in terms of its reach.
As a relatively new competition with new franchises still trying to win hearts and minds and build name recognition, free to air would afford the A-League a much wider reach.
As the Netball ANZ championship can attest, free to air coverage has its obvious benefits.
But how will the casual sporting fan react to the A-League, with its obvious and accepted deficiencies in style and play?
I do need to make the following clarification here: When I say casual sporting fans, I’m not talking about the sports fans that log onto The Roar daily and debate crowd figures, rather the fans that drop on the couch Friday night and want to be entertained to forget the drudgery of their working week.
The general perception of the A-League to these casual sporting fans is mixed.
They don’t particularly understand and appreciate the obvious and expected flaws of the A-League, especially when compared to other codes and overseas leagues.
Make no mistake; the A-League can be incredibly entertaining, and even these doubters would have been thoroughly entertained by the Melbourne V Brisbane clash from last weekend, but the overall depth and quality is still lacking and if this was exposed on free to air, it could damage the league and only foster these negative perceptions.
The advent of Fox Sports, and to a greater extent – due to its wider accessibility – ONE HD, is changing Australia’s sporting palette.
With Italian and German football now appearing on ONE HD, football is getting a greater run beyond the usual suspects of Fox Sports and SBS.
This all helps further educate the casual sports fans, which, in the most part, live on a diet of high scoring AFL and NRL, about the world game; a game that has only had brief flirtations with mainstream / commercial networks, often with mixed results.
The catch-22 for the A-League is the inconsistencies in its product would be further exposed in the mainstream on free to air, yet it needs free to air in the long run to help develop commercially so the knock on effect can help improve the on-field product.
Perhaps the fact that the next media deal is not up for grabs for a couple of years yet, is a good thing as it gives the A-League the necessary time to further develop.
This makes the next few years, when combined with the next stage of expansion, crucial to the leagues development.
The Holy Grail for the A-League is not free to air coverage just yet, rather genuine signs of on-field improvements.