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Two weeks ago I travelled 45 minutes from my home in the Rabbitohs’ territory of Newtown to the vacuous ANZ Stadium with 32,000 passionate fans dressed in their team colours.
The occasion was a clash between Souths and Melbourne, the only two undefeated teams in the NRL.
Despite these favourable ingredients, the atmosphere was dull in comparison to a standard Western Sydney Wanderers match.
There is an important lesson for those in charge of rugby league to learn from the phenomenal success of the A-League’s Wanderers.
Atmosphere and culture can be a disproportionate boon for a club and the competition.
The excitement around the Wanderers this year transferred into general excitement about the A-League.
NRL chief David Smith has indicated that he at least knows atmosphere and culture are important ingredients for rugby league to cultivate, but his ideas showed an alarming naivety.
There should be “rides, jumping castles, bands, video packages, great moments of the past echoing through the stadium,” he told the Sunday Telegraph.
No David. Cheap gimmicks are not what atmosphere and culture are built on. This is not the US, and league is not the NBA.
Atmosphere is built on passionate fans cheering their team in an environment where people feel close to the other supporters, close to their team and in which they can actually see the spectacle.
This in turn creates a culture of fans who want to be at matches.
Take the Wanderers, the NRL’s biggest threat in NSW, for example.
The Wanderers averaged not quite 15,000 people at each home game in their debut season, but from all reports the atmosphere was unmatched in Australian sport.
The team’s success in its first year has enlivened a culture of passionate sports fans scattered around the vast western suburbs of Sydney.
Those who travel to games, sing, shout, stomp and wave flags while draped in red and black.
Sometimes, a minority of fans have let passion spill over into aggression. Transgressions aside, these crowds have enjoyed the purpose-built size and shape of Parramatta Stadium.
In the 21,000-seat grounds, 15,000 people feel like rabid army on the sidelines.
These are the ingredients of an atmosphere that will drag more and more spectators to Wanderers’ games, buoying the team and filling the club’s coffers.
In contrast South Sydney, renowned for one of the largest supporter bases in the NRL, has averaged more than 26,000 at home games or about 11,000 more people at their games than the Wanderers achieved. But the atmosphere has mostly been incomparable.
At all homes games except the record-crowd-pulling game against the Bulldogs, when more than 51,000 people attended, the great cavernous stadium that is ANZ has sucked the life from fervent cheering and funnelled it up into the evening sky. Souths has the mighty ‘Burrow’ of fanatical supporters.
It has the instigators who start crowd chants, visible club colours in the stands and a membership of almost 25,000.
But inside the 80,000-seat ANZ Stadium, so much of that atmosphere is diminished.
Now imagine the 32,000 people who went to the Souths-Melbourne game in the SFS or, better still, filling a redeveloped 30,000-seat Redfern Oval.
The average crowd at each match would create an atmosphere that would be reason to attend in itself, win or lose.
Mr Smith can save Souths supporters the embarrassment of being hand-fed a fake atmosphere based around rock bands and jumping castles.
Let’s start talking about building a culture of playing games where Souths fans live and work, South Sydney, not Homebush.
For other clubs, I would suggest making homes games more affordable should be next on the agenda.
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