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Reviewing the ARU's fan survey

8th June, 2015
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ARU CEO Bill Pulver will need more than a few glamour shots to fix the game in Australia. (Image: Supplied)
Roar Guru
8th June, 2015
52
1600 Reads

The Australian Rugby Union is a sporting organisation that has repeatedly copped criticism.

While the areas of critique are many and varied, this is often for not being in touch with the real fans, being full of North Shore and Eastern Suburbs suits who care about GPS rugby and just generally not knowing what is going on at ground level.

It came as a welcome surprise when the ARU announced that they would be asking the fans for their opinions and to help shape the direction of rugby union in Australia over the next five years.

Unfortunately, the public survey was released a few weeks ago and some of the questions were, well, interesting to say the least.

The first question asked “Which statement best describes why you are involved in Rugby?” Not quite sure why the word rugby is capitalised there, but anyway the question isn’t what jumped out at me, it was the possible answers.

These answers include “I follow the Wallabies”, “I currently play Club Rugby” and “I previously played School Rugby”. At face value these answers are fair enough, but that is their problem, they don’t actually move beyond the surface.

If I asked someone why they’re involved in rugby and they told me it was because they followed the Wallabies I would respond with “why?” The answer doesn’t actually address the underlying reason as to why a person follows the Wallabies.

The situation is similar for the “I previously played School Rugby” answer. I can understand the thinking. A 14-year-old boy, let’s call him Tom, has never played or watched rugby in his life, he shows up at school and decides to play rugby.

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Tom finds out that he actually really likes the sport and develops into a passionate supporter who plays for a club when he leaves school.

I understand this, but there is an underlying reason as to why he fell in love with the sport and continued his involvement with it. That is why there should have been an option such as “it has fostered lifelong friendships” or purely just because “it’s fun”. That is why Tom plays rugby once it is no longer compulsory, because he likes the environment in which the sport is based.

Simply stating “I previously played School Rugby” is far too simplistic and doesn’t give the ARU the information that it actually needs to understand why people are involved with the sport. In fact I fear that it will actually lead to them making decisions that actually harm the sport of rugby.

The suggested answers are symptomatic of the ARU’s past failures. An inability to look below the tip of the iceberg and at what is actually causing trends in the sport. This continues into question two, which asks why I watch and/or attend rugby games.

The answers to chose from include “I am a fan or member of a Super Rugby Franchise” and “I am a fan of the Wallabies”. I’m sure most people who are answering this survey are fans of the Wallabies and their respective Super Rugby franchise, finding out that 70 per cent of respondents watch rugby because they are fans means absolutely nothing to me.

What is important is to know why they are fans. Is it because of the free flowing nature of the sport or the contest between attack and defence at every ruck or maul?

There were some legitimate answers to this question though, such as “Family/friends are fans or members”. This is a legitimate answer because the respondent isn’t actually a fan, we don’t need to know why they enjoy rugby because they’ve stated they don’t. It would be interesting to find out how they could be converted from unwilling companion to engaged fan however that is not entirely relevant to this question.

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The third question asking fans to rank the importance of the ARU’s five core values was fair enough, however there should have been an option for respondents to suggest their own value that they think is vital to future ARU success.

Questions five and six were also fairly on the money, they asked respondents to state how enjoyable rugby is to watch, on a scale of one to five, and then to rank a number of different proposals based on how much more entertaining they would make rugby.

The responses included “less time taken up with scrums/lineouts”, “ball in play more” and “simpler laws” all things fans seem to be clamouring for.

My chief concern with question five is not with the question but with how responses are analysed. Given that it is likely that most of the respondents are fans of rugby, there is a high chance that they are also the people who find the sport enjoyable.

They are the converted and I fear that the ARU will see that most respondents rated the enjoyment of watching rugby a four or five out five and trumpet how most Australian rugby fans think the sport is enjoyable to watch. If they do this they will be preaching to the converted and ignoring the very people that they should be targeting, those who don’t enjoy watching rugby.

Question nine was a question that really annoyed me. Like earlier questions, it wasn’t so much the question but the possible answers. The question asked fans to rank what classifies as success for Australian rugby over the next five years.

Two answers in particular bugged me, one stated “Wallabies winning the Rugby World Cup, ranking is irrelevant” and the other was “Wallabies maintaining a ranking in the top three in the world, year-on-year”. The two responses seem to imply that winning World Cups and maintaining a high ranking are mutually exclusive, that we can have one or the other.

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They’re not. And the answers should have reflected this.

I understand that the answers are specifically asking what the public think is more important, World Cups or a high ranking, but I still don’t agree with it. If the administrators don’t think that Australia can be the best in the world on a year-on-year basis and World Cup winners, the Wallabies have no hope.

The other perplexing aspect of question nine was the answer “Increased positive media coverage of Rugby in Australia”. I’m not quite sure how positive media coverage is a sign of success. Are they claiming that positive media coverage is independent of results? Or is it dependent of results? It’s quite ambiguous and could easily have been worded better.

Question eleven drilled down further on question nine, asking the most important measure of success for the Wallabies over the next five years. One of the responses was “Winning more games than we lose across all teams internationally” and another being “Defeating New Zealand at least once every year”.

Those two responses are so mediocre it’s not funny. I seriously hope that no respondent selected either of those. We shouldn’t be striving to be average, to win 50 per cent of our games every year and beating New Zealand once a year. The Wallabies have done this over the past decade and look where it has got them, in serious decline.

The ARU needs to strive to ensure the Wallabies are the best team in the world, that they can beat the All Blacks on a regular basis and win and retain the Bledisloe Cup.

Another question in which one of the suggested responses is so preposterous that I am hoping it was included as a joke is question thirteen. It asked what the most important thing to grow the game in Australia is.

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The fifth option was “Investing in the Rugby heartlands of NSW and Queensland, focusing on traditional Rugby Clubs and Schools”.

I’m hoping that even if anyone selected this box, it is ignored by the ARU because it is most definitely not the best strategy and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure that out.

Rugby union will not expand and grow in Australia if we are to focus purely on NSW and Queensland and we won’t expand our talent base – which is currently on of Australian rugby’s primary problems.

This brings us to question 15, the final question of the survey which asked “Is there anything else you would like to tell us?” This is a reasonable question except for the fact that it included a 1000 character limit which really inhibits respondents’ ability to elaborate on their answers in the survey and explain what they think is wrong with Australian rugby and how to fix it.

If someone is taking the time to fill out this optional question, it is clear that they are a passionate fan with strong views as to how to improve rugby. They should be given an adequate number of words to get this message across.

Overall we should be praising what the ARU is doing, asking their fans, their paying customers, how rugby could be improved in this country, something many organisations are unwilling to do.

Unfortunately some of the possible responses to questions were not detailed enough to provide the ARU any useful information, while others were so absurd that they make you wonder why they were even possible answers in the first place.

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Hopefully the ARU is able to generate some insightful answers and use them to establish a plan that sets Australian rugby up for the future.

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