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The NRL is happy to play in front of empty seats – something the A-League should use to its advantage by aiming to beat rugby league at the box office.
The fact the AFL is smashing the NRL in the attendance stakes should come as no surprise to anyone with even a passing interest in rugby league.
When the NRL signed an unprecedented $1.8 billion broadcast rights deal in November 2015, they effectively admitted that paying spectators are considered an irrelevance within NRL headquarters.
By adding a permanent Thursday night timeslot and moving Monday night football to an early Friday kick-off, the NRL signalled that they no longer care whether fans file through the gates.
Television money is now the only thing that matters – a mantra reflected by the fact while TV ratings are holding steady, this season’s NRL attendances are way down on average.
Why should this matter to football fans? Because the A-League possesses a superior live stadium experience, but continually squanders the opportunity to market it.
There’s no question the atmosphere at an A-League game is vastly superior to anything you’ll find in the NRL.
Where one features non-stop chants from active fans, the other is home to the sort of atmosphere that allows you to hear players talk among themselves on the field.
But instead of taking advantage of the atmosphere in the stands and tweaking the schedule to attract even more fans through the gates, our administrators seem content to sit on their hands.
Perhaps it’s a symptom of the fact the NRL and AFL have traditionally commanded the media spotlight without anyone questioning the status quo.
Yet the reality is that clubs like Melbourne Victory and Sydney FC routinely draw larger crowds than several NRL clubs, while just about every other A-League club has bags of potential they’re not currently living up to.
Isn’t this the sort of thing that football should be celebrating? Why does the game take a back seat to rival sports, when it could be attracting new fans by highlighting one of the A-League’s key points of difference – bigger crowds and better atmospheres?
When the New South Wales government tabled a development application for the new Western Sydney Stadium that called for 30 NRL games per season to be played at the ground, you’d think the Wanderers might have reminded officials that they’re club likeliest to draw the biggest crowds.
Yet the government has listed, almost inconceivably, two clubs known only as “NRL Team 2” and “NRL Team 3” that they expect to generate average attendances of 17,490 and 12,980 respectively.
No word on a safe-standing terrace though. Why would there be, when football so often fails to celebrate its own successes and the majority of our politicians wouldn’t know a round ball if one smacked them square in the face?
There arguably wouldn’t even be a National Rugby League if it wasn’t for the National Soccer League kicking off on the same weekend exactly forty years ago.
The occasion was at least marked in some small way by the A-League, on a day in which Wellington Phoenix stunned Melbourne Victory 3-0 on the road at AAMI Park, while Brisbane Roar recorded an even more improbable 5-1 come-from-behind win over the Central Coast Mariners.
Watching the Victory go around on a Sunday afternoon at AAMI Park is as close to a European football experience as we’ve got down under, while Jamie Maclaren’s whirlwind hat-trick at Suncorp Stadium was as exhilarating as it was effective.
There’s nothing wrong with the standard of football in the A-League.
But Football Federation Australia has fallen into the trap of putting broadcasters first and making it more difficult than necessary for spectators to attend games.
Fix that next season, and pretty soon the A-League will start out-drawing the NRL on a regular basis – and maybe then receiving the sort of media coverage it realistically deserves.