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When it comes to falling NRL crowd figures, the first thing to realise is that the game desperately needs the fans. It needs them to create the atmosphere, the excitement and the tension. Fans make the game.
TV ratings can pay the players and all the hangers-on, but without fans in the stands, the game dies – pure and simple.
But the NRL and the clubs seem to be in a quandary about how to encourage fans to attend. They’re groping around in the dark, but the answer is right there.
The growing sports and events worldwide are the ones that make the fixture an event. They give attendees the ability to express themselves, individually and as a group. They provide a space for fans to make the contest into a spectacle, a party, a meetup.
People flock to Carnival in Trinidad, to festivals in Byron Bay, and to the big football and tennis tournaments. Why? Because the fans get to be part of the action, they make the event.
Rugby league doesn’t seem to get that. They provide more and more game-day entertainments, more loud announcements, more ‘rev-up guys’ shouting at you. Fans sit there cold, physically and emotionally. They pay big bucks to be told to get excited, and then if they do, some monster in a fluoro vest comes over to tell them to be quiet.
The NRL clubs must allow their fans some space to create their own spectacle, to find their own voice, to stand and chant and dance together. Think the Raiders’ ‘Viking Clap’. If necessary, clubs could seed such activity, but in a subtle and clever way. The cricket has done some things to make this happen, although they too have a long way to go.
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Perhaps more important is the draw. The best way to bring back fans is to make each game really mean something. In this regard, less is more.
There is no way we’ll ever have a full home-and-away season again, there are too many teams and too much burnout of players. So the only option is just one full round. Each team plays each other once. That’s it. Next year at your place, this year at mine.
Every game then becomes a battle royale to earn bragging rights for the whole year. The Roosters already have cups for their games against traditional rivals – the Ron Coote, the Foundation and the Anzac Cup, against Souths, Wests Tigers and St George respectively. Make them mean something by being played only once per year.
Fans in the Sydney heartland would also have a great incentive to travel to away games – it’s the only time you can see the opposition’s star players. If I want to watch Greg Inglis play the Roosters, and it’s not a ‘home year’, then I will have to go to ANZ.
Besides, fans are spread all over now instead of being based in their team’s home suburb, so for many it isn’t such a big deal to travel to Penrith or Cronulla to see your team play.
With stadiums being consolidated, there will be regular games at Homebush and Moore Park each week. A Sydney NRL fan can watch their own team at home eight or nine times per year, and then travel just across town to another team’s ground another four times, on average.
That’s a solid 12 or 13 club games a year easily accessible for the Sydney fan, and each one is a packed-out, exciting derby, most of them at big, comfortable stadiums, easily accessible by public transport.
Nothing will ever come close to Anzac Day at the Sydney Football Stadium, but that’s what we should be aiming for.
Travelling to a game will become an activity in itself, like the big travelling fan-bases of English football teams (hopefully without the hooliganism). Social media and informal networks will grow up around going ‘on the road’ to support your club, as they do battle away from home. The home games will be regular and easy – “once a fortnight we meet here, at this ground, to cheer our team on”. No more disorganised and disorderly draws where you’re away for three weeks in a row, then at home another two weeks. Regular but ‘eventful’ footy.
For the teams outside Sydney, there is the benefit of the regular fortnightly home game too, but also the chance that interstate rivals’ fans will make a trip of it to see their one game in Townsville or Melbourne in two years. I wouldn’t usually go watch the Roosters play Brisbane in Brisbane, but if I knew that it was the one game of the year against the Broncos, and that every diehard Rooster in Brisbane would be at the game, and that a fair few Roosters would be flying in too, I’d make it a special occasion – an event.
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I could easily do that for three inter or cross-state away games per year. Brisbane or New Zealand fans won’t get quite as many opportunities, but they can still get nine home games, and perhaps more semi-final and representative football, which they are the biggest fans of anyway.
So what about the rest of the weeks of winter if the comp is only 15 rounds of 16 teams? Well for starters you could have Origin on stand-alone Saturday nights, one each in Sydney and Brisbane, and one at a neutral venue to make it fair and bring league’s biggest game to Melbourne, Auckland, Perth or wherever.
Make it a huge weekend event to promote the game, people flocking in from all over. A football festival. They don’t play the Wimbledon final or the World Cup football on a Wednesday night. They make it an event.
With Origin on Saturday night, you can mollify the TV networks with Tonga versus Samoa, Fiji versus Papua New Guinea, and games between the women’s teams, either NSW versus Queensland or Jillaroos versus New Zealand women, as the Friday and Sunday fixtures.
With three standalone weekends, those games could be formed into a meaningful series, instead of just one offs, like a Pacific Cup – perhaps with the winner to play Australia and NZ.
And on those Origin weekends, for non-rep players, bodies could heal, coaches could re-set seasons, football tragics could re-set relationships.
With a lighter draw, players would burn out less. Over time, you could also increase the number of teams to 18, perhaps add another New Zealand team, and another Queensland team, or the Papua New Guinea Hunters, currently playing in the Queensland Cup
Even if you decided against adding teams, less is more anyway. Keep the fans hungry.
With 18 teams, and three rep weekends, you would get to 20 rounds. We currently have 26 plus four weeks of finals.
To make up the last ten rounds you could have an extended finals series of six or even eight weeks. Finals footy is riveting, why not give it a couple more weeks? That’d get you to 26 or 28 weeks.
Add in the Auckland Nines, the World Club Challenge, the Indigenous All Stars game and some mid-season and post-season international series (Four Nations, World Cup etc), and you have easily filled the calendar, and the need for the networks to have games to broadcast.
You’ve tidied up the draw and made it fairer. You’ve invested each game with real meaning – bragging rights for the year, a big crowd watching.
Each game an event. The fans given the space to make it a spectacle. Less is more. That’ll pack the stadiums, and the TV ratings will likely get a boost as well.
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