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Earlier in the week I riffed on the poor turnout for last week’s round of matches in the A-League, in particular Sydney’s dire 8500 (if that) at the Sydney Football Stadium on Friday night.
Now we have word that attendance figures for the league are down 116,917 on the same time from last season, an extraordinary figure that will have the suits at Football Federation Australia racking those well-remunerated brains of theirs to come up with a solution.
FFA chief executive Ben Buckley says there is “no panic” and “the key issue is that we’re building a new competition from scratch, which is only in its fourth year, and it’s inappropriate to compare it with competitions which have 50, 60 or even 100 years of tradition and culture behind them”.
This has been a familiar refrain any time the A-League has been received bad news or responded to virulent criticism, such as Rebecca Wilson’s notorious column in the News Limited press a couple of weeks ago, which sparked a valiant rejoinder from the sport’s governing body worthy of the Russian effort in the Battle of Stalingrad.
But it is disingenuous and ultimately a self-defeating excuse.
The time for action is now and that action must involve real change.
During the week, in lieu of researching a story I’m writing for Inside Sport magazine on the J-League’s “Asian berth” provision, I corresponded with Mike Tuckerman, The Roar’s new man in Japan and someone I regard as a friend and fellow pilot in the struggle to get the great unwashed masses transfixed by the Asian football diorama.
Mike made a very interesting observation about the efforts of J-League in engaging with their immediate communities in the early days of the league nearly two decades ago.
“In regard to fans, the J. League has been wildly successful in embracing local communities,” he said. “What the league did was look at how the baseball league was so Kanto-dominated [the region that takes in Tokyo and Saitama, the geographical heart of Honshu] – to the detriment of fans in every other part of the country – and decide to structure the J-League in entirely the opposite fashion.
That’s the reason that so many J2 clubs exist in far-flung places like Yamagata and Ehime and towns like that, because the J-League wanted total football saturation of the entire country in regions where baseball teams had no presence.
“This emphasis on community participation and interaction has generated some fierce loyalty on the part of fans, and goes a long way to explaining why so many teams play in front of full houses every week regardless of their results.
“It also helps to cushion the loss of key players – Japanese fans don’t get out and support their team to watch some Brazilian star – they get out to support their team because the local fans identify with the club and are generally happy to celebrate the team’s successes.”
Some great points in there that the FFA, if it is fair dinkum about arresting this slide, should take on board. Solving the crisis is not going to be about splashing about more dollars on fancy TV commercials. The solution is much more prosaic.
The most compelling point Mike makes, I think, is about Japanese fans supporting their club through thick and thin, regardless of which Brazilian is playing for them, because they “identify with the club”.
This is something the Central Coast Mariners on a small scale and Melbourne Victory on a larger one have done exceedingly well and which Adelaide United is making great strides in replicating.
The undoubted basket case is Sydney FC.
The people of Sydney have no emotional investment in the club because it is a team that has singularly failed in four seasons to articulate any kind of personality.
It has utterly failed to engage its community and it is why there is a hornet’s nest of expansion-team start-ups in western Sydney itching to get right what Sydney FC, Sydney Hakoah in all but name, has got so horribly wrong.
So put the chequebook back in the drawer, Ben. The FFA doesn’t need any more market research or expensive advertising to find the panacea to this current crisis.
The panacea is people. Engage them with real conviction and heart and they will come.
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