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There have been plenty of articles referring to A-League crowd slump, but let’s look at the decline in AFL crowds this season and make some prediction for how big the drop will be for AFL by the end of the season.
At exactly the half way stage, lets look at AFL attendance projections for the second half of the year and the season total. This is designed to illustrate just what the significance of the crowd decline so far might extrapolate to by the season’s end.
Most likely is that that will be a decline of about 348,000 AFL attendances by the end of the 2009 season, if the relative percentage decline trend continues.
And just what hope is there within the remaining rounds for a venue-by-venue rise in crowds over the run home to compensate for any of the losses?
So far this season, crowds are already down more than 165,000 on last season, and are a lot lower than the previous year as well.
We know that we saw an increase in overall attendances in the last two AFL seasons, but it looks like the AFL trend is downwards in 2009. This is particularly evident for teams outside Melbourne.
The falls aren’t just in attendances at games, but also in TV ratings, especially in Sydney where Swans games have the lowest TV audience of any program on a Saturday night in Sydney, including the lowly rating SBS program, The Iron Chef.
Sydney Swans home games attendances will be down about 110,000 this season or about thirty percent of the overall AFL decline. In terms of relative percentage to potential TV audience, the TV ratings for Swans games are some of the lowest since the Swans move to Sydney 25 years ago.
With the looming new television deal for AFL coming up for renewal in the next couple of years and the expansion of the AFL with two new teams in Sydney’s West and the Gold Coast, these are worrying figures for the AFL.
The fall in interest in AFL comes despite a widespread and very expensive national advertising campaign run by the AFL at the beginning of the season and also a very large increase in marketing and advertising budgets for this financial year.
The AFL had also set aside $150 million alone for the “Expansion of AFL into NSW and Queensland”.
Obviously it has not had the desired effect, especially in NSW, where football continues to have the highest number of registered players by a very large margin and still growing at about six percent annually.
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