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Melbourne Victory's Matthew Foschini in action against Newcastle Jets' Ljubo Milicevic during round 5 of the A-League Season, played at the Ethihad stadium in Melbourne, Thursday, Sept. 3, 2009. The Jets drew against Victory 1-1 after full time. AAP Image/Joe Castro
How depressing the Football section of ‘The Roar’ has been lately. Every second article is about crowd sizes and how this spells doom and gloom about the future of the A-League, if not about football in Australia.
This seems to be a trait unique to football supporters in this country. Because after all, we do feel somewhat besieged by other bigger codes (and some of us have been traumatised by the Soccer Australia regime).
So we have a bipolar approach about how we feel about our sport.
When everything goes well, some of us shout from the rooftops that football is going to take over and become the number sport in Australia. When a negative things occur (such as lower crowds), then it is over, and we are hopeless, the FFA is hopeless, and so on.
We may as well get Rebecca Wilson to write for Football Roar.
Every sport experiences high and lows.
Admittedly football having to contend with two other codes, which are much more supported by the media and naysayers that constantly remind us that the A-League is ‘rubbish’ because it doesn’t reach Champions League standards, has different issues.
But we live in a competitive sporting environment and it is inevitable that there will be leaps forward and setbacks.
But let’s look at the data.
Melbourne again is the leader of the pack, with the highest most consistent support. Just to give an idea of how well they are supported, the average attendance so far in the midst of the later stages of the AFL and finals is 17,575.
While for Melbourne Storm, which belongs to a very well-publicised Murdoch backed competition for this season has been 11,764. Let’s not forget that the Melbourne Victory has almost reached 20,000 members, which is not an insignificant achievement.
Perth and Adelaide have actually increased their attendances over the past three seasons. And Sydney and Wellington, while slightly down, are not doing too badly, either.
Yes, there are teams which have been consistently below expectation.
One is the new team, Gold Coast.
With regular Socceroo Culina, and having done well at the start of the season, you would expect could have done better.
Brisbane has also been a bit of a disappointment. There are a number of reasons for this, but it seems that cost of tickets is a major factor.
Having said that we also have to consider that having 13,000 average is great. The smaller clubs are always going to fluctuate from mid-teens when successful to 5-6000 when doing terrible.
No excuses.
But I can’t believe that finals of the other two codes and the Global Financial Crisis which may have made some people wary about committing to something that can be seen as a ‘luxury, didn’t also have some effect on crowd numbers.
So no need to panic. Yet.
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