Outfoxing Fox: formula to A-League success

http://www.oztam.com.au/documents/2008/A2_20080413.pdf This link shows the average ratings of each channel between 6am and midnight over 7 days. It doesn't say anything about how many people have access to each channel. Your interpretation implies that only 20% of the population have access to channel 9.

Whites, http://www.a-league.com.au/default.aspx?s=newsdisplay&id=33055 http://www.knowfirst.info/forums/showthread.php?t=27815 Uzbekistan? which beat the previous Pay TV record of Socceroos v Japan in the 2007 Asian Cup. Don't underestimate the popularity of football in this country [and around the world].

"2.8 % of the households in Australia have access to Fox Sports. This includes Austar and Optus Suscriber services" This is simply not true. That means that less then 10% of households that subscribe to PayTV include Fox Sports in their package.

These are the ratings for this years Grand Final(5 city metro + regional) 3 Live: Football: A-League Grand Final FOX Sports 3 176,000 The portion of the game that was extra time and the penalty shootout was 1 Live: Football: A-League Post Game Show FOX Sports 3 272,000 http://www.tvtonight.com.au/wp-content/uploads/ASTRA-Ratings-for-Week-100314.pdf Where did you get the 30million worldwide figure from? I watched the game but at the same time 2 NRL games that overlapped with the GF had higher ratings.

To Fussball, You must spend hours trawling through AFL club annual reports, such is your knowledge of who has what and where etc, and yet you profess to dislike the game, in fact you wont even admit that our indigenous Australian football code is actually football. .. sad!!. BTW GC17 now has over 9,000 members i dare say MF is right and they will have around 12,000 members in their first real season, most sports fans would say good on em, but all i hear from you is sniping. You are not really a sports fan are you ??.

Wouldn't the Victory like to have 57000 members of any sort? Get real

The game died because 10 didn't want to pay coin for a sure fire ratings winner?

Poor Warwick should have taken up backgammon :)

Well! , when young Warwick Faifax (Paul Barrie's 'The Man Who Couldn't Wait') took over The Age in the late 1980's ? - he decided that The Age would henceforth feature Basketball as its pre-eminent sport !!! That plan - along with every other idea Warwick had soon turned to dust ! The last I heard anything of young Warwick Fairfax, he was cowering in a dark corner of a room in some sort of religious enclave in the States !

. . . OR ! - you could enrol in a short course offered by East New Delhi TAFE - How to tap into PayTV for nothing 101 !

Midfielder... finally somebody who gets it... in a broader sense anyway... Everybody has been talking about how much better the quality is this season, but it is only four rounds old! there is plenty of time for it to (potentially, and hopefully not) drop off... I'm not trying to slag off the A-League, I love it dearly, but what we have to realise is that economically, it is needs to be a better product for it to be worth more. We have got a sweet thing going on with fox, they have devoted so much time and effort to the game, we'd be mad to surrender anything more than one out of five games a week to FTA. I'm really excited that ONE HD are looking to take the game seriously (no pun intended), and hopefully we can drip feed some A-League out to them and slowly start to grow the game in the mainstream/FTA arena. What people need to realise is that, depite the (near quantum) leaps that football has taken in this country in the last six years, there is still at least another 6 to 10 years of development to go. we are 10 years behind the MLS and 15 years behind the J-League, they are good role-models for us. we can complain that the FFA should be doing more, and perhaps that they should, but if they continue on the same path for the next six years, the game will continue its current trend, which is better than it has ever been in this country, ever. We need to be securing the long term future of the game so that in 15-20 years time, there has been growth, development and progression in the game. we may never get to the same level as the AFL and NRL, but thats okay, so long as we get closer than we are now.

Actually you're a little off the mark with basketball... it should still serve as a warning none the less. I was young when basketball was at its peak, i played, all my friends played, we went to games, all was great. Ch10 had a wonderful product, great coverage of the NBL and NBA, with family friendly weekend timeslots so that all of us in the target audiences (9/10yo's obsessed with the game) could get in on the action. we should have been the generation that grew up with basketball as their primary game. then, when the deal came up for negotiation, the NBL got greedy. they percieved their game to be way more valuable than it actually was. Ch10 wouldn't be held over a barrel, and backed out, the rights went to the ABC, who only showed the NBL, the magazine program and NBA coverage that bundled with the NBL made the Ch10 product so good died away (they had no longer had any interest in supporting the game), and by the end of the 90's, the game was dead. the money had dried up, and WC98 caught the attention of those kids like me (now 12 and 13, ready to lock in their game of choice), and the rest is history. from the age of 7 all i ever did was play basketball recess and lunchtime, basketball, but as basketball begain to faulter, the WC in France captured our imagination, and every recess and lunchtime until i finished school at year 12, football was king.

8,000 members for a second tier football comp (the VFL) IS impressive, very impressive - make no mistake - it is very impressive. The cost of membership for the old VFA clubs was always cheap, always - I doubt any of them ever got anywhere near 8,000 members - and that includes the bigger clubs like Port and Willy.

Can you be sure of Suns getting 12k+ season ticket holders? Apparently they signed 8k season ticket holders this year which prima facie sounds impressive .... ... but, on closer inspection, the cost of a season ticket in 2010 was $45 for adults & $25 for kids! Let's see how quickly the fans sign on when the Season Ticket price jumps 300-400%? Source: http://goldcoastfc.com.au/membership/inaugural-membership/

Sorry mate, can't agree with you there... the NRL are paying the price for "going with the money", they cant get coverage outside of QLD/NSW, yet on Fox, the NRL is the highest rating sports code by a long way. the "best" deal is the one that secures the viability of football long term, and whilst dollars play a major role in that, so does coverage. there is no sense having another C7 Sport disaster, that would undo all the good work that has been done. Fox can sell a football package (A-League and EPL, plus all non-WC socceroos matches), and its attractive. ONE HD are pushing into the football area with Bundesliga and Seire A, plus Liverpool and Arsenal games, however, unless there is a stipulation that A-League game(s) MUST be shown live, when the next AFL & NRL deals come around, ONE/Ten could grab a bigger slice of those pies and bump football out of the prime FTA slots that we would want to grow the game...

The new GC club will be relying on 12k+ memberships for a healthy start to its existence.

MF Community links are important but: 1. Strong communty links will not ensure financial survival; 2. Weak community links will not necessarily lead to financial failure The Essendon Football Club's "involvement" with the community of Essendon, Moonee Ponds, Strathmore, East Keilor & Avondale Heights, etc. is not as strong as it used to be. There are probably (based purely on the change of population demographics) more Essendon supporters, who live outside the traditional "Essendon community", yet the club has never been financially stronger. Similarly, Collingwood FC's involvement in the Collingwood area would not be as strong as it was pre-1980; yet the club is financially very strong. By contrast, Port Adelaide FC is reknowned for having an extremely strong bond with its community, yet the club is on the brink of insovency! To repeat ... season ticket holders cannot prop up a sporting club's finances. Do you honestly think the new Gold Coast AFL club is relying on the revenue of 8-10k season ticket holders for its survival?!!

Great post Mid, good luck to the A-League in boosting the TV coin. All codes will have their hands out in the next few years, but I agree that the one after next is the key for the A-League.

I'm not too sure where you're heading with this argument. You're referring to Collingwood, the biggest footbal club in Australia, they would earn at least $10 mill per annum from their membership sales (which are now over 50,000) - I doubt anyone else on this forum would view $10 mill as insignificant. Either way, every soccer poster on this forum rabbits on endlessly about engaging with the community - you must be the first soccer fan to come on here and poo poo that idea. Also, look beyond the top 10 or so Premier League clubs, and all other English professional football clubs have very strong community links.

The "community factor" is important when sporting clubs are minor enterprises, and AFL would not be considered "minor enterprises" any more. Clubs operating in major competitions have huge costs and require significant revenue to remain liquid and significant capital to develop and expand. If you think Footscray's survival is guaranteed b/c it can rely on 30-40k season ticket holders (and, I'm exaggerating the number significantly) you need to do more research into the cost of running an AFL club. Simply, a modern sporting club is living in "fantasy land" if it thinks it can survive by calling on the largesse of its supporters/season ticket holders. E.g. in the 2009 Annual Report, AFL Club Collingwood's Expenses (excluding expenses from its gambling operations) were approx $36m So, to simply cover Collingwood's annual "football-related bills" would require 180k full-season ticket holders (assume a season ticket cots $200 per annum) or ... ... a lot of people rattling a lot of tins! Source: http://www.collingwoodfc.com.au/portals/0/magpies_docs/2009_annual_report_cfc.pdf