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The AFL’s Team GWS is venturing into quicksand – and the paltry 23,459 crowd at the NRL’s Roosters versus Panthers playoff last Saturday night is the proof.
A misconception exists that western Sydney is a vast untapped city waiting for sporting codes to mine. The AFL has launched GWS, the A-League’s (albeit faltering) Rovers are coming, and the ARU envisages one day a western Sydney Super franchise.
Yet the Panthers have been in western Sydney for over 40 years and look at the attendance last Saturday evening. Seemed there were 22,000 Roosters fans and the Penrith diehards made up the rest. The week before the club could only draw 16,668 to a home semi-final in Penrith.
The NSWRL added Penrith and Cronulla in 1967 to build upon Sydney’s residential urban sprawl. Roll around to 2010 and on any rational assessment, the “value” that the Panthers and Sharks bring to the NRL (compared to say what the Central Coast and other expansion opportunities offer), then the NSWRL probably made the wrong decision.
The Panthers in particular oversee the code’s largest junior participation base, but that could just as readily have continued under the Eels banner.
Compare this to Melbourne where the last expansion inside the metropolitan area was way back in 1925 via Footscray (later known as the Western Bulldogs), Hawthorn and North Melbourne. As the Melbourne suburban area spread outwards over the past 75 years, no new clubs were added to take in these new suburbs. Instead, the existing clubs continued to gain support as the city’s population grew, irrespective of where the members actually lived.
In Sydney, a comparable would have left the pre-WWII clubs of Norths, Souths, Easts, Balmain, St George, Canterbury, Newtown and Wests. This would have allowed for national expansion without necessarily culling traditional Sydney clubs.
Fast forward to 2012 and the AFL is placing a team into Sydney’s west, while in Melbourne itself there are vast swathes of residential suburbs without an AFL club that represents them. The AFL’s logic is that western Sydney can support its own AFL club and the locals will embrace this chance at identity.
But even the NRL and the Panthers are proving that western Sydney is still part of Sydney. Millions live there, but they support some other Sydney NRL club, and have not embraced their local NRL club. The Parramatta Eels and Manly-Warringah were added in 1947, but even they have generally lacklustre attendance numbers and struggle for business sponsorship.
In Melbourne, adding an AFL club to serve in name an extensive part of the expanded metropolis would equally fail to be embraced by the locals. They, and their off spring, would still give allegiance to one of the traditional Melbourne AFL clubs.
Should the NRL announce it is adding a new Melbourne club to serve some large part of the city not served in name by a current AFL club, would anyone see logic in that? Yet that it is what the AFL is doing in Sydney’s west.
Adding a team to somewhere such as the Gold Coast that sees itself as a distinct region and without representation on the national stage makes sense. The Titans are proof that can work.
Sydney though already has an AFL club to serve the city. Will GWS simply bite into the Swans support, or will GWS just be ignored as Swans fans and their children stay loyal?
Penrith and Cronulla provide ample proof that merely plonking down a new club into a supposedly unserved part of the city is no guarantee of success and profitability.
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