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Tomorrow night the Newcastle Jets will play their second mid-week game in as many weeks when they take on the Central Coast Mariners at Energy Australia Stadium. While I’m expecting a reasonable “mid-week” crowd in Newcastle, it will most likely be another of those fixtures that doesn’t live long in the memory.
The reason is simple – mid-week football has yet to capture the public imagination.
Whether it’s trying to artificially create rivalries like the F3 derby or looking at introducing a cup competition with a group phase, Australian football has a tendency to come up with well-intentioned ideas that just don’t quite fit and, at the moment mid-week football is one of them.
Wednesday night’s fixture may have been re-arranged due to the Jets’ upcoming “glamour” friendly with LA Galaxy this Saturday, but that’s a technicality.
Right across the board midweek football, with match-days spread out across weeks and months, has become forgettable.
These isolated games come and go so quickly that if you blink, you’ll miss them.
Of course, this isn’t a problem unique to Australian football. Even in Europe, weeknight domestic football fails to draw the same crowds, viewing figures and media attention as its weekend counterpart.
However, by limiting the scheduling of A-League games during the week to one at a time, it’s compounding the problem.
The overall drive of a full round of action is missing, as is the corresponding media cut-through.
As I understand it, the driving factor behind this set-up is the A-League TV rights arrangement that requires FFA to not schedule games that overlap or take place at the same time.
So the solution to help make midweek football more of an event, and thus enjoy all the relevant benefits, is to break this status-quo.
I don’t expect Fox Sports to generously break their agreement, and let FFA schedule games at the same time but I also fail to see a sufficient alternative.
However, even if Fox Sports allowed FFA to do so, the commitment and resources it would take to broadcast these concurrent games would be monumental.
It’s hard to see how it would be feasible without bringing in a second broadcaster and that would have to involve the Free To Air networks.
Despite the rumblings I’ve heard over recent weeks, such an idea is most likely going to remain a pipe dream and midweek football is going to continue to flatter to deceive.
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