Since the demise of the National Soccer League – previously run by Soccer Australia – the rebirth of the A-League, now run by Football Federation Australia, has taken vast strides in the development of football, its overall status and how the game is seen by today’s society.
The first step was recognising that although football, also known as soccer in Australia, should be returned to its original birthright name of football.
Unfortunately, depending on the group or person you associate yourself with, debate still rages among those who believe it to be Soccer and those who believe it to be football.
Prior to the A-League’s first season, Australian football was not always recognised and highly regarded in the Australian sporting landscape. So no longer would football fans sit idly by listening to other sports lovers say, “Football may be the world game but not in Australia, mate.”
Soccer or football, Australians today are starting to wake up from their winter hibernation of AFL and NRL and realise summer is around the corner. The A-League is ready to once again capture the minds of sleeping giants who have yet to experience 90 minutes of emotion and the feeling of ‘We Are Football.’
The avid football fan who lives and breathes the sport will understand the feeling of watching their team continually persist with the ever reliable goal to break the deadlock or grasp a win in the dying moments of a match.
When 90 minutes of frustration and emotion builds up to a boiling point in which 35,000 or 42,000 fans, in the case of Sydney FC versus Newcastle Jets and Melbourne Victory vs Melbourne Heart respectively, become so overwhelmed with emotion that they embrace the nearest person to which they may have never met before.
In the most extreme and high pressure moments in football, when 90 minutes of football are not enough, you could be a part of history and witness along with 50,000 other fans a clash for the ages in which you come back from literally the jaws of defeat and win the most amazing match in the A-League’s history – Brisbane Roar versus Central Coast Mariners, 2010-2011 grand final.
No matter the supporter, venue, home or away, team or opposition, you feel what I feel. I feel what you feel and slowly the Australian public are starting to feel what we feel.
After a previous seven seasons of A-League drama, action, suspense and highs and lows, four rounds have passed in the current season eight of the A-League.
The standard of the A-League is continually improving and as the season wears on we will bear witness to some spectacular moments of brilliance in which upsets will occur, comebacks will happen and players will rise above the pack to etch their name into A-League history.
Since the start of A-League season eight, we have seen a Round 1 attendance rate be broken along with the overall A-League attendance record.
Round 2 attracted the largest attendance rate in which Melbourne Victory did not play at home.
Round 3 saw another fair turnout for A-League clubs and although down on last year’s attendance for the round, 2011-2012 Round 3 had the Newcastle Jets versus Central Coast Mariners (F3 derby), Melbourne Victory versus Melbourne Heart (Melbourne Derby) and Brisbane Roar versus Gold Coast United (M1 Derby).
Round 4 was up on last year’s attendance rate and Round 5, going off the previous four rounds, should be just as successful.
Television viewing is at an all-time high and with a new broadcast deal announcement imminent, these numbers can only mean one thing: the future of the A-League is looking bright.
The overall focus will now be to draw more fans in, convert them into members, gain free-to-air television viewing, and in the near future, who knows where the A-League will be.
All I know is that ‘We are Football’ is a great advertisement from the FFA!
Dave
Guest
Brisbane get terrible crowds dude, you cant use population as an excuse, seeing though you are the most succesful club in the league and have a population of 2,146,000 and get out done by Newcastle, population 288,000.
Towser
Guest
Midfielder & others Dont know whether you saw this article on TWG but I think it will resonate with your view in particular of football & where its going:- http://theworldgame.sbs.com.au/a-league/news/1126591/Football-is-finally-being-embraced I noted in particular this line from the guy being interviewed Alex Brown head of sport at the Telegraph ""At the moment football has some great stories to tell so unsurprisingly to me the result has been a great coverage. But again I challenge you to go back to our clippings and you will see that our coverage of past overseas marquees was very expansive then too." This is why the right marquees are vital to the mainstream media coverage of the A-League & will remain so for a long time if not forever. Confirms for me that not only did fans look overseas for their football fix in the past ,but the media weren't as bias or as dumb as some football followers would believe,they knew that also & are covering football more because of it.
Midfielder
Guest
kellett Astute comment and one missed in the early years by many football commentators .... or was it a phoney war ... or have the old NSL bitters come across to the A-League as when it started to falter maybe they realised Football needed positive media from its heart land writers ... IMO there is a connection between the change in stance from the football writers / crowds / ratings .... be that as it may it all kinda connected ... AP, GA and others have steadily improved the standard of Hal .... hopefully ADP will inspire a handful of other top players so we can develop ... If as has been suggested the Socceroos and A-League are on SBS then this will help grow the game .... The big ticket item not IMO understood is the other 8 international sides... Keep up the good articles mate
Towser
Guest
Just on advertising & this is a personal opinion. Given the impact of Del Piero & Heskey in raising the profile of the A- League ,I feel any advertising money is better served being directed to more marquees of that calibre.
whiskeymac
Guest
the clubs are pushing onwards and upwards. sometimes the struggle aint pretty and a few steps backwards are needed before going forward but there is change and improvement and there seems to be, for the first time since the initial honeymoon wore off and we woke up to find out were in bed with butcher not all nightdwight, some good media traction and positive interest. Roar pushed the playing style and NSW and MV re-introduced the bling and the interest has increased (and it had to lets be honest) - the SMH had an article (bit of stat fun anyway) claiming HAL's popularity on world wide, world game comparison (skewed as all stats are maybe but Disraeli doesnt need to be quoted)
Towser
Guest
Why would it be a farce? Seems a strange thing to say given the steps taken in the last 8 years to put football on a more professional footing.
Cameron
Roar Guru
TC I actually can see where you are coming from and what you say makes sense, sorry that i came across quiet defensive. After reading what I wrote I realised this. Although I did use the heading 'A-League capturing the minds of Australians' I only used it going by the definition of what I know 'mind' to be. Though I do understand how capturing makes it seem like I am trying to say something else. In future I shall keep this in mind :). BTW when I said your imagination i didn't mean your's, i meant in general.
Cameron
Roar Guru
Hey Midfielder, that's all good. I am a NRL supporter and a season member for the Brisbane Broncos and to be honest they are probably the only other team I care about, I have more passion for this sport we call Football though. My most fondest memories are with the Brisbane Roar and I shall be a supporter until I die. I am not only a supporter for Brisbane Roar but the whole of the A-League and I am loving the fact that every other club in the League is looking to improve and take the game to another level. These are exciting times and I just hope it isn't all just a farce. The negativity portrayed by media constantly is at times draining but as you say it is changing. Although I wrote in a previous article why Brisbane Roar would win I am happy to witness greater achievements from other clubs and do their best to take the 'Grand Final' win off them, also hope the race to the Premiers plate is close. Fingers crossed trends can continue and the A-League gets a good tv deal, this will hopefully reduce the costs the clubs are incurring and maybe more advertising can be done to promote teams within the A-league.
Midfielder
Guest
kellett Missed your article yesterday ... very busy day as today is going to be as well... brief comment [sorry time] ... Its going to be an evolution ... but slowly we are becoming accepted as a genuine competition and I will be very happy to build our number two ranking in each state... TBH I don't care about the other codes.. what they do ... I just don't want their media lap dogs going at us for the benefit of their code... it is changing and maybe why it's changing is worth an article in itself...
Cameron
Roar Guru
Johnno, what does the Sydney Olympic Blues defeating Marconi 2-0 before a crowd of 26,353 at Parramatta have anything to do with this article. I wrote in my article Sydney FC vs Newcastle Jets. A little side note, that crowd record of yours will never be broken again with the current stadium as it is. Don't know if you recall but it got burnt down and now the capacity is roughly 21,000. Many clubs may feel left out but this has to do with poor management, a lack of connection with a wider community, poor attendance rates and to be hoenst too many teams especially when AFL and NRL have dominated for so long. A-League is taking the correct steps and actions to prevent this from occuring again and are having phenominal success currently.
Brick Tamlin of the Pants Party
Guest
Johnno i think you'll find the record between Sydney Olympic and Marconi will no longer stand after the next Sydney Derby.
cliffclavin
Guest
towser - these are great points. I was a regular at Breakers games in the 1990s and if we got 3500-4000 it was considered a good crowd. 6-7000 was a top crowd. But i think accross the league (the NSL) we forget the average crowd hovered at about 3-5000 for about 2 decades - despite some very good attendences at South, Marconi, Perth and Adelaide. We dont need to get ahead of ourselves re how 'big' the league will be, but like Towser has noted here - we should look at our A-league average of over 10,000 (since inception) as something to celebrate. And as Richard Dreyfuss said in what about bob - baby steps!
James
Guest
The difference is that the nsl historically had about half a dozen clubs in Melbourne, South Melbourne, Melbourne Knights, Sunshine George Cross, Heidelberg United, Preston Lions....thats 5 nsl clubs in Melbourne in the early 90s, later on you had Collingwood which lasted a season and Carlton which lasted a few more.........basically my point is that nsl was never geared towards a 1 or 2 team per city model....today if you live in say the latrobe valley you probably support mv or heart...in the nsl days however you didnt have to because you had the morwell falcons. So sure in the nsl days you may never have seen crowds of 40k to a derby, but you had half a dozen clubs that probably had that combined fan base of what Victory have today Exact same scenario in Sydney....you had olympic, marconi, syd united, apia...then northern spirit, parra power etc.
cliffclavin
Guest
it also seems that the main grandstand - with most fans - is not the one the camera is looking at.
Ian
Guest
still carrying on with the supposed 6000 crowd at suncorp. you seem to have an issue with brisbane crowds. everyone else that was there who has seen hundreds of games at suncorp said it was over 12000. the majority of the upper western stand - the premium stand - was full because they allowed the people in the cheap seats uncovered to get a covered seat. that section is usually closed. i was sitting in the northern and could see the entire stadium congratulations to suncorp for doing it. plus the people sitting in lower western, in lower and upper eastern (also open for people to sit under cover instead of being rained on), southern and the northern including the den is 12500. and the rain that started 2 hours before kick off probably stopped a further walk up crowd. i thought 12500 was good for the conditions and that it was for a new team. city of 2 million, not 4 -4.5 million like sydney and melbourne.
TC
Guest
Mate, we'll have to agree to disagree. One doesn't usually talk of capturing another's mind, unless you are talking about mind control, brain washing, etc, etc. You can capture someone's imagination, a less nefarious concept or image, and to my mind, not wanting to play mind games of course, that is more the idea you are trying to convey. But never mind, we all have minds of our own, and whether we are caught in two minds, or whether we are wanting to mind our p's and q's, it always pays to have the presence of mind to mind one's own business. TC
Cameron
Roar Guru
TC, I mean A-League capturing the minds of Australians, Although there are small aspects in which you could use your imagination, I believe you should look up the definition of 'mind' as imagination clearly does not suit the structure of this article or the context that I wrote it.
TC
Guest
Heh, heh - that's not too bad - I'll pay that one! TC
Brick Tamlin of the Pants Party
Guest
Lol i knew that headline would get TC excited.
Realfootball
Guest
Ben Buckley is a Pod. Explains everything.