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So I have toyed with this idea for a while. Why isn’t the A-League as popular as the other mainstream Australian sports?
Why are crowd numbers low? I never really took a lot of thought to this topic as I am mainly a rugby league supporter who catches the odd A-League match.
However, I am currently living in Europe and as such soccer (or football as it is rightly called, but for the sake of avoiding confusion I’ll refer to it as soccer) is a huge sport over here.
I showed one of my cousins the highlights of a Sydney FC match as he was interested in what Del Piero is doing in Australia.
He couldn’t believe how little the crowd was. But for the A-League the crowd was decent. By European standards it was tiny. The SFS isn’t a small stadium yet it is lucky to be half-filled during the regular season.
So I began to seriously contemplate as to why the A-League doesn’t garner a larger following. The A-League is on the rise but it will never overtake the hold that both the NRL and AFL have in Australia.
The main reason I could think was that Australia is one of the few countries in the world that have more than one main professional sport that is heavily supported. In winter we have NRL, AFL and rugby union.
In summer we have the A-League and cricket. Those other sports have been, in the cases of the NRL, AFL and cricket, established for over 100 years in a professional capacity.
Soccer has always fought an uphill battle in Australia because of this. The established sports already have their supporters, as such the market was much smaller when the A-League came around. Sure they had the NSL but that was merely glorified park soccer.
The A-League has done a decent job in garnering memberships of clubs and the establishment of new teams. Not least the meteoric rise of the Wanderers.
However they did slip with the folding of the North Queensland Fury and Gold Coast United. The A-League now have a CEO who is familiar in dealing with controversy and managing political issues in a sporting environment.
I do believe though that the main reason that the A-League is still only hanging onto the ledge of Australian sport is that it is only available through Pay-TV.
The NRL, AFL and international cricket are all available on free-to-air. If you were given the option of paying to watch a competition that is still relatively weak when compared with the rest of the world or watching the best players in their respective sports for free, what would be your choice?
The A-League have made a small step in the right direction with their next television deal but it’s been a long time coming.
So in answer to the title, yes they are a victim of the established sporting landscape in Australia but this is not all circumstance. FFA have made some decisions that have led to their poor attendances and ratings.
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