FFA misses opportunity with FTA coverage

So, the much anticipated draw for the A-League 2013/2014 season has been released.

While there are always going to be positives and negatives to the draw given there are so many factors, overall as a Melburnian in particular I personally am left with a sense of disappointment.

There was some added excitement to next seasons draw because in season nine for the first time there will be some free-to-air (FTA) exposure on Friday nights on SBS.

The bigger picture is that the FFA seem to have missed a big opportunity to promote the virtues of the A-League to a wider television audience that only have access to free-to-air television.

Most specifically through the derbies and the fading star that is the so-called ‘marquee matches’ that aren’t quite the crowd pullers they once were.

One can understand that Fox Sports are paying the bulk of the majority of the new $160 million four-year deal so the challenge for the FFA would be to ensure that people with a Fox Sports subscription are getting value for their outlay etc.

The other side of that coin though is that free-to-air television is a form of mass market exposure and advertising.

From this perspective it would have made some sense to have a two-thirds majority to Fox Sports, namely show one-third of the big derbies (ie Sydney FC versus Western Sydney Wanderers, Melbourne Victory versus Melbourne Heart and other interstate ‘marquee’ matches) on free-to-air while the other two rounds of those matches would be on Fox Sports.

This makes sense when we consider the respective business models of both, Fox Sports as a cable network relies on subscribers, SBS as an free-to-air network relies on selling audiences to advertisers.

From this perspective if we put the big derbies which are set to be sell-outs in terms of the AAMI Park (Melbourne) and Parramatta Stadium (Sydney) matches, then the visual and energetic theatre of opposing fan interaction and the full stadiums will be a great image for the game.

This would further entice half-committed or casual viewers that if they want to see more the A-League it is an added reason to subscribe to Foxtel or Fox Sports.

Conversely, having Brisbane Roar having erstwhile decent enough crowds dispersed across the cavernous Lang Park/Suncorp Stadium (Melbourne Victory just about get away with it having crowds in the region of 20,000 playing in a 50,000 stadium) but the Roar with 15,000 just don’t manage it.

And that’s without going into having Heart play their fixtures in front of a one-thirds full stadium on a good day, with the so called ‘green seat elite’ out in full force, this projects a bad image for the game and doesen’t make it look quite exciting at all.

Indeed when you look past the first few weeks, fans could be forgiven that the FFA have been fooled into making the Friday night free-to-air games the ‘dud’ slot for the most part given most of the match-ups are not the ones that capture the imagination.

Not to mention the mistake of having Western Sydney play in Melbourne in the Friday night free-to-air slot against the ‘wrong’ Melbourne.

Perhaps some are expecting Wanderers fans to go to Melbourne once again in the same numbers they did against Melbourne last year.

Personally I would have thought this unlikely for the same reason that in the 2012/13 season Wanderers fans did not turn up in near the same numbers for the Heart clash as they had for the Melbourne Victory clash a few weeks earlier.

I am from Melbourne but given Wanderers fans have something resembling ambition I feel confident enough at this early stage as an outsider to say that Western Sydney fans will never quite regard the so-called ‘Big Red’ which the media conjured up as anything resembling a major inter-city rivalry, despite the FFA’s joint scheduling of the ‘Big Red’ with the so-called ‘Big Blue’.

As we saw last year the big Melburnian rivalry is against Melbourne Victory for both Sydney based teams and one would summise that Queensland-based Brisbane Roar would be the next largest for either Sydney team for ‘State of Origin’ reasons.

This is another tie that should be considered for regular free-to-air exposure and on this count at least the FFA have obliged with two Western Sydney Wanderers versus Brisbane Roar matches and one Sydney FC versus Brisbane Roar matche in the free-to-air slot.

Needless to say the fact that the administrators of Melbourne Victory didn’t adjust the ticketing for the AAMI Park match against Western Sydney as they had for Sydney FC a few weeks earlier (leading to a sell-out with over 4000 empty seats) showed how the administrators of the game were caught on the hop as to what stimulates the fans imagination.

The top quality atmosphere of that match shows what kind of a opportunity has been missed given it would be a fantastic opportunity to advertise the virtues of the game (unique atmosphere) to a mass audience.

It would have made so much more sense marketing wise to show one of the AAMI Park home games of Melbourne Victory versus Western Sydney (the December one in particular) as the atmosphere of that rivalry in that stadium is potentially the best in Australian sport if both sets of fans turn up for it with their game hat on..

This works the other way round too, one of Melbourne Victory’s away games on free-to-air should have been the WSW away in Parramatta, because this will make for a great spectacle if Melbourne Victory fans should turn out in force (unfortunately this potential is slightly hindered by the FFA having scheduled all of Melbourne Victory’s major away ties within weeks of each-other).

Indeed even now there will some quarters of the Melbourne fan-base that are beginning to regard Western Sydney as the bigger Sydney based rival even at this early stage. I am one of them.

Other rivalry ‘mistakes’ can be considered in not showing a Newcastle Jets versus Central Coast tie in the Friday slot. The FFA have got one right though in showing the Adelaide United versus Melbourne Victory tie on Friday in Round 2.