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The NRL is doing great – I am enjoying the games, and my team is doing well so everything is fine. This seems to be the attitude of some rugby league fans.
I draw different conclusions, so I decided to do a bit of research and see just how the game is faring.
The average crowd figures for home-and-away games have fallen by almost 500 per game since 2010. That equates to 4000 people per week.
Even at $10 a ticket, that is $40,000 in revenue a week and over a million bucks per year. Not to mention the secondary income derived from food and beverage sales, increased marketing etc.
TV viewership seems to be the priority of the NRL lately, so hopefully the midseason average has improved. Unfortunately I have found it difficult to come up with these statistics. If anybody does know, I would be fascinated. But according to the data I could find, AFL games rated higher than NRL throughout May and June (not including Origin), at least for homes with pay-TV.
One argument is that the billion dollars received from the TV deal means crowd attendances are meaningless. But this is easily disproven.
Take 2013’s total match attendance of 3,345,248 and multiply it by an average ticket price of $20 and you get $66,904,960. Do the same calculation with AFL’s total crowd attendance and you get $108,976,140. That is without including any of the increased advertising revenue, food and beverage sales, premium tickets, etc.
During this same period of time AFL crowd attendances have also decreased, although this can be partially attributed to the expansion of two new teams into growth areas.
So where are all the sports fans going? Football may be the answer, having increased their average attendance figures by over 3,000 per game since season 2009/10.
One club in the NRL makes a profit. Out of sixteen. Almost every solution to fixing the problem that people come up with is to dilute that one club’s ability to do so. Two to four more clubs can probably pay for themselves. That leaves twelve or so clubs that face the stress each year of having to secure funds from leagues clubs and wealthy backers.
This is not healthy. And it needs to be addressed before there are serious consequences for the teams in trouble.
My fear is that the money from the TV deal has been a band-aid to a very serious health issue for the NRL.
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