QRU boss fires fresh salvo at Roar owners

Thanks for the inside info jb, fills in some of the gaps, regarding an outsiders suspicions. The one line " not improved off the field " speaks volumes.

Tom, I'm guessing that if you regard Foxtel and SBS as "your media enemies", then just about everyone else probably falls into that group as well.

I don't expect a welded on AFL cheerleader and probable AFL employee to agree with an part of my statement. But suffice to say that more than 2 days after posting it on this page NOT a single regular 'Football blogger' has seen fit to take issue with a single word of it...............................................So I will take the liberty of calling that 'charge proven!' After all, my fellow Football supporters views are the only views I'm interested, NOT yours. Have a nice day

Towser - A well thought out comment based on information as we were told or that you witnessed. However the "root" of the problem can be traced much further back into the local game's history and you touched on it when you mentioned "Queensland Lions" running the HAL team From 1957 up to 1982 the Brisbane Lions had morphed their way from the embryo Hollandia club playing at the old Darra ground into probably the richest (asset wise) club in the whole of Australian football,owning,not renting, a three pitch size ground out at Richlands with another "owned" asset in Inala where bingo was played all week providing the club with steady income.Come 1981 and that season saw the NSL team have their best season finishing 5th in the competition and winning the then national trophy beating West Adelaide in Canberra.The club also had a side performing extremely well in the local league consisting in the main of young local players,on amateur contracts,and at least three "graduates from that squad were regularly given start time in the National League side. The club also had 22 junior sides all accomodated at the Richlands complex After the "successes of '81" a subtle change came over the club and '82 saw them drop 6 places in the league and exit the cup in round1. 1982 saw a further drop to last in the league and another first round exit from the cup. Then came a "reprieve" when the national body decided the NSL should be expanded into 2 "confederations" north and south but Lions failed to make an impression finishing in the lower half of the weakened competition for 2 years. By '87 the two division idea was scrapped and LIons were omitted from the NSL only to re-appear in '88 when they again finished last and from then Brisbane had no representative in the National League until '91 when "Brisbane United" was born. This was a thinly disguised attempt to get national football back into the city but United was built on poor foundations and after 2 years disappeared to be replaced by Brisbane Strikers. During this difficult time for "national football" in the city Brisbane Lions were contenting themselves by winning the local league season after season and one could say they built an aura around the club that they were successful but only at that level Come 2003/4 and most of the men who had worked hard to establish Hollandia / Lions over that 25 year period were ageing or had departed the football management scene to be replaced by a "new broom". So you see Towser,the myth surrounding Hollandia/ Lions/ Roar is just that,a myth,perpetrated by people who did not know what was going on behind the scenes and today,some 12 years after national football was re-vamped ,we find that in the management of a football club ,things have not improved off the field despite the huge gains made on the field. Will things change????,Now we need rich owners rather than hard working,football loving migrants, and in that simple statement lies the "cancer" eating away at our game. Hope this clarifies your thinking somewhat. Cheers jb

Maybe so but nonetheless, it is all true and can be independently verified by anyone prepared to do just a little research.

. . . and so bloody looong!!

That's true Ian. Facebook is probably Roars most active channel - interestingly the Facebook likes jumped 5,000 after the LFC game as well

Tom, I won't attempt to address the entire tirade, so I'll respond only to your bizarre opening paragraph... - "gifting away the games TV rights to our media enemies for far less than their true value". Most people would be surprised to learn that the TV rights-holders, Foxtel and SBS, are apparently "media enemies" of the sport. It's no exaggeration to say that the ALeague simply would not exist if it weren't for Foxtel, and SBS single-handedly carried the sport in the decadeds prior. A nonsense conspiracy statement if I've ever read one.

Three major factors at play here indicated by Waz and Mister Football. and I stated yesterday on another article about the Roar One the city is more than double the size it was 30 years ago. Not only that it is no longer the sole domain of Anglo/Celtic grass chewing Hicks in the mold of Uncle JBP. A walk around the city or Suburban shopping centres will show you this both in their ethnic appearance and dress of people ,the amount of coffee shops and diversity of retail shops. . So their is diversity to tap into that wasn't there in "Brisbane Past" Second is tapping into the football playing spectator base, be they Junior or Senior players. All clubs have to do this in the A-league as we know and the Roar is no exception,Messi and Ronaldo still loom large in the minds of kids and indeed adult players. It takes effort and indeed with the recent trend of overseas clubs packing stadiums in Australia.it will require double the effort. You get 50,000 for Liverpool vs the Roar,but the club is struggling for members if the latest figures on the official Hyundai A-League site is an indication. Thirdly is engaging the community of Brisbane in and outside football during those periods of success. You can blame the print and electronic media in Brisbane(,personally I find at times it hasn't yet really woke up to the fact that JBP isn't still around) but the main culprit regarding point 2 & 3 has been the owners. For a brief summary it goes like this. First 3 seasons run by the Qld Lions, no success but John Ribot had his finger on the local pulse somewhat,being a local lad,despite his background in RL. We got 2 regular season crowds over 30,000 and also a 36,000 semi crowd.all against Sydney FC in those 3 seasons. Season 3 we averaged 17,000. Then the Coffee club/Luxury paints, come Bombolas(NFI) come bumped up ticket price period, come no success, come more Kookaburras than punters in the stadium era. Along comes Ange brings success bit of FFA ownership there somewhere, then along comes the Bakries . Mike Mulvey brings a bit more success ,but the 50,000 punters on the Orange Sundays disappear into an Orange hole as the Bakries might as well have been what they often show up as if you type their name on Google "the Bakeries". In season 4 on the downward slide,the Roar advertised 2 games at the end of the season on billboards , when our average was 12,000 maximum I would think. Those last 2 games got 19,000 vs Sydney and 17,000 vs Perth. The Roars competitors spend money on advertising both via billboards and on what I call flagpoles,in other words they are visible to the public in the street, Roar despite having more success than any in the last 4 years are invisible. One other thing also that applies to all Roar owners,they have never forked out for a name marquee(and now we could have two). Judging by the Asian cup and the amount of EPL shirts you see on young people nowadays in the street a name would help with advertising and rising above the pack. That's of course if we ever get decent rich owners of the genuine not Claytons kind.

These seemingly never ending financial disasters have been caused by the FFA leadership gifting away the games TV rights to our media enemies for far less than their true value, thus defrauding Football and depriving the sport of critical funding needed for growth. The critical underfunding of the sport over the past 10 years has rapidly overwhelmed the multicultural game's ability to survive let alone thrive at a time when rival mono-cultural sports with far less universal appeal, continue to be showered in unimaginable riches from conspiring and corrupt media cartels who treat the laws of the land outlawing this practice with utter contempt by simply ignoring them......................................in pretty much the same way that our lowlife parliamentarians simply ignore the rules surrounding travel entitlements and arrogantly gorge themselves on the public tit while treating the voting taxpayers with the same arrogant contempt that the media barons do. As ex FFA Board member and former WC goalkeeper Jack Reilly said recently, the current FFA Chair has done an absolutely brilliant job as Chairman of Westfields but has been an absolute dud as Chairman of the FFA and Football's impending financial collapse will become the soon to be ex-Chairman's true legacy to the game. In a late 2005 essay in the now defunct Bulletin magazine, following the Socceroos qualification for the WC finals in Germany, now Fairfax journalist John Birmingham gleefully articulated what he saw as the insurmountable obstacle that the openly hostile media posed to Football's future, when he opined that despite all the goodwill and undoubted high level of public support for the game in Australia, soccer would never achieve success in Australia because of the huge financial interests that the powerful media cartel had in rival sports and how this fact had caused the same media cartel's to join forces to stop Football's progress and bring it down at any cost. By fair means or foul! At about the same time, the then FFA CEO John O'Neill, also alluded to the depth of the problem when he stated his shock at the level of resentment and hostility he encountered from the commercial media when he came into contact with them as the game's Chief Executive. This issue isn't new and has been the biggest problem confronting Football's progress in Australia for decades but the FFA leadership has refused to show any real leadership in addressing it since it's reorganisation 12 years ago, preferring to assert that blatant discrimination against the game in the media and government is either non-existent or totally overstated despite the weight of evidence proving it to be an undeniable fact. Obstinately pursuing an 'olive branch' approach to try and build friendships within the commercial media industry is a strategy that history has shown to be a total failure for the game, with no discernible abatement in the level of discrimination to be seen. The style of discrimination has simply morphed from open hostility into a more subtle but equally vicious form similar to the tried and tested formats often used by the commercial media barons and their government lackeys when they are seeking to begin yet another orchestrated campaign demonising some marginalised group or other, in the community that they desperately wish to persecute! Rather than accept the reality of Football's predicament and tread the courageous path by taking head on this awful media cartel and calling them out by exposing them to the harsh glare and the wrath of public scrutiny and opinion for their vile and never ending anti-Football crusade, the FFA leadership cowers in fear before the very same media mafia and docilely complies with every demand from Football's eternal enemies whose sole objective is the total ruination of the game in Australia in order to protect it's rivals from competition! What a total sell out! The FFA Chairman sacrificed the best interests of the game 10 years ago, when he threw it and its all it's stakeholders under a bus in order to curry personal favour with the most infamous and ruthless of the media barons, one notorious for using blackmail, bribery, phone hacking and other nefarious business tactics to get his way, in exchange for Westfields receiving an easy time in the media with only minimal scrutiny of it's own dodgy and highly questionable business practises ever being reported or commented upon. And just like the Emperor Nero during the great fire that destroyed Rome in 64AD, the FFA Emperor has stood idlely by ever since, rarely lifting a finger to intervene, just watching Football's slow moving train wreck unfold before his eyes, while calculating the best and least conspicuous moment to make his exit before the inevitable catastrophe happens and the finger pointing of blame is directed at him. Like tens of thousands of disenfranchised supporters, I feel bitter that the criminally corrupt media of this country has been allowed by successive greedy and gutless governments to freely conspire together to stop Football's progress and the role of the equally greedy and gutless FFA leadership in this conspiracy has been deplorable. My fervent hope is that once he exits the game, Football's duped stakeholders unite and band together to begin a huge class action in the courts to go after this two faced charlatan and his personal assets to recover the hundreds of millions of dollars that he has cost the sport over the last 10 years of his disastrous leadership!

What sort of due diligence does the FFA do on potential owners...the Bakries are supposed to be Indonesian billionaires, but how can the FFA verify these facts? Do they ask for financial statements, bank statements, details of properties, etc...it just seems that so guys can just pack up their toys and leave when they like...leaving players, fans, stadium owners, out of pocket...how can all the soccer fans on the Gold Coast and Townsville support their teams now? Maybe the FFA should be at least one of two things: - Start asking for bank guarantees (say maybe $10M??) similar to what the Newcastle Knights did with the Big Tink...I remember there was a lot of animosity towards the previous Knights boss about this insistence, but imagine what would the situation would be like without the bank guarantee! - Limit the amount one owner can hold to maybe 20% of the equity in a club, similar to Melbourne Victory (who funnily enough are the most successful and wealthy club in Australia) - this can stop the likes of the Bakries, the Palmers, the Tinklers from financially destroying clubs

Waz - how come you mention twitter in particular? i have twitter but not facebook - though my wife does and there seems to be the same amount of activity with Brisbane Roar facebook

No I'm not sure large presence is the right word. the media coverage comes and goes - it got better about 3 years ago when there was a change of sports editor. i know the main football writer so heard it straight from him that his stories used to have their angle changed to be negative. then we had a good patch. at the moment I think it is waning. as posts below have alluded to - there is the market for football here, i consider the Bakries really screwed things up. we had a prime opportunity in the last 4 years in terms of marketing. at least last season we cracked more than 11,000 full season members, maybe around 12k. so that was a good effort. i just wouldn't want football and the Roar just to be considered an afterthought. they are far more than that but never really enough was done to capitalise. connecting with existing football fans and players needs to improve though. the whole last year has been a bit of a disaster though and caused some damage.

There's no doubt that Brisbane is a big enough city to support all these professional football teams (plus some). Perth is a smaller city, and supports two AFL clubs (with attendances for both around 35,000), the Force and the Glory (which are capable of becoming a big club again, like they were in the NSL).

The focus has to be to convert those people already connected with Football - we don't need to beat the other codes to be successful. Reds and Broncos both averaged 33,000 not too long ago, in the same stadium in the same season. That's enough to suggest that success for one code doesn't automatically take fans away from another. The Lions in AFL had an average of over 30,000 with the smallest playing bass of any code (I think they were smaller than union at the time but might be wrong) so again, large crowds will follow when you get the product right - Lions had and still do plenty of game day advertising in TV, radio, press as well as match day events (Roar do nothing outside Twitter). So with a large playing base and better engagement it will convert to match day attendance, it does already for big games, it's just never been done outside of season one maybe!?!

It's a very good point nordster. People often use the word "investment" - but clearly, how can any intelligent person view it as an investment when at the end of the day, you actually own nothing - the FFA can take it away from you and re-sell it to the next bloke. In the majority of cases, owning an FFA license has added up to the right to lose lots of money over a designated period. For the next owner coming in to buy the Roar license (more than likely directly from the FFA), they will have it in the back of their minds that even after three championships in four seasons, the Roar still lost millions of dollars and the owner ended up with nothing.

Yep, the FFA step in and assume control then facilitate a sale, much as they did with Tinkler and Newcastle. Brisbane have a lot of potential for investors and some of the sale prices quoted are very high.

Fair enough Waz. Pretty tough to beat the other codes in Brisbane, however you should look to be latching onto that football demographic that you have. No doubt as Brisbane grows as a city there will be more room to do this.

I'm pretty sure that AAMI Park was mainly built because of Melbourne Victory. It was also expanded to 30,000 seats because of them. Storm and Rebels were just extra reasons to go along with it. But my point is that in Melbourne you have AFL, then daylight, then Melbourne Victory would be one of the next biggest clubs in the city. The fact that AFL fears football so much is probably a compliment more than anything. Same as in Sydney with WSW and SFC. There is always decent new coverage here on them, and the AFL/RU are no real threat in terms of causing us any problems. RL is traditionally number one, however it does not have a monopoly or anything like that. NSW government is also always supporting football projects. I would say football would be the number two sport here if you add up all the criteria. Some of the things I have heard today and previously over the way the Queensland media and government looked at Brisbane Roar and football in general as a professional sport in Australia, is what prompted me to ask the question. But if you say Brisbane Roar and football has a large presence in the market, then fair enough.

SVB - I wouldn't actually argue with what you've said, Roar for whatever reason have failed to convert a great footballing product and success on the field into bums on seats. Every other footballing code has managed to average 30k+ during periods of success whilst the Roars best ranges from 16-18k (and to be fair both AFL and Union have seen crowds fall dramatically with poor on field performance recently but those crowds have fallen to levels football would consider good). I don't think it's an issue with football as such in the city, the challenge as I see it is firstly we've had very, very poor owners/management at Roar for over 5 years. If you look back at this forum over the past 12-18 months you'll see plenty of Roar fans being critical in this area; secondly we've got the same challenge as the FFA in converting those people that play soccer into supporters of the A League, soccer is the most popular paricupation sport in Brisbane so how do we convert that? As an example my kids club has 1,000 playing members all U18 and sits 6km from Suncorp stadium and yet we've had zero interaction from Roar in over 3 years ... now those kids, plus parents, best friends and siblings represents a potential 5,000 bums on seats, just up the road from us there are 7 other clubs including the Lions with over 20,000 members. In Brisbane we do not need to convert RL, RU, or AFL fans to watching soccer - we just need to convert the soccer community to watch soccer. Finally, there's 2 million+ people in Brisbane and the vast majority don't go and watch ANY live sport - there's work to be done in cooperation with the other codes to get more people to visit Suncorp/Gabba eg an 8 game pass with 4 games for the Reds and 4 for the Roar might work. But the starting point in all this has to be decent owners, we haven't had any for quite some time now!