A-League cannot grow unless biased media views change

The A-League started with a bang with a lot of hype - but finding it tough now 11 years in. As an Roar fan I find it frustrating that the League is its own worst enemy. To start with instead of trying to attract themselves to one broadcast partner why not multiple. Sell the games off to Seven, Ten and the ABC (that last one might be hard as they are trying their hardest not to cover sport) along with Fox. Could rotate the Grand Final each year. Additionally I'm not sure what the long-term vision of the A-league is. The J-League when they set themselves up had a 100 year vision - the A-League could learn from this. The J-League started with one League expanded to two and twenty plus years in just started a third tier comp. The A-league needs to have a vision for what it wants before it can start to rectify its issues.

Squizz - you need to be careful about your generalisation. There is in NSW a far greater presence than RL in Victoria - clearly. The old 'Barassi' line - we know that from roughly the Murrumbidgee down, through Wagga, Canberra down to the border including Albury is very healthy Australian (Rules) Football territory. Such that the Sydney Swans have had very good quality NSW born/bred captains since back in the 1980s - Denis Carroll (Albury), Paul Kelly (Wagga), Brett Kirk (Albury) and Jarrad McVeigh (Sydney). Contrast to the Melbourne Storm with one Vic rep full stop in the senior team (and he's a kiwi heritage I suspect so probably not a 'conversion' story). The Media issue is largely around running national programs from Sydney - it feels like it should be local Sydney content only but for the national audience it has to present differently. Were the Sydney based news to try to present to WA, SA and Vic that the biggest national story was some guy being unavailable for NSW City vs Country then you know what viewers will do.

#Ian Football is clearly defined as any of the codes of 'Football' that use either spherical or ellipsoid/oval balls. 'Real football' - is any of the above. Anything else is self inflating delusion. The irony of those such as yourself is that the pre-eminent publication in the UK for soccer is titled 'World Soccer' - even the esteemed Les Murray (he once of the FIFA ethics committee - that's an oxymoron) - a few years back cited his first edition copy of 'World Soccer' as his most prized possession - and I doubt he'd scribbled over 'soccer' with 'real football' in black texta but perhaps he might have.

This article illustrates what Rebecca Wilson is trying to achieve with domestic football in Australia, " explain or depict it as unsafe and violent "... The most ethnically diverse sport in Australia also suffers the most commercially in Australia ..

Don't forget Canberra has had a team in the women's national football league (WLeague) from day 1 in 2007.

Well all the interesting talk about BBL expansion - Netball Australia has officially invited 'Expressions of Interest ' in new franchises for the 2017 season of the ANZ Championship -one of the front runners is Canberra -so Netball might well be the Sport that gets in first in tapping the Capital/South Coast area market -more power to them I say :-)

Australia’s world rankign in Rugby Leaue – top ten Only 3 nations play, New Zealand above Aussies, 1/5 of OZ population Rugby Union – top ten New Zealand twice world champion 1/5 of OZ population Cricket – Top ten Only about 8 cricket countries Netball – top ten Australia has played new Zealand in the last 10 World cup Finals. Football/Soccer – < top 50

Australia's world rankign in Rugby Leaue - top ten Rugby Union - top ten Cricket - Top ten Netball - top ten Football/Soccer - < top 50 Serbia is better at Football than australia.. which has a population of under 1/3 of australia's

When I was growing up NRL was Rugby League, there was Rugby Union but there was no such thing as AFL, it was Australian Rules Football, played in the a few southern states and reasonably strong in the Hills District of NSW and a couple of other niches. Football was both Football and Soccer. I'm not a code warrior, I enjoy most sports - but I am sick of the media shoving AFL down our throat in NSW, It has never been the major sport in NSW but more often than not it leads the sports news. This is not a new phenomena. It has been happening for at least 35 years, before Australian Rules was to the point where it is now in NSW. i.e. when Ross Lindsay was involved in the Hills District Australian Rules and before South Melbourne morphed into the Sydney Swans. I am sure many Victorians would quickly grow sick of it if NRL was the lead couple of stories in sport each day, whether in season or not. So yes - the media is biased and has been for years. I just can't understand why the FTA networks that show the NRL in NSW also follow the trend. Bizarre.

A good post Asanchez and for the most part I agree with you. I don't agree with your point about the PFA putting themselves in front of the game. Both the FFA and the PFA came to an agreement which satisfied both parties. To be fair to the PFA they could have been more aggressive in their stance considering that they agreed to a wage freeze since the previous TV deal. In other words when the tv deal of 40m per year was negotiated they effectively didn't get an increase. There is no way they will miss out this time, hence why it was written into the CBA agreement. A lot of football supporters don't see it that way because the footballers themselves are an easy target. Everyone assumes that they are on huge money, they're not. When you consider how scarce their skills are and how limited the places for football players are you can understand why they should be paid more. If it was an easy job everyone would do it.

I agree with this headline to some extent, but football needs to master it's own domain before it starts worrying about media treatment. I've avidly followed the game for decades in Oz, and around the world, and there's definitely people in positions of power, media and otherwise that don't want football to grow and succeed, that's just a fact. And I don't think much of it is prejudice, it's just people and organisations protecting their patch. Sports and sports media are a business these days. But things like the constant media beat ups, to the massive disproportionate police presence at many games, and the huge gap in funding that exists, particularly at the grassroots level where our game flounders in comparison to other sports, when 3 to 4 times more kids (boys and girls) play the round ball game, tells me that our game has a long way to go on many levels. However, besides all that, the game and its administrators need to help themselves. I believe the FFA has really dropped the ball yet again these last couple of seasons, and needs to wake up and smell the roses. The product is decent, and is getting better every year, crowds are good but they could be better and TV ratings are in decline. Having said this, the Fox ratings this season are approx 8% down, so I wouldn't say it's panic stations just yet. But it's definitely a time to reflect on what the game is doing well and also not so well. I would argue that the FFA have had as much of an impact on the A-league's overall interest, crowds and TV ratings this season, than the BBL has. The sheer plethora of negative issues, which started all the way in the offseason, which the FFA has either incompetently botched, not sorted out, or left alone and allowed to fester have been simply embarrassing. We've had the on again-off again sale of the Newcastle Jets, which has completely wrecked their season. The ongoings at the Brisbane Roar and their ownership issues, which almost derailed their entire club and this season, had it not been for them doing so well on the pitch. However they did lose about 7000 members from last season to this one, which are massive numbers and big dollars lost by the Roar this season. The FFA haven't advertised or marketed the league anywhere near enough this season. The complete lack of media and advertising strategy this season has been a big balls up. We should be advertising heavily every season without fail, especially in this market. The ridiculous and public stoush between the FFA and the PFA, over the collective bargaining agreement, which ended up also getting the Matildas in the papers for all the wrong reasons, and also got the Socceroos offside with some people out in the west, pulling out of engagement opportunities with the fans because of the PFA, was a huge PR disaster. Need I mention that the Socceroos are Asian Cup champions, have qualified for the last 3 World Cups and don't yet have a major sponsor. Anyways I digress, but you get the drift! That was an absolute farce, where the PFA actually put themselves in front of the game itself. And I'm sure the FFA didn't win any admirers during this time either. And who can forget the article by Rebecca Wilson, and the boycotts by the fan groups. That was a massive low point this season. I think that may well become a turning point in the years to come. The FFA should've backed the 99% of fans that do the right thing every week, but stayed silent, and literally paid the price, when thousands of fans either didn't turn up or left early in protest. All these issues, together with other smaller details added in, like steep FFA Cup Final ticket prices and ridiculous kick off times in extreme heat in North Queensland and in Western Australia, have all either been directly or indirectly the fault of the FFA. They have had a stinker, particularly in the last 12 months. In other corporations, heads would've rolled for this incompetence. But David Gallop and Damien de Bohun have kept their jobs for now, so let's see what they can come up with and do for the game. So people can talk about the BBL, or the lack of hype this season supposedly due to missing big name marquee players and the like, but you need to get the foundations right first, and the FFA simply hasn't done that, they've actually gone backwards this season, and this is showing in the crowds, the ratings and the overall hype this season. Del Piero or the Wanderers can't come around every year. They need to pull their finger out...

Where I'm from in western Sydney, it used to be that if you said you were going to or playing "football", you meant Rugby league. Now they refer to the 13 a-side code as "league" or "NRL". So far as I can tell when you refer to 'football". people around here take it that you are referring to Association football.

. . . spellcheck can only do so much...

So Steve - In Straya football is BOTH AFL and NRL….how can that be??????? You are in a dreamworld as usual. I love it that real football being called football irks people like you. I know no one who calls rugby league 'football'…even when league was my preferred sport to watch. No one called it football. No one.

Perry Bridge - rewriting the history of football again. Perhaps give us a spiel about how Aussie Rules is the hardest to play - must be - because of all the performance enhancers needed to play it. Oh, and its exciting. Just ask half of the population of one country.

That's $20M more than they would pay for that rubbish called Aussie Rules Fumbleball

Good comment. Imagine too, if the AIS had run such a programme for its athletes.

I guess they call both rugby codes football, as they were derived from football. T20 and ODI were derived from cricket, but there are different skills needed, and different fans are attracted to each. But it's all a bit irrelevant anyway. My thinking is that cricket and rugby could learn from football on an international level. Football leaves them all, and AFL too, way, way behind. It's just the A League that lags in popularity, and most certainly the game itself can not and will not change for the A League.

Suggest you turn spellcheck on before posting.

the ffa is courruopt and does not want Australian football to be number one sport in this country. The so called cricket verually does not exist in the world. FFA make money for it's eymploees , it does not give a rubbish about A