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Brendon Bolton keeps telling fans to be patient, as the Blues are going through a rebuild. While this is a problem for Carlton and their players – and frustrating for their fans – it’s a bigger problem for the AFL.
Club rebuilds are taking far too long and that will cause more problems than losing games, as members’ support via attending games is crucial for the game’s survival.
There are currently kids at school that have never seen some AFL clubs play finals. It sounds like the punchline to a joke, but these kids are the youngsters playing Auskick at halftime and falling in love with our game.
Unless these kids have strong family ties supporting these clubs, they aren’t going to start supporting a tema struggling to stay competitive. In the coming years, thet will be the ones paying for club memberships and tickets to the games.
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When these teams start to have success, they will get the token bandwagon fans, but they’re not what football is built on. A club needs the diehard fans, who buy their season tickets and go to every game – rain, hail or shine win, lose or draw.
Clubs that haven’t had much on-field success will struggle to build a strong membership base, which affects both ticket sales and the club’s ability to lure sponsors.
If, for example, the Suns can’t drive up ticket sales and acquire long-term sponsors, the AFL will have to look into whether the team is viable. The only way they are going to build this base is to have winning seasons, which brings the talk of priority picks to teams who haven’t played finals in a certain amount of years to the forefront.
These priority picks could be used as trade leverage to get more mature talent, which would improve the club’s list, and show members they are trying everything to get the side up the ladder.
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