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Allianz Stadium may have signed off with a record attendance in the Roosters-Bunnies NRL clash, but in doing so it raised an interesting question. Why don’t those fans simply turn up every week?
There are a few myths around our sporting culture worth debunking, one of which is that the Australian sporting experience is somehow unique.
It’s not – but that never stops the inhabitants of a city like Sydney from using every excuse under the sun to explain why they don’t attend sporting events.
The main reason more fans don’t turn up at NRL games in the harbour city is because they couldn’t be bothered.
Now that we’ve got that self-evident truth out of the way, it’s worth examining how our sporting culture got to this juncture and what it means for the A-League.
It’s nice that 44,380 fans saw fit to watch the Sydney Roosters down their erstwhile local rivals the South Sydney Rabbitohs at a ground they once shared, but it’s not the only time they met at the old Sydney Football Stadium this season.
Back in April, a much smaller crowd of 15,242 occupied around one in every three seats at the venue for the traditional showdown. It ended up being the Roosters’ second-highest attended game at Allianz Stadium all season.
Why the big difference? Try starting with the fact that the game was on a Thursday night.
But having long ago made the decision that fans turning up at games was an irrelevance the NRL could do without, it’s been interesting to watch the hand wringing of late over the sight of empty stadiums.
Broadcast deals are the only thing the NRL has cared about for years, so they’re simply reaping the attendance figures they long ago sowed.
Why does any of this matter for the A-League? Well for starters the current head of Football Federation Australia is a former NRL bean counter.
And for the past few years the A-League has fallen into the same trap of treating paying spectators as ‘customers’ whose patronage can be taken for granted.
It never occurs to the decision-makers cracking down on active support what effect this might have – to use one example of an A-League public relations disaster – because most of these executives have never stood behind the goal or even paid to get into a stadium before.
And football is at an added disadvantage in Australia because many refuse to acknowledge that the sport even exists.
Three of the largest attendances at Allianz Stadium were for A-League grand finals, and until last night, the Round 2 clash between Sydney FC and Western Sydney Wanderers in October 2014 drew a bigger crowd than any rugby league game in the stadium’s 30-year history.
And while it was nice to see football mentioned in at least some of the eulogies for the old ground – particularly the Socceroos’ clash with Argentina and one Diego Maradona in 1993 – many in the mainstream media view the sport as little more than an inconvenient interloper.
That’s why there are calls to unveil a statue of former Roosters fullback Anthony Minichiello outside a rebuilt Sydney Football Stadium, but not – for example – Alex Brosque.
But this also illustrates another glaring problem. Not one A-League club owns their own stadium.
The first club that does – possibly one of expansion hopefuls Southern Expansion or Western Melbourne – will enjoy a clear advantage over the rest of the league.
(AAP Image/Darren England)
Unlike in countries where sporting attendance is culturally engrained, none of this means much until our administrators stop treating supporters as short-term targets first and potential lifelong fans second.
There’s not much incentive for parents to pass down the joy of live sport to their kids when they feel like nothing more than a chance to pad the metrics from the get-go.
Sydneysiders might be the most fickle sporting fans on the planet, but you can’t exactly blame them.
When faced with spending their hard-earned on being treated as an afterthought or watching on TV, it’s no wonder so many fans simply reach for the remote.