Nine axe NRL Footy Show after 25 years

There are some excellent female sports presenters: Kellie Underwood, Yvonne Sampson, Tara Rushton, Neroli Meadows etc. however if Channel 9 replaced Erin Molan with a cardboard cutout or Sophie Monk nobody would notice any difference. What Erin Molan knows about Rugby League could be written on the head of a pin!

Which class did you write that for?

It's nowhere near the Matty Johns Show.

No one watched it cause Fatty left...

Heh, Heh ! Yes, Hard Yards, reading back my own words I can see how you gained that impression! I'm not a PR man and those were my own thoughts, which possibly were shared by many 20 years ago but from the comments here, apparently not shared by many today!

About time this show get axed. Good xmas present for me! NRL Footy Show - since Fatty got dumped and Erin took over as host, many people have stopped watching this show. Some didn't like the format, others cannot stand the host. Erin Molan was a horrible host and I didn't know why they picked her. Beau Ryan's jokes have been flat. I hope that AFL Footy Show will go next. This show was 5 years late. Since James Brayshaw departed Nine and Craig Hutchison became next host, many people have stopped watching AFL Footy Show, including myself. Craig Hutchison was boring, and spouts out Victorian bias from his mouth. But it wasn't Craig. Dave Hughes's jokes and horrid voice made me turn tv off, Bec Madden's constant Geelong-centric ego was more than enough to turn my TV off, Billy Brownless and Garry Lyon had a massive relationship affair that caused Garry Lyon to suffer from mental health, and Sam Newman has been hit with on-air incidents on the show.

Article within an article, nice

Exactly

Great copy. Which PR agency are you from?

Bernie- If you can’t restrict your comment to less words, you should write an article instead. Seriously

Chanel 9 have nothing. They normally put on Hamish and Andy who are about as funny as 2 f**ts in a jar. In fact most other sports presenters on all channels are pretty woeful.

Glenn, I was all for a Rugby League based show that was fun and entertaining. But take a look at a studio once a week show like Have you Been Paying Attention. Funny and entertaining because the people on it are professional comedians, presenters and entertainers. The Footy Show was current and ex football players, not trained performers. All of whom would probably be good to have a beer with and could tell a good yarn, but it isn't television. If The Footy Show circa 1999 was piloted today, it wouldn't get picked up - and that is saying something considering what is considered TV these days... That is 19 years ago and it only ever went down hill

I think Ch 9 in general is hopelessly out of touch with modern Australia, Ch 7 is too but they seem to have more rusted on viewers, but majority of them would be 50+ i reckon.

Courtesy Crikey Australian sport, especially NRL and AFL, is becoming more and more numbers-driven. Tackles, distances run, tries, goals, kicks, handballs, contested marks, line breaks, height, weight, speed — you name it — are measured and plotted in the course of a season. It’s the difference between winning and losing. TV is just as numbers-driven and has been thus for much longer than sport — since soon after ratings began measuring performance. In the end, in TV, ratings (and the demographics of the viewing audience) end up making the decisions. On Tuesday it was the 25 year old NRL Footy Show’s turn to be brought down by numbers. Nine says it is replacing the NRL show with two programs that will run after the NRL games on Thursday and Friday. The NRL show was already sort of doing that this year after the Thursday night NRL game, but the format was fiddled with, the personnel changed. Nine knew the NRL show and its AFL counterpart, the AFL Footy Show, were in trouble when it started combing the two programs under the same ratings coding. In previous years, and especially for the grand final shows, the two shows had separate codings, meaning you could see the number of viewers for each show. Because of Nine’s lack of confidence in the ratings for the NRL show, its figures were buried in the data and hard to extract and present precisely. But the rough indication was that at best the NRL show’s audience for the final episode (and centrepiece program of the year) collapsed — from 460,000 in 2017 to less than half of that this year. In Sydney and Brisbane, the two biggest NRL markets, the combined audience fell from 285,000 in 2017 to just 129,000 a week ago. Not having a Queensland team in this year’s grand final undoubtedly hurt the ratings. As Crikey pointed out on Monday, the TV audience for the NRL grand final was the lowest for 10 years. So while the tired, old, blokey format of party tricks certainly would have played a part in the NRL Footy Show’s decline, the gradual, overall loss of interest in the NRL also contributed. Nine management was slow to pick up on this. They revamped the show at the start of the season, but didn’t do enough work to settle it down into a consistent format. Production values were weak and it wasn’t until they started getting more involvement from old stars such as Gus Gould, Wally Lewis, Andrew Johns and Brad Fittler that the show started to become interesting. That was action that should have been taken three years ago. Importantly, the NRL Footy Show did not have a real rival, and that allowed Nine’s managements to arrogantly take viewers for granted rather than take action to refresh the program. Take a look at the numbers: the NRL show saw a 32% slide in total people in 12 months (from 197,000 in 2017 to 133,000 this year). There was a 28% slump in Sydney and a rather nasty 39% slide in Brisbane. Among women, the slide was larger — 41% — and even in the core male groups, the drop was 26%. It’s no wonder Nine pulled out the axe yesterday. Will we see something similar with the AFL Footy Show? In 2017, The AFL show averaged 293,000 against rival The Front Bar’s 222,000 (in Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth, the three main AFL metro markets). This year, the AFL Footy Show’s audience fell in those three markets to an average of 231,000 (down 21%) with the Melbourne audience (the AFL heartland) falling to just 161,000 — a drop of 20%. The Front Bar’s audience rose to 312,000 — a rise of 90,000, or 40%. The reality is that Nine should really be lopping both the Footy Shows and starting again. Eddie McGuire and his production team have run out of ideas. Perhaps the only way Nine can give itself a chance is to poach Mick Molloy, host of The Front Bar, and some of the production team from Seven, swallow their pride, and take a step back.

Since they launch the new look it became hard to comment and that put people off quickly.

It was a great show in its day, I remember buying the 10yr anniversary DVD which is all the funniest highlights. But times change and the footy show was too slow to react, but the time they attempted to it was too late. Or maybe the fact that their newer talent being Molan and Beau Ryan were duds. I think Matt Johns shows on Fox cover both the football and funny business well, then you have the professor for the relaxed vibes and Vossys The Fan is a great show! I can’t stand NRL360 with that peanut Kent as host. What a sour piece of work he is.

That and this website is circling the drain as well. Not as many comments as there used to be

The axing is as much a symptom of Leagues bigger struggle with it's image as anything else. The format and the legacy of the presenters style (prior to Erin) was too much baggage for it to continue floating. Australia is growing out of 'larikinism' and in the main no longer venerates and lifts footy-boofheads-behaving-poorly onto a pedestal as 'the best people' like we once did. They aren't and they never were. Only 14 comments by Roarers reveals how few here give a rats-ass about The Footy Show. It's time is over.

i think it's good the game can laugh at itself and not take itself so seriously. I would like to see a magazine style show that really focuses on highlights, statistics, top tries, top tackles of the week, players who are hot/cold etc. Something you would get in America. Too many NRL shows are focused on off field controversy or speculation about the future of coaches and players and opinions of the dopey presenters.

Oh, please, get a life you Roarers! Some of you wouldn't be happy unless Rugby League programmes like the Footy show were presented like the pontifications of Harvard Law School debates by boring, sombre faced commentators who take themselves far more seriously than the subject requires. Who wants that at 8.30pm during the working week? The Footy show presented the fun aspects of the game and its players. Yes, sometimes it was corny and amateurish, but that was part of its charm. We got some insight into what players were like off the field, without all of the politically correct rubbish which is a feature of other shows. The show raised a lot of money for charity and suburban RL clubs. Interesting and important aspects of the game were discussed from a lot of different perspectives. I thought the presenters did a great job and were genuine personalities. Erin Molan is gorgeous and her football nous is at least as good as the other presenters and better than many of them. The Big Marn was charming and empathetic with his interviews with the young footballers. What we are left with now are dull, excessively earnest, pay to view shows like RL360 on Fox presented by men in dark suits, who you would think were debating the future of Western Civilisation. You're welcome to those, but I think we've lost an aspect of the off field game which was, overall, very enjoyable and worthwhile.