The Roar
The Roar

Advertisement

Can you call yourself an A-League fan if you don't have Fox Sports?

11th October, 2018
Advertisement
Adelaide United fans celebrate. (AAP Image/James Elsby)
Expert
11th October, 2018
96
1472 Reads

So many A-League fans view Fox Sports as a charity service that you have to wonder about football’s long-term future on the network.

Let’s get the brickbats out of the way first.

No, I’m not paid by Fox Sports, nor do I receive any discount on my subscription.

Yes, I realise that Foxtel is expensive, and that not everyone can afford it.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk about a column I’ve considered writing at the start of every season for years.

Rumours of the A-League’s demise may be greatly exaggerated, but if there’s an inherent danger lurking around the corner, it’s the idea that someone else will pay for everything.

You see it everywhere these days. It’s the result of so many things – including this column – being made available on the internet for free.

This column exists because the advertising on the site helps pay for it, but I hear regularly from readers that if I didn’t write it, someone else would.

Advertisement

And they’d be expected to write it for free, judging by the number of A-League fans who make a point of admitting they never pay for any media they consume.

For a long time that has included fans who scour online forums and use VPN services to access illegal streams of A-League games.

The broadcast vision usually comes directly from Fox Sports itself.

Some of these fans engage in animated discussions about their A-League team of choice, and will often demand bigger signings and a better standard of football.

But they never seem to think where the money might come from to pay for it.

If there’s a flipside to this – and I’ve been in this position myself – it’s that many fans, particularly younger viewers, simply can’t afford a Foxtel subscription.

I can relate to that.

Advertisement

And when I came back to Australia from Japan and moved into a few different places before settling in, I didn’t sign up to Foxtel first thing – although I didn’t really need to, since I worked on the sports desk at the national broadcaster.

Cost, and the fact that younger people traditionally tend to share-house and move around more frequently than cantankerous middle-aged columnists like myself, are two factors working against Foxtel reaching a younger demographic.

And that doesn’t look like changing anytime soon now that Foxtel has just increased the price to new customers of its Foxtel Now streaming service.

They’ve also just paid millions of dollars to acquire cricket broadcasting rights – a sport traditionally watched by older, middle-class Aussie males – and seem determined to position themselves as a premium content provider, rather than a competitor to streaming services like Netflix. Or Optus Sports.

Keisuke Honda of Japan celebrates after scoring

Keisuke Honda is exactly the type of player the A-League needs. (Photo by Suhaimi Abdullah/Getty Images)

Plenty of A-League fans seem to think Optus is the logical next destination should Fox Sports ever pull the plug.

But the question is whether they would pay tens of millions of dollars per season to produce their own coverage, replete with local commentators and all?

Advertisement

A few A-League fans have been critical of Fox’s coverage of late, suggesting it suffers in comparison to the wall-to-wall coverage of competitions like the NRL.

They also generally fail to note that for the past two years Channel Nine’s former head of rugby league, Steve Crawley, has been calling the shots at Fox Sports.

Some of these are the same fans who get online every day to demand more A-League coverage in metro newspapers, before freely admitting they would never buy one.

So can we really demand better football coverage when so many fans admit they have no intention of paying for it?

I recognise that this is a sensitive topic, and that plenty of A-League fans prefer to watch the game on free-to-air TV or at the stadium instead.

But it’s a discussion the game needs to have.

Either Fox Sports is the A-League’s broadcast partner and we pay for the content, or football needs to start thinking about some alternative revenue streams.

Advertisement
close