The first round of the FFA Cup has thrown up plenty of subplots and potential upsets.
Former NSL heavyweights Melbourne Knights host Adelaide United. A large banana skin for the Central Coast Mariners at Maitland. South Hobart open their doors to Marconi Stallions. There’s history, romance and giant-killing potential.
Where the Cup will be broadcast, though, is another matter.
Last season, when Sydney were drawn against Rockdale City Suns, Fox Sports had an impressive pre-game build-up that afforded the same respect to the Suns as it did to Sydney, before touchline reporter Daniel Garb tucked into a pre-match cevapi.
It was a broadcast by people who were fully immersed in Australian football culture, and all the better for it.
This year, you wonder if Fox’s budget would stretch to a post-match Skopsko for Garb, let alone a full build-up. And given how closely intertwined Foxtel and Australian football are, Foxtel’s financial problems become Football Federation Australia’s problems.
The pay TV provider lost $417 million in 2018, and its operating expenditure was $2.56 billion. Of that, $800 million was related to sports rights and production.
Any plans Foxtel has to dominate the pay TV market are looking as likely as the Mariners storming to the Premier’s Plate next season. Their financial situation also means that the $346 million that Football Federation Australia sold their TV rights for becomes an even more impressive piece of negotiating with each passing stock market statement.
But despite this deal, there’s still plenty of reasons to be concerned. In the words of Fox Sports pundit Mark Bosnich, A-League viewing figures have fallen off a cliff.
And while the FFA Cup has hit some highs, even the basic cost of production during the early rounds isn’t cheap. This makes football especially vulnerable, as the broadcaster looks to scale back on production costs.
In any other market, there would be free-to-air broadcasters queuing up to take football rights. But this is Australia and, domestically, football isn’t the biggest show in town.
This is why there are plenty of advocates for football going its own way. On the Daily Football Show, co-host Tony Persoglia pushed heavily for moving the FFA Cup rights to the likes of Twitter and YouTube, on the basis that the majority of fans already inhabit these platforms.
This is already the model at a state level. Many NPL games are streamed on Facebook and YouTube, with a degree of qualified success.
At the start of the current NPL season, Matthew Galea from Football Today (and now of The Roar) noted that around 10-12,000 people tuned into Victorian state league games. But Galea is also correct in contextualising these numbers – not all of the 13,000 who clicked on the South Melbourne vs Dandenong City Facebook live stream were viewers.
Streams of state league matches, like those involving Apia Leichhardt, have proved popular. (AAP Image/Brendan Esposito)
Facebook will typically count a view as three seconds, which is akin to me quickly changing the channel whenever I see Ed Sheeran on my TV screen. I may have seen Ed grinning from behind his mop of ginger hair, but that doesn’t mean I want to stick around and watch the game.
Marketing expert Mark Ritson has also debunked the idea that all viewers are migrating online. At the 2018 World Cup, England’s opening group game drew 3.2 million streaming requests from the UK broadcaster. That’s streaming requests, not average viewers across the 90 minutes, which stood at 13.7 million for the TV broadcast.
In fact, Ritson suggested that typically online streaming accounts for around four per cent of the total TV audience. That number has probably grown in the past 12 months, but is unlikely to have shifted so significantly that streaming matches has overtaken TV viewership.
These numbers matter, especially for a tournament like the FFA Cup. Last year’s FFA Cup final attracted 78,000 and was the top rated show on pay TV. Rockdale City Suns vs Sydney FC didn’t make the top 20 programs for that evening, so would have had an audience of less than 33,000.
If we apply the Ritson rule, then we’d be netting out around 3120 for the final and somewhere under 1320 for Rockdale vs Sydney. These are probably conservative numbers for a free streaming service, but aren’t too far from current NPL figures, and fall a long way short of the available TV audience.
Moving online isn’t without its risks. Would, for example, a partnership between Twitter and the FFA Cup actually make any money for either party? Sports broadcasting isn’t cheap, as Foxtel can attest to. And secondly, how will new audiences discover the game?
Dive in the comments on any piece around broadcasting on The Roar or Twitter and you’ll see plenty of people highlighting the fact that they’ve ditched Foxtel for Kayo Sports, Fox’s sport streaming service.
But these are existing, hardcore football fans who will actively spend their own time discussing the game online. They’re not casual fans who’ve spotted a cup game while browsing their programme guide and decided to tune in. And the harder you make it for a casual audience to discover and tune in, the lower your numbers will be.
Human beings, even sports fans, are nothing if not lazy.
Even successful sports suffer when their audience is constricted. Earlier this month, an average of 550,000 viewers were tuning into England’s Cricket World Cup matches. In contrast, 4.6 million viewers watched England defeat Scotland in the Women’s World Cup on BBC One. Cricket in the UK has suffered due to being locked away on Sky Sports.
Fanatics may watch it, casual and new audiences less so.
The FFA Cup may, at least in the early phases, benefit from the novelty on Twitter or YouTube. But if the A-League and the FFA Cup are to attract casual viewers or entice new fans to tune in, they’ll need to think bigger. And for all the talk of cord0cutting, that means a partner who can reach the largest audience possible, which at this stage looks something like TV.
Streaming is the landscape of the future but it isn’t what is currently squeezing the life out of Foxtel. That can be put down to good old fashioned accounting: namely paying too much money, borrowing too much money, and not anticipating competitors will stop them making as much money as they need to service the debt.
Ultimately football is not what will sell more Foxtel subscriptions. Steve Corica and Tony Popovic battling for the Iron Toilet Seat is a lot less compelling than Daenerys Targaryen and Jon Snow killing for the Iron Throne.
And if wider Australia has yet to be sold on the joys of cevapi on a Tuesday night in Rockdale, they’re unlikely to actively seek it out on YouTube.
Gary Andrews
Roar Rookie
Nemesis, I suspect if we discussed this over a beer we'd find plenty of common ground. A few bits to try and answer (as you say, there's a lot here): Hi Gary, you’ve raised a lot of points in that reply & I’ll attempt to address each point. 1) It’s unlikely that Telstra & KayoSport (or OptusSport) will ever release viewing data because it serves no purpose for them to do so. Investors/shareholder & their bankers/lenders are not interested in viewing numbers and, if anything, releasing the data weakens their negotiating power when the next broadcast rights are put to tender. --- Yeah, would agree with that. I suspect from the A League it's not hugely high though. 2) If you’re a casual sports fan you’ll probably keep Kayo 12 months of the year because you casually watch all sports. I’m not a casual sports fan. I only subscribe to Kayo for Aleague so I cancelled my subscription at the end of H&A season. All the finals were on 10Bold. I doubt casual sports fans watch Aleague. Why would they? There’s nothing in the Aleague to keep casual sports fans excited, other than the Grand Final. --- I suspect you're a bit atypical of a Kayo subscriber, but I'd wager the majority of Kayo's 300,000+ subscribers don't subscribe solely for the A League. Again, though, I don't disagree that the regular season doesn't have much to keep people engaged - even if I thought some of the individual games in the season just gone were some of the most entertaining I've seen in recent seasons. 3) The Aleague audience will grow if we give the football community a reason to engage with the competition. This means opening up the competition to all clubs via Promotion & Relegation. The average viewing won’t increase, but the number of people viewing over the Top 2 Division will be far greater than just 12 clubs in 1 Division. --- Yes, I'd agree with this. I'd also include the grassroots game in here. There's a lot of players of the game at junior level. 4) Social media doesn’t limit the audience. PayTV limits the audience because 70% of Aussies reject PayTV and they’ve always rejected it for the past 25 years. By contrast Youtube/Facebook/Twitter reaches nearly 100% of Aussies. And the younger demographic is more likely to engage with LiveStreaming than linear FTA TV -- Younger demographic yes, and agree on the PayTV limitations. But just because a vast number of Australians are on social media, it doesn't mean they're going to tune into football. If anything, it has the potential to push the game further to the margins. 5) Conversion doesn’t work. We’ve tried to convert fans for 14 years, and all it’s done is alienate the traditional football community. The new independent A-League needs to focus purely on engaging the hard-core football fans. The ones who get up in the middle of the night to watch footabll. The ones who play the game. The ones who live & breathe the Game. Once we’ve engaged all of these people, we can then set our sights on trying to win over people who hate the Game because there’s not enough goals, they don’t like offside, the players are weak, etc etc. --- This is a much larger conversation! I don't think it's a binary decision of converting people who hate the game - they're at the one extreme of the scale. But there's plenty of people in between who wouldn't describe themselves as football fans but may tune into a Socceroos game or the Grand Final. Again, a whole conversation about how we bring back in the hard core fans alienated, but at some point you'll need to expand the game beyond this audience.
Gary Andrews
Roar Rookie
Hi Waz, So what's the solution? If you take that last line - they generally don't want to watch an entire match - to its logical conclusion, it suggests we should pack up and go home because there's no audience to watch games. It feels a bit defeatist. I do totally agree that the viewing landscape is changing rapidly. But that's a big statement to say they don't want FTA or STV and I'm not sure the data backs that up. Kayo subscriptions are over 300,000 according to a Roy Morgan report this week. Last year 3.4m tuned into the Socceroos v France. The Matildas attracted an audience in excess of the A League Grand Final. All of which were more than Kayo's total subscriber base. And other sports top the FTA ratings - even if there is a steady decline in audiences overall. But not enough to suggest that it should be discarded completely. Similarly, moving to streaming only moves football from having access to a wide if casual audience to one that is potentially larger on paper but tends to be smaller when the numbers are counted. Typically, the deals seem to be a little better for the social networks than the game. I don't disagree that the FFA and the A League should be thinking beyond standard TV as part of their long term strategy. But that's only valid if they have a product to sell - which means in the short term, the game still needs reach. And in the short term that still means factoring TV into the mix.
Waz
Roar Rookie
Gary, Part of your problem is you’re arguing to try and reach a new audience with old techniques. If you want to get to the new audience, give them what they want. They don’t want FTA and STV and they generally don’t want to watch an entire match.
Nemesis
Guest
Hi Gary, you've raised a lot of points in that reply & I'll attempt to address each point. 1) It's unlikely that Telstra & KayoSport (or OptusSport) will ever release viewing data because it serves no purpose for them to do so. Investors/shareholder & their bankers/lenders are not interested in viewing numbers and, if anything, releasing the data weakens their negotiating power when the next broadcast rights are put to tender. 2) If you’re a casual sports fan you’ll probably keep Kayo 12 months of the year because you casually watch all sports. I’m not a casual sports fan. I only subscribe to Kayo for Aleague so I cancelled my subscription at the end of H&A season. All the finals were on 10Bold. I doubt casual sports fans watch Aleague. Why would they? There’s nothing in the Aleague to keep casual sports fans excited, other than the Grand Final 3) The Aleague audience will grow if we give the football community a reason to engage with the competition. This means opening up the competition to all clubs via Promotion & Relegation. The average viewing won’t increase, but the number of people viewing over the Top 2 Division will be far greater than just 12 clubs in 1 Division 4) Social media doesn’t limit the audience. PayTV limits the audience because 70% of Aussies reject PayTV and they’ve always rejected it for the past 25 years. By contrast Youtube/Facebook/Twitter reaches nearly 100% of Aussies. And the younger demographic is more likely to engage with LiveStreaming than linear FTA TV 5) Conversion doesn’t work. We’ve tried to convert fans for 14 years, and all it’s done is alienate the traditional football community. The new independent A-League needs to focus purely on engaging the hard-core football fans. The ones who get up in the middle of the night to watch footabll. The ones who play the game. The ones who live & breathe the Game. Once we’ve engaged all of these people, we can then set our sights on trying to win over people who hate the Game because there’s not enough goals, they don’t like offside, the players are weak, etc etc.
Gary Andrews
Roar Rookie
Hi Nemesis, think we’re coming at slightly different points of the argument here - although I don’t disagree with a lot of what you’ve written, especially around the Kayo and Telstra viewing figures that are unlikely to be released any time soon (anybody from Kayo or Telstra fancy giving us some insight?). The way I’m looking at it isn’t necessarily Foxtel’s business model or subscriptions vs pay TV - the former is... troubled; the latter raises interesting questions about ease of cancelling (ie if you’re a casual football fan but are fanatical about union or AFL, would you keep your Kayo subscription during the close season?). But to flip question a different way: what’s actually going to grow the audience for the game? It’s not people who’ve tuned in for 30 seconds on a streaming service, no matter whether they’ve paid for a subscription. And while Kayo is hardly going to drop any sports or competitions now, it will get the data that tells them whether it’s worth sticking with. Netflix’s more ruthless recent cancelling spree is a sign of how this could pan out. And if 10 has cropped criticism for sticking the matches on 10 Bold with minimum promotion, how will casual fans find games that require a bit more effort to hunt down the live stream? By rushing to embrace social platforms, are we actually limiting our audience and tacitly saying football is a more minority interest. There’s no doubt TV viewing IS changing (future trends of media and audience fragmentation is something I work with day in day out) but I’m not sure the landscape is at a stage where football can afford to dispense with traditional viewing models and broadcast altogether. By all means strategise for the future but not at the expense of the here and now. That said, the FFA Cup is probably one competition that it’s worth experimenting with, as there’s not too much to lose in the early rounds. May be a bit of an own goal to not have the semis and final on TV though. One last point. I realise that Roar readers are super involved and probably not representative of the wider, more casual audience for football in this country. We’re the ones who will take out a Kayo subscription solely for the A League. We’re probably not the people the FFA / Kayo / FOXTEL / YouTube / Twitter / whoever needs to convert from casual fans into full time fans.
anon
Roar Pro
A-League only attracts 20k viewers. Like I've said before, a vlogger with an iphone and gimbal can get 20k views. You don't need to send equipment and staff around the country if you want 20k views. Maybe get someone with a vlogging camera just shoot the game and publish it to you youtube. Just no market for FFA Cup soccer.
Nemesis
Guest
You can think whatever you want. There are only 2 line items relevant to Foxtel & those who provide capital needed by Foxtel to keep its doors open. In Nov 2018, when investors asked when they will begin to see the numbers turn around at Foxtel, this is what the CEO, Robert Thomson said: "Keep an eye both on ... a) the number of new customers and b) obviously the average revenue per user. " He didn't say: Keep an eye on the OzTAM TV ratings. He said: watch for Number of New Customers and the ARPU. Source: https://www.afr.com/business/media-and-marketing/tv/news-corp-ceo-robert-thomson-confident-of-foxtel-turnaround-in-face-of-challenges-20181108-h17o1d During summer, Foxtel got huge numbers watching BBL on PayTV. Massive viewing numbers. Bigger than AFL, or NRL, viewing. But, unfortunately for Foxtel, the BBL audience was simply the same subscribers who already bought Foxtel for AFL, or NRL, or Rugby. There were insignificant new subscribers. So, huge viewing numbers. But, insignificant revenue from the viewing. The only reason driving the existence of any commercial enterprise is to make money. If the enterprise isn't making money, the owners & investors will pull the plug and find better use for their capital.
Mister Football
Roar Guru
Apart from denying the obvious, not sure what point he is trying to make. To suggest that ratings on Pay TV don't matter is extraordinary. At a minimum, it informs two vital pieces of information: - what TV products consumers are interested in (pretty important bit of info for a broadcaster I would have thought); and - even if you want to argue there is no correlation between ratings and subscription revenue (an extraordinary claim to make), you don't reckon sponsors care? You reckon sponsors are going to ignore the 25k watching on Pay TV in favour of the 1k streaming?
Jimmy
Roar Guru
Good article Gary, you present both sides of the article well.
oldpsyco
Guest
The issue is that both Fox and FFA treat their "customers" like they are doing them a favour! Customers just don't see value in what is being dished up! Fox need to rethink their basic service. Television has and is changing, TV is no longer king! Radio went through it, now its TV's turn. NO one trusts FFA, and people are drifting away from the sport in protest! Things need to change, its not football. Football works around the world, and in smaller markets than Australia! FFA MUST realise they do NOT own football, never will, they are merely custodians.
Lionheart
Roar Rookie
read Nemesis post below
Lionheart
Roar Rookie
Thanks Nemesis. You've told us before and yet we don't listen and learn. Telstra must be seen as a competitor by Fox, yet they're partners, right? It's a funny world. Thanks again.
Nemesis
Guest
Very useful and important discussion pieces. Sadly, the writer - like the majority of people who discuss this topic - doesn't understand what drives the subscription TV market. The revenue generated by Subscription TV, or Subscription streaming, is not driven by "number of viewers". It is driven purely by "number of subscriptions". Only revenue from Free To The Viewer models - i.e. Free To Air Tv, or Free To Viewer Streaming (YouTube's free version, Twitter, Facebook) - is driven by "number of viewers" because Free Viewing platforms generate revenue from advertising. And Advertising revenue is driven by "number of viewers". So, Foxtel or Optus Sport, does not care about "number of viewers". They don't care if you watch, or don't watch. They don't care if you watch 90 minutes, or the final 5 minutes. They want your cash. And, to get your cash, Foxtel & Optus Sport need you to subscribe. They need you to just have enough interest in the content to pay a subscription each month. I don't know why people find it so hard to understand the basics of the PayTv vs FTA TV business model. It's basic common sense. You don't need an MBA to figure it out. In the 2018/19 A-League season, for the first time ever, over 12 million people had access to ALeague for free because they are Telstra mobile customers. Additionally, for the first time people were able to access A-League on a much cheaper Foxtel platform that doesn't publish its viewing numbers. So, until we know how many people are watching ALeague on Telstra and KayoSport, it's pointless & disingenuous to suggest "TV viewing for A-League has fallen". The truth is: No one knows what the true viewing number is for A-League any more, because no one is publishing the viewing figures. The only viewing figure published is the viewing on the most expensive PayTV platform. And, yes. That viewing number has fallen.
Waz
Roar Rookie
Let’s put if this way - Fox Sports won’t help figure this out, they’re still locked in to their old model And there has to be a shift in mentality - the number of viewers/size of audience is the historical metric but one viewer who comes and go’s five times in one stream is more valuable than 4 watching all the way through. Commercially football needs to figure this out , and quickly - we’re already a decade behind on this stuff.
Lionheart
Roar Rookie
There's been a lot written about TV deals but I'm not seeing a solution yet, to replace Fox. It'll be a great shame if the FFA Cup is not televised. Streaming would be better than no view at all, but it would still need advertising and no one seems to want to do advertising. What's the point in having national teams participating in world and regional tournaments if our national competitions are withering. We need to sort this mess out.
Mister Football
Roar Guru
As the author correctly points out: "Ritson suggested that typically online streaming accounts for around four per cent of the total TV audience. " What many people don't understand is that the TV audience is averaged across the full length of the show in question. The streaming numbers one often sees are an entirely different kettle of fish: anyone logging onto a particular site for at least 3 seconds. So for a typical A-League game getting around 25k in ratings on Fox, if the streaming numbers are calculated on the same basis as TV ratings are calculated, it's an additional 1,000 in ratings (which might equate to 15,000 watching for an average of 6 minutes). Obviously this number will grow with each passing year, but as the great Billy Preston once sang: nothing from nothing is nothing.