Why football needs to be a winter sport

kept the league going a further sixteen years which is no mean feat...if you fair-dunkum believe switching to summer's what killed the NSL, then there's no helping you

Surfside 66 - A slight correction. I was never involved in the "birth of summer soccer". What I have said is that the original idea of playing the NSL in summer was borne in a trio of minds in Brisbane. This trio went into every aspect of the game and came up with the basic idea of playing our premier league in a time slot comparable with that of the touring teams that visited us in their summer break, fitter and faster than our local players who had yet to start training. The trio went into areas like weather, time of kick off and game finish, travel times between cities. All this happened in the early 1980's and to prove the theory to themselves the trio ,with help from a sponsor, invited Hakoah, St George, and Rasic's Socceroos (Pre 1974 WC) to Brisbane to play a "same day" game ,up and home, just to prove it could be done. They got no help, financial or otherwise, from any of the management bodies. Knowing full well the idea would never get off the ground I informed Andrew Dettre of Soccer World and he ran it as a story. Andrew could see merit in the idea so I suppose he "tried sales" to his many contacts in the game. Now for the punch line. This was in 1983 and some 6 years later the powers that be decided to give it a go and we got Summer Soccer. As I have said before the important factors were that the games should be played in early evening, under floodights. thus creating a ready made market for the NSL clubs to sell themselves to the thousands of senior and junior players, and parents, who already had a vested interest in the game. Did this happen ? I'll leave that up to you but the games continued to be played Saturday and Sunday with a 3-00pm kick off.!!!!!!! Another issue that is never mentioned is that from 1984 to 1989 Frank Arok's Socceroos built up a huge reputation among clubs that came to Australia expecting, fun, games, and easy beats. Arok's record proves a different story. Note how the dates coincide with the NSL switch to summer soccer from where, at that time, Arok was getting 99% of his players. We could spend hours talking about how why and when summer soccer never had the impact that it should have had. Cheers jb.

“AFL have 1 million members and only a 30k average attendance than they cant even get their own fans to the game.” For a stats man, that’s a pretty strange comment. The AFL is the 4th best attended football league on the planet.

I don’t get it. No fast technical football in the heat? Someone better tell Brazil, and most of Sth & Central America.

Whilst I do believe that the number of multi-code fans in this country is considerably exaggerated, it's not enough nor will it ever be for me to throw my lot in w/the 'A-League in winter' crowd. The real issue is that the HAL season begins the week after the AFL&NRL Grand Finals when it should begin in early August - ideally the weekend before the EPL begins. The first few HAL seasons began in August and should have remained thus, if not for FFA's bean-counting by way of scheduling the big derbies for Round 1(another farcical practice that should never have been) the w/end after the 'footy GFs'. Also, by starting the season just prior to the main Euro leagues opens up the possibility of whetting the Eurosnobs' appetite for ⚽ in anticipation for (in their view)'the main event'. But all in all, say once Covid is truly under control, would you *really* want the HAL going commercially head-to-head w/the 'traditional' codes? Switching its season to spring/summer is virtually the best thing the old NSL ever did; do we really *need* to undo that?

Winter- Thanks for the reply. Just in case you don't know, when that big fireball falls below the horizon the temperature usually falls dramatically with with it's disappearance. The thing that worried the originators of the summer soccer idea was actually not temperature ,but that other tropical bane, humidity. That's when they were told in tropical Brisbane the bigger threat was thunderstorms. You mention another thing that was introduced later. The original Idea for an FFA cup came much later than "summer soccer" and did in fact foresee the difference in conditioning as an added benefit to those lower division teams who had made it through the early rounds. At the time that was seen as a benefit suiting the "winter teams". I agree with that viewpoint. cheers jb.

Winter Love your passion... In time we will have a 40 week season and we need to keep key dates free. i.e world cup, Asian Cup, Champions leagues calendars etc... The June to August period is by and large when many key tournaments take place. If we start on October and finish in mid June thats good, we can play in summer latter in the evening and have no game before six and the early games in the southern states... Starting on October allows for the competition to get going and create an interest...

I think he was taking the approach of moving the schedule to winter of a period of years, otherwise if we'd moved the A League to start in say Feb next year, that's a 7 month off season! I think if we can play from mid October to July next yea, it'll then allow the season after to kick off in late early Dec and play until August the year after. Then by year 3 you could start in late Jan and play to September, if you get my drift.