With a struggling Victory, A-League crowds are not pretty reading

I’ve been following the A Leagues for nearly 20 years and I haven’t seen any games like that. You’re obviously a troll with your 1 comment as a Roar Rookie, Duncan. Even if that was true, in my opinion, that’s still more exciting than a 40 point thrashing that occurs in other codes.

Valid comments Adriandon. Victory must do better during this recruitment period and next years comp. However, I need to respond to the claim that in 2017, when they were loooking for new clubs, that a south east/ Dandenong team was a furphy. I grew up in Dandenong and it’s still a huge, new migrant centre. There are heaps of Football teams/ players in that catchment. There are well over a million people within a ten kilometre radius. A Trainstation would have been a short walk to a new stadium. Yes, there was no serious money for a stadium in the bid, but the state Government just needed such an excuse to spend and create a second major hub, outside of the CBD. It still does! The area is a distinct suburb, 35 kms from the AAMI but easy to reach by road/train. It was a disgraceful job by Gallop and co, who weren’t looking for a strong and passionate rivalry but some bullshit developers stadium out west. 5 years later and still no WU stadium and Melbourne City have set up its main training centre not far from Dandenong. Hmmmmm, and we fans keep arguing amongst ourselves why the fan interaction has declined.

It is strange when you go online and can't buy a ticket yet on TV the ground looks less than half full. And when commentators announce a sell out and there are heaps of empty seats.

Go to Lucknow (India) to find out but they paid $970 million for the licence after previously owning a team called RisingPune Supergiant. Do you prefer that name? Anyway you could probably buy out Soccer Australia for that amount of money.

Some reciprocal deals might be good too. Members of either club could go to two or more of the other clubs “lesser” games. We do need to be smarter to get our crowds back.

I think we are starting to see that in Brissy with The Roar's new deal at Ballimore. It is a shame the Roar and Rugby had that falling out a couple of years ago when the Roar was training there, as the relationship could be well down the path now. I hope it works out. I would love to see Ballimore coloured Red in the winter and orange in the summer. It just makes sense to share that facilities' cost and potential.

Very good point FF

Did you personally count the size of the crowds?

That is not just a football issue. Rubbery figures are used by all codes and in all aspects of life - creative accountancy!

The problem is the crowd figures aren't accurate. There are several teams with rubbery figures including Western United, Wanderers, Sydney FC and Melb City. There were games this season where the Wanderers didn't get more than 5,000 people of Western United more than 1,000 but the official crowds announced were about double that. So the situation is more dire than it seems.

Past games for AUFC, against Sydney and Victory, were moved to Adelaide oval attracting around 30000. I’d much rather watch with 15000 at Hindmarsh with a better view and atmosphere. It also reduces the value of the seat at Hindmarsh. Many of the extra support don't need to come to other games they can just turn up to the big games knowing there’s plenty of seating, with no need to get membership.

Adelaides average 10,300 CCM average 6,600 Adelaide's population 1.3 million Central coasts population 350k Good job Adelaide?

At the start of the A-league very few wanted to join it or invest in a team.. Lowy actually contacted many rich persons to back a team, Politis said no to run the Sydney team, Bruce Gordon for Wollongong, unlike the 15 million last time or the 25 million it was 1 million for the license fee which was going to pay for the running costs. Melbourne was an enormous problem because it was the one place Lowy had to have a team and was the one major city where no backer with enough capital could be found. Auckland had the initial NZ tea. Since those days various fairy tales have been written about why teams were chosen and who was excluded when the truth was at the start of the A-league anyone with enough money could have joined even without paying the license fee. The reason the Mariners are in existence is down to John Singleton and he signed a deal to take over the Gosford stadium when the Northern Eagles were in existence only to have no team there when they went back to Manly. Singleton actually tried to get Newcastle team down to the stadium when that failed he actually set about making a Central Coast Team.

VIctory and City were interested in getting other teams because they made so much money off derbies with big crowds along with price gouging. I never heard anything about Victory and City not wanting an Eastern team. Sydney were the only wise club to oppose expansion, and even then that they were being made to move to Kogarah for 3 years would they have opposed it so much if they weren't. I dont know about the Dandenong bid but the way the media promoted Southern Expansion despite that the bid behind the scenes was basically con men making money off Chinese developers with Craig Foster happy to take the money as well it could have been an empty shell. Its like when that group of blokes bid a couple hundred of million without having to outlay money and they didnt have a cent of cash. Or what about Sports Flick the actual investement money they had was a few million, yet they won the UEFA rights with their bid, and the rugby league world up and there was no actual money. Sports FLick their top offering was the Austrian league, and they even showed Serbian rugby league which is equivalent to a suburban league here in football. South Melbourne their crowd averages in the NSL was about 8k whereas City pre Western United were doing 10k albeit with Victory fans providing 2-4k of that average depending on how many derbies they hosted. The mistake City made was to let another team into Melbourne, its absolutely decimated their support, whether its east,west or South Melbourne. They thought 9 derbies would be triple the money how wrong where they. There are plenty of franchises who have expanded then gone under because they expanded too much, and took each others business to the point where everyone went under at the same time.

Hopefully. I got sick of going to games, only to walk away with a draw after 100 minutes of sub-par football. There's no entertainment in that, nor there is any joy watching tonnes of players pretending to be injured after the smallest of tackles. It's a joke

Chris1 - me too. When the A league was first set up, SFC had association days and the association was given an un catered for outside box on the eastern side of the ground and 10 tickets. in exchange, the associations organised the small sided games etc at half time. In 2012 when WSW arrived on the scene, they did the same or similar at Pirtek. Beyond that, the children that participated were given one ticket for an accompanying parent. Any extras had to be paid for. Apart from that the only freebies are through players and families. I’d say the rest is total BS. Last weekend, Adelaide’s crowd was disappointing in my opinion. I know it was raining but since the seats were pre-sold it shouldn’t have made any difference. IMO what we witness is a core number of supporters just the same as anywhere else but the club seems to struggle to reach anywhere near the capacity of Coopers. It is a given that there are always unoccupied seats but not in those numbers. I have been to plenty of sold out games down the years and on plenty of occasions, hardly room to breathe.

We are tired of commenting on how to reinvigorate football. It’s been a weekly topic and we’re all worn out! Quality is not an issue. With our huge participation base there is a lot of talent. We lose a player like Garang Kuol and Nestory Irankunda comes along. We lose a Riley McGree and Aiden O’Neill bobs up. You might not recognise those names because in the media, football is virtually invisible. Perception is our problem. Most people don’t realise how good it is (and of course we all know it can’t compare to the big 5 leagues). I think football is a bit like rugby – more people, at this time, simply prefer to watch rugby league. I generally have the news on free to air on in the background and rugby, like football, seems to rarely be mentioned. It seems to be invisible, like football. I watch league a bit, but because of the media saturation I would probably go OK in a trivia contest, but I know virtually nothing about rugby these days. I think sports such as football, rugby and basketball should start to “team up”’ and work as one to gain better media coverage and deals. I wouldn’t mind buying a streaming service that covered those three sports. And some of your ideas sounded pretty good – names are important and the worst one I’ve heard is the Super Giants in the IPL. What is a super giant?

Some good points Sheek. And while we do lose a lot of players overseas diluting the quality here, it's mitigated by 1/ the high number of grass root players and 2/ the number of players that come here from overseas.

I’m sure some casuals are lost. I believe you are one of those, but my understanding is crowd numbers didn’t really change and occasional games and clubs had a spikes in numbers. And the season can’t be shorter, we need to increase games so our players are able to match the fitness levels of overseas players when they play for The Socceroos, Joeys, etc.

Yeah, I might be that casual follower ????