You might be right, I’m no expert in media rights — best I can do is see what the experts are saying and there’s a consistency there in what they’re saying … the relationship between big sport and FTA is in trouble. I can understand why they’d say that but whether they’re right or not, who knows? Time well tell, as will our changing viewing habits and the returns advertisers and sponsors think they’re getting.

Unfortunately you’ve misconstrued the piece, thinking the 2006 figures were the point — the point was that the 2006 appear — appear — to represent the peak of the FTA model because sponsors aren’t getting the ROI they were. They’re finding it harder to make their ‘voice’ heard and ‘own’ an event in a crowded marketplace so perhaps the sports-sponsorship thing isn’t providing the value it once was … which obviously has implications for media-rights values.

FIFA, the FA’s and FFA’s media-rights dilemmas obviously aren’t exactly the same but they’re all facing a similar tough call — there is more money on offer in the short-term to go to cable.

As the article says, the FA is torn over the issue but the way its going pay-TV will have exclusivity over WCs and Euros in the UK in the future. How is that different from FFA’s dilemma with HAL? If there’s no money on offer from FTA but FTA is better for promotion of both HAL and the Socceroos’ and their sponsors, what are all the downsides of going to cable?

Obviously that does impact on FIFA revenues because its ‘global partners’ are counting on FTA — pay TV is worth less to them so it’s a serious issue when football working both sides of the street with FIFA spruiking to prospective sponsors an audience of 7 billion people and then the national federations onsell it to cable and put the event behind a firewall that cuts out half or more of that audience the sponsors paid for.

That’s been the marketing post-script to the Asia Cup — some mightily annoyed sponsors who’d signed on on the strength of a FTA audience and then it got flogged off to pay-TV.

That’s the big uncertainty at the moment — how much will going behind the pay-TV firewall will cost the game in other revenues? What it picks up in media rights from cable could be lost on the “global partner”, jersey sponsorships and ground signage revenues. The FA have done all sorts of number crunching on it and come up with question marks so your guess is as good as anyone’s about what happens next.

go away

That’s right Fussball, the under 9s have been bursting at the seams for eight years and precious few of them make it past the under 14s..

Your so-called demand exceeding supply applies at one end of the game — kids 5-11 y.o.

The overall registration numbers have stagnated.

What!?

I know you don’t want to comprehend what that means but luckily you don’t have to — that’s why Arbib’s called a review. He says he wants to know why so many kids quit football early.

You could write him a letter and tell him not to worry about any of that because kids are flocking to the game and that’s what matters. So what if they’ve poured out as quick as they came in?

Like me, I reckon he’d just shake his head and wonder what planet.

Hard to believe we’re talking about boxing, innit — Rose, Harada, Rudkin and Fammo were like a league of gentlemen.

Worse part of that was parents thinking it wasn’t a bad idea for kids to give boxing a go so they’d grow up to be a top bloke like Lionel.

I gave it a go at it for about 30 seconds. Are they kidding? Didn’t cry though.

Good piece here on Lionel

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/a-man-who-transcended-his-sport/story-e6frg6z6-1226052826880

I’m worried about you, whiskeymac — that’s a couple of times now that you’ve cut to the chase on obscure articles and raised astute questions. Thanks for reading carefully, I can’t ask for more than that (and sorry about all the stray commas, I wrote it sober and edited it cross-eyed.)

I’m not sure whether an FFA legal counsel is providing legal opinions as such but I think the way it works is that legal opinions are provided in good faith — you don’t argue it if you don’t believe it.

Didulica doesn’t look to have convinced Munn of that though.

In the meantime, club-nominee-elected FFV president Nick Monteleone consolidates links between FFV and Victory while Manny Galanos blows smoke off the barrel of his Smith and Wesson, lights a cigar and kicks back and is horrified to see he’s now got bullet holes in both feet.

I’m thinking sitcom or opera, I can’t decide. There’s some Fawlty Towers in there and Reservoir Dogs in there but Buscemi survives in Reservoir Dogs and that’s not the Victorian football way — down here no one ever gets out alive.

Thanks mom.

For the record, Robert Walls just on SEN radio talking about his Fitzroy years and where it all came from — he says he had a conditioning bloke called Chris Jones who’d come from “professional sports in England and the US” and he started asking questions about why their best kick wasn’t taking, why they kicked to packs etc.

Walls said Jones pointed out to him that opposition players would follow the ball so they could create space where they wanted it etc and away they went.

Chris Jones CV

Qualifications:
B.Ed Liverpool
B.Sc University of Oregon
M.Sc University of Oregon
PhD University of Oregon

Playing History:
Played Basketball and Rugby Union for England, played Basketball at University of Oregon

Coaching History:
Strength and Conditioning and Sprint Coaching in USA with athletes from NBA and NFL
Strength and Conditioning Coach, Performance Unit Management in AFL for Fitzroy, Carlton, Melbourne and St Kilda

Been looking for you, Trust Me.

This is among your more civilised villifications of recent weeks —

“What evidence do you have that the FFA is no better run than Soccer Australia?

“Again regurgitated opinion with no substantiated facts.

“The federal government and the new sports minister Mark Arbib have just given the sport a resounding tick of approval. They also investigated the set up of the state football associations and again found nothing major to report.”

Ha. You shouldn’t make stuff up.

Fancy that Fussball — an independent review into football governance. Out of the blue, just like that.

Who’d of thought?

Enjoy.

What do you mean by missing the point?

The point is that it’s wheelbarrow, not “barrow”. No one from the southern hemisphere says “barrow”.

Just admit it Mike, you’re working for Putin.

I was going to politely request we keep at least on square cm of this website code-wars free.

Alas, my sponsors at Lexus and Motorola weren’t keen and want me to go the other way and find some pretext to write SOKKAH SUCKS, which if I could if I used a cheap trick and indirectly quoted them. As a friend of football I declined on ethical grounds.

Our radical soccer separatists who skim text looking for SOKKAH SUCKS are encouraged to leave veiled threats as usual — so long as they click an ad first.

Hi Cattery, thanks for reading and writing.

Wished I’d seen that Foxtel thing on the Pies, would love to know what they’re doing. Looks to me like they’re playing 25 men so I’ve got no idea.

Guessing there’s a bit of that about though or everyone else would be doing it back to them — but then there’d be 50 players on the ground and Adrian Anderson would have to change the rules again.

Wonder if our radical soccer separatists (see below) saw recently, also on Foxtel, Malthouse talking about catching up with Alex Ferguson for coffee and comparing notes?

My sources are saying Didak to MU instead of Arizona next pre-season and Rooney will be over here for the finals crumbing across half-forward next to Chris Dawe.

Apparently Rooney saw the International Series on Sky last year and wants to represent a country that isn’t England.

Keep it coming Fuss, it all helps later.

Yes, Fuss, we’re well aware of the narrative you and your mate’s you’re angling for:-

– Without your active support Victory would be a basket case.

– Without your psychotic anti-AFL ramblings the A-League would have died.

– Without you and your mates alienating legions of genuine football supporters by labeling them “anti-sokkah” for not sharing your pathological hatred of the AFL ….?

All bow to Fussball to whom football owes all; the good, the bad and especially the ugly.

There is another very different narrative around football that you and your multi mates have worked overtime to suppress and to this point have largely suppressed with your duplicitous nonsense about the football culture — of all people! — not understanding “football culture”.

Your clandestine extremism has inflicted more than enough damage on our football community. Your two-faced forked-tongue football zealotry does not give you the right to insult and abuse other members of our football community, many of whom were around this sport before your parents were born.

Your duplicitous games are soon to be revealed — as will the abject lack of good faith your crew have shown in negotiations with our football community. The full gamut of your manipulations will be exposed.

That’s right, Fuss, someone else has decided “we won’t put up with this rubbish any more”.

Our football community — OUR football community , not your collection of troublemaking nutters – has had enough of your cynical and destructive manipulations.

http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/sinodisp/au/cases/vic/VSC/2009/123.html

You’re in health sciences dasilva so you’ll have heard of harm minimisation.

Same deal with anti-sokkah stuff as illicit drugs — you can shoot for complete eradication and watch on as the free market gets you the exact opposite result to the one you were seeking, or you can swallow your pride and do what most minimises the damage.

One course of action is morally upstanding and uncompromising, wins a lot of votes, lots of applause from thickheads and is unequivocally a failure that brings a miserable dividend to those very same thickheads.

Or you can swallow your pride and behave as if one were of an intelligent species.

That’s covered in the article dasilva — if you think everyone else is too dumb to separate fact from fiction, then you will be busier than a fly with a blue backside trying to set the ignorant straight on football culture.

How’s it going? We winning yet?

Moreover, why the keenness to eradicate prejudices against the football community in the non-football community when the football community itself is so bathed in ignorance, bigotries and prejudices about itself?

It’s laughable, innit? It’s all the anti-sokkah media’s fault, yet if you take the anti-football media away, what are you left with?

You’re left with football supporters slagging off at football supporters … if it ain’t club versus club insults, it’s HAL supporters slagging off at old soccer for being too violent and too ethnic and generally no good — as if that was something any of them could have gleaned from anywhere other than that same wicked media.

That is, some football supporters are happy buying into media-driven bigotries when they are applied to others but get deeply offended when it’s they who are the victims.

It doesn’t get a lot of sympathy, that kind of selective what-about-me moaning. What about them, mate?

Moreover its indicative of an underdeveloped brain that’s yet to recognise that one’s behaviour now determines how one will live later.

We’ve seen that in glorious living colour in here — kids trying to trash the landscape because they think it belongs to someone else and they’d like to pwn it.

They haven’t twigged that they also get to inherit it, and sooner than they think, and everything dumb thing they do and say now will set the culture that they will have to live in — endure — later on.

We were hoping to bequeath you a Rolls Royce but some teenagers trashed that and all we’ve got left in the will is this rusted car body in the backyard. Enjoy!

… and you ignore the reality that responses to negative articles – no matter how sensible, polite and non-confrontational the responses — beget more negative articles.

We all know that — know, not surmise — but some folks prefer to feign ignorance — it’s called believing what you want to believe and there’s a bit of it about — because then they don’t feel feel so guilty about not changing their own behaviour.

That is, it saves jerks feeling like jerks just because they’re behaving like a jerk.

No AL, I am right on the mark and you know it.

Agend(a) covered as opinion, eh? I’d have said portrayed as opinion but we get your drift.

But you won’t be responding! Nooooo. How will our ever readers know what my agend(a) is if AL doesn’t explain it to them?

Or would you like me to explain what’s going on here? I can if you like.

Your problem now is that I’m beginning to enjoy this. I am more than happy to just keep on drilling away until the whole picture is revealed and we find out exactly what and more importantly who is behind the faction of delinquents who’ve been running rings around this game the last few years.

We will eventually get to the stage in here where the decent and reasonable football supporters can have a sensible and constructive football discussions without mindless twerps butting in and pretending they are the embodiment of “football culture”.

It’ll take a bit of weeding out, unmasking and letting some unknowing parents in on precisely what their little darlings have been up to — but we will get there.

My mistake — I thought AL was referring to the “Soccer crowds too friendly” headlines they’ve been whacking us with all these years.

Damnit, I was going to provide you with a link to das Libero’s meticulously constructed Persecution Complex Central but you beat me to it.

I love this stuff about “from our own personal experience from playing and watching the game”, as if footy supporters have ever come over the hill and disrupted your matches.

What you actually mean is your parents pay the fees, you and your mates play in a team and you do what a lot of kids and backward societies do and identify a common enemy in the name of cobbling together something that feels to them like unity. And because you’re in a soccer team and/or hang out behind the goals, you make a huge deal of the anti-sokkah stuff so you can at least agree on one thing.

You’re clever kids too and you know how to organise, if not proactively then reactively, and do your million-man army thing with your multiple IP addresses — and perpetuate the cycle you profess to hate.

That’s the duplicity that’s in play –without a common enemy you’re reduced to fighting amongst yourselves. You must have a common enemy.

Das Libero’s “smell the fear” is a top spot to recharge all that bile for your common enemy — it’s almost enough to convince you that it’s all their fault and there is nothing whatsoever football needs to do to improve itself.

Das Libs biggest impact isn’t on the AFL, it’s on the football community’s internal dialogue and dignifying the notion that not being anti-AFL is therefore anti-sokkah — I mean, after all they’ve done!

As they say though, it’s better to die on your feet than live on your knees.

Well, it’s not as if you don’t know what happens if you respond — it encourages more of the same.

Tough one, isn’t it? Will you squeeze that pimple or not?

That’s not a catch-22, by the way — a catch-22 is when you get the rough end of the pineapple whatever you do. You can actually choose your outcomes with this one — you’re choice is a small geyser or Mt Pinatubo

Nope, a catch-22 is what you and your mates impose on football writers and ultimately yourselves — there are plenty of journos out there who grew up with the game who choose not to write on football because they can’t be bothered dealing with the mindless and vindictive responses they invariably receive.

That’s probably why in newspaper around here the football writer’s beat isn’t known as the “soccer correspondent” or even “the football correspondent”, it’s called “the short straw.”

That’s not their problem AL, it’s yours — you’re the one complaining about the dearth of quality football writing, which so far as I can gather equates to a lack of anti-footy diatribes in the press.

Journos on the other hand can get paid the same money covering other sports that don’t have an active component of teenagers and mentally damaged “smell the fear” cretins trying to own that sport.

Like I said, AL, it’s your problem. If you want quality football writing of a standard commensurate with your in-depth knowledge of the game, you’re probably going to have to write it yourself.

Why don’t you have a go? Just tell us everything you know and exactly what we ought to be doing so football here can be in better shape in future than now. I’m quite looking forward to someone with a bit of knowledge and experience weighing in to get us all back on track.

The “submit article” button’s up there at the top right.

You’re even slower on the uptake than me, AF.

Hi Bondy,

I’m comfortable with that, I’m sure Harps and Fossie will enjoy your insights as much as we have.

I don’t really think flame wars are fun but I didn’t want to say that lest the Epping lads call in reinforcements and flame me for being anti-football.

You need to factor in that effect our Khmer Rouge has on football reporting here — a lot goes unsaid but not because it ain’t so.

Hi AL,

Perception is incredibly important, which is why its counter-productive leaving nasty comments about other sports as if they were helpful to football.

The commercial media is just that — it’s there to sell advertising.

Some folks we know will ignore a news service for months and years and then all race over there when it runs what they regard to be an anti-sokkah piece! What’s the lesson there, do you think?

Like I wrote, no one is mystified by how the media works. It sells advertising — and while the football community keeps arcing up, anti-sokkah pieces are paydirt.

Again, if football supporters like seeing anti-football articles, they only have to keep responding to them and ignoring the more considered discussions and the job’s done.

Think of it as a pimple — it’s unfair, we don’t deserve it and it’s not our doing but squeezing and poking at it only make it a lot worse.

I know, that’s a huge ask when we’ve got so many teenagers around football who desperately need to squeeze that acker, but that’s the equation — so long as the press get a huge response they’ll keep printing anti-sokkah nonsense.