Bonita needs to eat mate…..

Run a few marginal seat campaigns in my time. Football need to rent up to the political fight.

A lack off fans wasn’t the problem. That’s my exact point. City have the same problem now as before. Relevance to Victorians at large. As a global accounting fix, you never will. City know this and they are fine about it.

City are one of literally dozens of cost centres in a football portfolio which is itself one of dozens in the ballance sheet of an authoitarian, global, multi billion dollar petro chemical empire. Melbourne Victory, a club built and owned by Melbourne football fans (corporate and individual), who lost 5.6m over THREE years (1.8m PA on avg) the backdrop of a global pandemic and who just topped 10,000 members a week into their membership drive for a club finally rebuilding. Melbourne will dwarf City once by any meausre football fans care about again soon enough. To compare these football entities is meaningless. While the precursor to City was a huge failure, the transition to the new owners lost something important that Melbourne and it’s fans hAve in spades, even in the dark times. Heart.

The tail will not wag the dog – that’s why.
If a NST is to be a commercial (and therefore a football) reality, it needs to be aligned with the only national league that can fund itself.
This (summer NPL) is how JJ will ultimately deliver a NST that, phased in over time, can adjust to the commercial reality of Australian football.
IF, and it’s a very big ‘if’, the NST achieves this – a phase in Pro/Rel and the sale of the NST to the APL won’t be far behind.
Expecting the APL (who OWN professional football) to agree to anything else is nonsense and it is the completely expected outcome of spinning off professional football in the first place. A decision I have come to support in hindsight. The more concerned YOU are about the FFA/APL splt, the more convinced I am of it’s merrits.

Amen to #RealTalk

WIth the youth, women and community football heading to its new home and the A-League squad and wider football department being transformed, I expect a period of stabilization in performance ahead. Not winning trophies just yet, but the commercial scale of MVFC will again be exploited (local owners, local sponsors and a huge local following will always drive engagement better than petro-cash from dictators) and our club will find its voice once again. A lot of fans are very excited and engaged in recent times, and little of this has anything to do with the squad. Victory fans feel for the 1st time in years the club has figured out ‘Who are we’….

I say, do bother, but only if it is the fist pahse of a transitionaty plan to shift over time to a model that achieves the objective you rightly identify – while doing so transperantly and by minimising the very real strategic risks of moving to the final model too quickly.

I am more optimistic than your, understandably skeptical self, but believe what you are seeing as an exciting but risky revolution in Queensland is exactly what we need and goes to Point 2 (of 3) that I outline above in my list of outstanding strategic reforms. Let’s hope QLD ends up with a unitary model more akin to VIC and they don’t blow the place up doing it. Even NSW, despite it’s scale of participation needs to clean up it’s football administration. It has a lot of players and revenue – but the sheer scale of the bureaucracy is mind boggling.

This modest milestone, the production of a PDF document, belays the fact it evidences by its very existence the unification of the professional, representative and amaeteur game in Australia for the first time in my 50 years. The irony is that this unification required as a pre-condition that the game be split up with the emergence of the APL entitiy (in a deal, the financial specifics of which suprised me and won me over from a position of extreme skepticism towards the professional clubs).
I hope this milesone, the suprisingly decent broadcast rights deal and the emerging maturation of the womens game in commercial terms can create the bedrock for 5 years of strong game development and the strategic space to resolve the three biggest challenges remaining in the game, namely (1) reform of State federations within a unitary national football governance model (2) the subsiquent reform of player development pathways and (3) the biggest opportunity/risk of all – the devlopment, implimentation and ‘spin off’ of a NST that doesnt bankrupt the FA or lead to strategic capture by the various factions. Remember, the governance reforms of a few years ago has produced more ‘football polticians’ than we have ever had. This remains a concern to me.
When you list the key, outstanding issues this way – the amount of reform ahead is HUGE, but I hope the release of the national football calender gives our massive and inneficient game the strategic space to start solving its real issues.

That number is amazing. The Olympics has a halo effect on these numbers IMO, but regardless just amazing. If cricket were an Olympic sport I suspect they women’s team would get similar or better numbers, but that is theoretical at the end of the day. The Matildas are a hot property. Would be interesting to see their rights sold separately to the rest of football to see what revenue they could bring in for the W-League or the female pathway in general. Again, just a thought experiment and unlikely to ever happen, but interesting to speculate….

Yea…… nah.

Equality isn’t progressed through exclusion.

Two national teams went to a tournament, one got through their group and the other diddnt.

Well done Matildas. Thanks for the Argentina result Olyroos.

Anything else is gender politics.

I’ve never seen an analysis of player quality that accounted for changing visa / transfer rules nd competition from the emerging football economies of Asia and Nth America in addition to minutes played, results (individual and team), club/league etc? Much talk about the quality of players across eras in largely nostalgic, agenda driven nonsense. A lot of former greats even acknowledge it is a meaningless comparison often.

I am not so sure. I hope you are right. My view is there is a compelling national ‘Park to the Professionals’ reality TV dimension to the Cup that a national broadcaster could put a price on. A Div-2 (absent a promotion game) isn’t as compelling a product in my view.
There is one way it may happen, and I write about it in another thread.
If the APL are going to establish a production business (for hire, like Supercars TV) I can see them pitching to produce NSD content for the FA, as Supercars TV does for the ARG with TCR and production car racing here and in Malaysia (from memory).
I don’t think APL are building an entire production capacity just to supliment the work of their Netwprk/OTT platform partners and short form content for their Football Hub portal. I think they are getting into the football broadcast production business – maybe even broadcast via the portal.
Interesting times.

I believe from a legal / risk and management perspective (both APL and FA) that a NSD, while it may be an FA auspiced (not just regulated) league to start with, will ultimately only become a true NSD (i.e. with P/R) once it becomes A2. There are many paths to this outcome, and the FA could make some cash in the transfer – but this is my predicted outcome.

FANTASTIC CONTENT
https://vimeo.com/570363834/0bc2d868b9
Many, many interesting and detailed elements to this interview with APL CEO Danny T – chief among them:
1 Formal legal unbundling happened just last week. APL is literally the ‘owner’ of the leagues
2 More detail about the 10/Paramount+ rights partnership.
– Value.
– ‘Hard trigger’ 5+3 years.
– FTA 10/Bold split.
– Equity investment.
– Saturday Night Football will be huge with 4 shows back to back over 4.5 hours.
3 Building the Direct to Consumer (DTC) model in Australian Football.
– Central to this strategy is the APL $30m ‘Digital Strategy’, including:
– Leveraging the rights partnership/content to building a ‘customer acquisition’ model for the APL business – not a traditional sports ‘real estate’ model.
– Becoming Australia’s biggest football content producer for all football fans from the grass roots to the A-league, State Leagues and the Eurosnobs.
– Delivering this with a digital football content portal with the working title ‘Football Hub’.
– Bringing all the games data together to mine it to build the DTC model.
4. An APL “investment pipeline”, starting with the Digital Strategy, but going to:
– Investment in on field A-League quality
– Investing in on field W-League quality
– Investing in content creating team and the ‘APL Studios’ to build that up to be what it needs to be.
5 General Australian and international sports market and future directions, most interestingly:
– Making it clear the A-League is its own legitimate league in a giant football family
– “Doubling down” of the ACL.
– Presenting the A-League as “adjacent” to leading leagues to draw in new football fans – with APL doing direct content deals with all the leading leagues.
6 ‘Process’ for appointing the APL executive team.

That is a facsiating idea……. Genuinely new and interesting.

Clubs (defied as entities incorporate under the various state associations laws), as entities will not be DIRECTLY given licences to participate in the A-League under promotion regardless of the footballling or commercial criteria we might agree to for a model of promotion. They will need to put arrangements in place to enter into a franchise arrangment on terms that allow for their ownership of an APL share, full financial integration as well as the ability for them to loose that licence (ie. be relegated) on football criteria in the future. This somewhat escerteric legal distinction (and a few relating to seasonal misalignment etc…) will almost certainly ensure NSD will be a closed shop within the APL. The question is – who will it’s inaugural licence holders be #popcorn

Because it is the only national football competition to have attempted it. Ignore history at your perril. My local club was destroyed by relegation (more importantly, the terms and specifics of it) in the NSL era.

Wait, FFA Cup draw, euros, ACL news and we get served up AFL?…… and so it begins…..

This is a very considered and modest set of arrangements that seek to leverage the draw (within constraints) to create a league calender to build some broadcast investment, manage the impact of summer and build some fan familiarity around. Purists may not like the idea and others may quibble about some specific matchups and dates, but overall I would welcome a considered approach like this.

Correlation is not the same as causation Stuart, having said that, the situation is worse than even you suggest here? Mike T a former TWG producer and a few others have been crapping on Australian football ever since they embarrassed themselves with Thursday FC and Less passed away. They are corporate shills who have always held these views and never had the courage to speak them openly in Les’ lifetime. I can forgive Lucy and FOx their foibles as they are genuine football people. Make no mistake, Mike and his friends at SBS are delighted to be off the leishe….. Expect more of it as they seem relevance by my means they can find.

Great news. The national teams deal done to reunite the football broadcast rights (FFA and APL) for circa $100m, less contra…. my estimate above of $60m less contra was too conservative. So all up football’s broadcast revenues at about 80% per cent of their prior peak (sponsorship has a way to go yet), but the game gets things it has never had before. Including FTA coverage of leagues, cup and national teams (previously on sold), an actual shareholding investment in the league from CBS, cross platform integration to promote the game, a platform for all the youth team games, retained production rights to exploit our back catalogue and other product commercialy online here and on any platform abroad – and all this for a game that is truly national, still growing and a World Cup event, 2nd only to the Sydney Olympics, just around the corner. Much to look forward to football fans.

But they OWN the 5 game content (and can produce additional non-league content) and can sell it all domestically and internationaly. Investing in production is exactly that – a cost designed to derive additional revenues.

You are failing (deliberately) to account for the fact that past broadcast rights figures for the game included all the available non tournament national teams properties, the Cup and the whole of game digital rights. Now, in addition to the 200m (less contra/production), being able to onsell 5 A-League games a week offshore and the digital leagues rights, the game (albeit the FA and not the leagues) can also sell it’s non tournament national teams and Cup rights seprately (including the recently returned AFC rights we have not had in the professional era).

All up the game will NET after contra and production circa 100m for A/Wleagues, plus national teams (circa 60m) plus the Cup (circa 5m) plus whole of game digital (circa 15m) plus all leagues offshore streeming and whole of game, additional domestic and international non-league content (circa 20m). Conservatively 200m cash, and a FTA network putting the game front and centre in Australia…… Thats a net $40m per annum, a figure that is approaching the best the game has ever earned (presuming the Fox contra was about 8m a season?) and the production values are high. Remember, they are about to raise a further 100m – 150m in venture capital, which tells me they are going to go all in on production (not outsourcing) among other things.

TWG reporting APL set to announce salary cap of 2.5m, five visa players, two marque players outside of salary cap and a central designated player fund. Even more interesting, Network 10 have paid the $200m (less contra) over five years for just two matches (1 ALeague and 1 WLeague) – with the APL producing all the remaining 5 A-League mtches on Paramount+. If the APL are building their own production capacity this is extremely exciting for the game. I hope this is the direction they are going……