A-LEAGUE launch: "New Football"

[yob]

The City membership tally interests me because I want football to grow right across the country and the major thing that is holding it back is the lack of funds the FFA has to do its job. Gallop has said that to run the code optimally the broadcast rights need to grow to $100m pa. A second club drawing good crowds in the second biggest market in the country, GRP $248m pa, with the third highest STV penetration rate, 29%, delivering the second highest number of STV subscriptions, just over 500k, and the second highest FTA TV advertising revenue, $814m pa, or $463 pa per household served should appreciably raise the value of the current broadcast rights for the 10 team competition and give the FFA some much needed additional revenue.

My interest is simpler. They were a pretty sh*t club. Now they're not. They didn't get enough fans and interest in their first incarnation. Now the CFG cash has acted as a circuit-breaker and the club is in the process of proving itself viable and interesting to the broader Melbourne football community. As much as Victory has managed to piss off tracts of its fanbase, it's always presented a more viable prospect than Heart. People can sense dead clubs walking and will steer clear of emotional and financial investments in clubs that might not last. Heart had a bit of that stench about them. They've shed that now and look to be a very serious competitor to the tards.

I reckon they'll end up with over 15,000 members this season.

Heart was and is a good idea. The issue, as highlighted by vant schip, was the business was under capitalised and therefore its only real development strategy was survival. MC is an obviously good fit.

In practice though I've got a little problem with their branding strategy. For one, I don't take kindly to being a puppet club. Also, they're telling a few porkies with their new City brand. For instance, maintaining the red and white in the club crest, paying homage to the clubs foundation roots as the Heart. Oh would you just f**k off, it's the English flag. And they felt they really needed to represent Melbourne's history to the world by incorporating cows in the crest. No, not a gold nugget that built the place, cows, which they have in England. And obviously the English crown is important, to symbolise Victoria - the state with the highest yes vote at the republic referendum. And look at that boat, looks just like Manchester... wait, no it's like captain cook and sh*t.

How many years until the two hearts get replaced with roses?

Melbourne City is a play by Manchester City for Asia. Asia is rapidly maturing as a footballing culture, and there's no more room. Liverpool have got it. City is trying to get their foot in the door by exploiting the time zone, and giving Asia what it wants - english football. They're nuts for it.

[Simmo79]

The club crest is just the City of Melbourne flag plonked in a roundel. None of the symbols it incorporates were a conscious choice. If anything it's unimaginative, rather than inaccurate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Melbourne

[yob]

Nothing stirs the passions more than waving the flag of the illegal layer of government tasked with giving you parking tickets and not letting you build anything.

[yob]

And Ballarat, Bendigo, Rockhampton Wagga farkn.

[gyfox]

Lets use Wollongong as an example. In the Wollongong TV ratings area there are 522k people in 210.8k households and there are 58.5k STV subscription households. Is that market going to generate the $5m in addition to the $2.55m from the FFA that is the average that an A-League needs to operate? Additionally, the FFA spend $40m pa on the A-League's 10 clubs including the distribution to clubs. Will the addition of the Wollongong market add an extra min $2.55m but closer to $4m to the FFA's revenue through increased broadcast rights and sponsorship of the League in order to cover the cost of having them in the competition?

Wollongong's broadcast market is roughly two thirds of that of Newcastle as is its number of STV subscriptions. The Newcastle Jets has not yet made a profit.

The average FTA TV advertising revenue per household in regional Australia is $286 pa which is less than Adelaide - $349 pa, Brisbane - $422 pa, Perth - $430, Melbourne - $463 pa and Sydney - $636 pa. 78% of the $3.84b FTA TV advertising revenue is generated in the 5cities markets while the other 22% is generated in 20 disparate regional markets.

[yob]

There's a whole lot of variables. You can increase your revenue by having more games, and likely reduce your marginal cost as well. You can invest heavily in the Cup competition to attract revenue. TV money and advertising is important, but not to the exclusion of everything else. Can you predict which local governments would be prepared to underwrite some costs, and to what end?

Regional areas may not attract the same coin, but they have their advantages - cost of living and lifestyle. If you had the same earning capacity as a player going to Sydney FC compared to Goulburn, and if you assessed it simply on cost of living, you'd actually consider living with Ivan.

Don't invest heavily in what the FFA says. They have a strategy, their rhetoric must be consistent. Set your alarm on Wednesdays and watch town V town in the FA Cup (you still have plenty of time later on for a nanna nap). All communities matter, it's just unfortuante that Australian regional areas don't have effective advocates. It may sound like an emotive argument, but it's real and it works elsewhere. We were stupid for trying for a professional league, now we're there. We've got a Cup comp. Let's be stupid and have a second division.

[yob]

Also remember that the survival of our game isn't leveraged to the FFA. We made a world cup without having a professional domestic league, and basically spent 30 years eating each other alive. Let Ronaldo and his stupid haircut pick up the tab if and when we f**k up along the way.

[dibo]

Canberra, Gold Coast (don't imagine that it won't happen), 3rd Sydney side, 2nd Brisbane side (*has* to be the Strikers), regional Victoria...

To get to $100m there are a couple of ways of going about it, but the main one is by jacking up the number of games played. More rounds or more teams or both means more games and more ad time.

We're at $40m a year at the moment, of which $25m goes to clubs and $15m into the FFA generally. The broadcast deal makes for nearly half of their roughly $90m yearly revenue.

If you jacked the comp up to 20 teams playing 38 rounds and paid each club the same per game and the TV deal rose in proportion, you'd be getting $112m a year, distributing about $70 million a year to clubs and you'd have another $42m left over for the FFA.

For what it's worth, to make rep footy no longer cost up to $2400 a year for kids and instead bring the cost down to about $300 a year would cost about $20 million. If you ensure talented working class kids see football as a viable option that would be a good area to direct a subsidy.

[IanRitchie]

Yeah, Auckland. Though I'd want to know Ian's perspective on why the Kingz failed. Was it the club (product) or the city (market) that was the problem?

Wollongong and Auckland for 6 games per round.

Brand. 100%. Auckland would work instantly at Mt Smart or Eden Puke.

I see it as working like the Warriors. There's a risk of bad crowds but the likely good outdoes the bad. It's removing the black mark the Kingz left that is the stumbling block.

[dibo]

There are probably 4 sides you could get going in the space of a few years - Auckland, Canberra, Wollongong, Brisbane Strikers.

If you take the MLS route and announce the licence in advance, and then give the clubs time to build staff, playing rosters, corporate support etc., then they'd be able to really crack on.

AFC will continue to be an issue though. Fold OFC into AFC?

[yob]

OFC has no future. Roll it in to AFC and tie up the minnow nations in an extra round of qualifiers with other numpties like Malaysia. Ethnically there's some clear genetic links between these nations and Asia anyway, more than us that's for sure.

There's merit in announcing clubs early. Gives them time to spread the gospel without burning much of their capital. Maybe allow them to challenge for FFA cup for a couple of seasons with an amateur/semi pro roster. The AFL allowed Gold Coast FC to compete as a semi-pro for a season and it worked well. Allowed them to harden the f**k up a bit.

Why is everyone on the Strikers? Money? Or is it our pipe dream that they'll return from the wilderness and redevelop Perry Park into a quaint rectangle with 10,000 yellow tshirt hard-farkns? I'd be on that. But I don't see anything wrong with the Roar other than playing in a stadium with too many seats.

Don't give Canberra a team, this place is a shithole. Give it to Queanbeyan. We're sorted at the riverside complex. Let the c***s coming in from Canberra see what it's like getting pinged on the way in for a change.

[dibo]

So you start with Auckland and the Gong, and work it out from there. Building a mentality where there are a couple of licences on offer every couple of years until we're up to [insert desired number] will be healthy and if the development path for the licences is smart they'll hit the ground running.

[yob]

No doubt the more you add you will run in to diminishing returns. This is where structure comes in. If you go the AFL route - closed, protected market, then you'll struggle past 10. If you allow the free market option of just about every league in the world then it's no problem. Port Augusta can compete, they can finish 27th, and they can f***ing like it.

[dibo]

No doubt the more you add you will run in to diminishing returns. This is where structure comes in. If you go the AFL route - closed, protected market, then you'll struggle past 10. If you allow the free market option of just about every league in the world then it's no problem. Port Augusta can compete, they can finish 27th, and they can f***ing like it.

The diminishing returns bit can be dealt with through sensible structuring of FFA distributions and salary caps.

If the distributions and salary caps are set correctly, it's quite possible that you can get the basic club budget (ceteris paribus) to be in surplus given a reasonably low average crowd. I think we'd have to look to set that break-even number around 8-10k, given we're expanding into smaller markets and slicing up big markets.

If you can do that, it's up to the clubs to do the work to grow, but it will attract people who want a piece of the action and are willing to spend the time, effort and money to build new clubs.

[yob]

Tweak it here, nip that nice and low, don't let that bit out of control, put a limit on that. f**k it's like you're Bob Rock producing Metallica's love songs in the 90s.