2013/2014 DRAW RELEASE CONTINUED

FTA OPPORTUNITY MISSED

Putting the partisan Melbourne Victory fan aspect to the side for the moment and looking at the ‘bigger picture’...

And the bigger picture is that the FFA seem to have screwed up a big opportunity to promote the virtues of the A-League to a wider television audience that only have access to Free-To-Air (FTA) television.

Most specifically through the derbies and the fading star that is the so-called ‘marquee matches’ that aren’t quite the crowd pullers they once were.

One can understand that Fox Sports are paying the bulk of the majority of the new $160 million four-year deal so the challenge for the FFA would be to ensure that people with a Fox Sports subscription are getting value for their outlay etc. The other side of that coin though is that FTA TV is a form of mass market exposure and advertising.

From this perspective it would have made some sense to have a 2/3 majority to Fox Sports, namely show 1/3 of the big derbies (eg SFC versus WSW, MVFC versus Heart and other interstate ‘marquee’ matches (MVFC versus SFC, WSW and AUFC) on FTA while the other 2 rounds of those matches would be on Fox Sports.

This makes sense when we consider the respective business models of both, Fox Sports as a cable network relies on subscribers, SBS as an FTA network relies on selling audiences to advertisers.

From this perspective if we put the big derbies which are set to be sell-outs in terms of the AAMI Park (Melbourne) and Parramatta Stadium (Sydney) matches, then the visual and energetic theatre of opposing fan interaction and the full stadiums will be a great image for the game. 

This would further entice half committed or casual viewers that if they want to see more the A-League it is an added reason to subscribe to Foxtel or Fox Sports.

Conversely, having Brisbane Roar having erstwhile decent enough crowds dispersed across the cavernous Lang Park/Suncorp Stadium, Melbourne Victory just about get away with it having 20,000ish playing in a 50k stadium but the Roar with 15,000 just don’t manage it

.

And that’s without going into having Heart play their fixtures in front of a 1/3 full stadium on a good day, with the so called ‘green seat elite’ out in full force, this projects a bad image for the game and doesen’t make it look quite exciting at all. And let’s not mention the fact that for all their loose talk of being some kind of ‘cultured’ football team, they were the most boring team to watch away from home all season under ‘long diagonal ball’ Aloisi where they didn’t even win a match away from Melbourne.

Indeed when you look past the first few weeks, fans could be forgiven that the FFA have been fooled into making the Friday night FTA games the ‘dud’ slot for the most part given most of the match-ups are not the ones that capture the imagination.

But let’s imagine for a moment we are SBS, like pretty much all the football media in this country, we live in Ivory Towers up in Sydney where we are in touch with the local football fraternity up in those parts but can’t see far beyond the Pale to where the rest of the football fraternity live (the lack fo football journalist spread is a blog for another time). 

The Sydney football journalists then are looking at having 10 Sydney themed games overall, with six (2 home and 4 away) of them being in relation to Sydney FC where they get the opportunity to carry on and on and on and on about Del Piero (Fox Sports were bad enough to my Melburnian ears last season) and especially how he lifts the away crowds etc.

Then on four occasions we have Western Sydney (2 home and 2 away games). This is a tad surprising given how large the Western Sydney market is in TV terms but I guess they’ve decided not to differentiate too much between the predominantly Eastern Sydney Sydney FC oriented segment of the market and the Western Sydney segment.

So if you are SBS and you have 10 of the 27 rounds involving a Sydney based team in some respect then you aren't too unhappy despite missing a very large chunk of the big match-ups. I wouldn’t be surprised then to hear heaps of talk about how ‘exciting’ this poor excuse of an FTA draw is from their perspective and some actually believing it.

Even if Del Piero has a cracker in round six away to Melbourne Heart (funny how the FFA are employing another trick to artificially boost Hearts crowds by giving them two home games against Del Piero), to see all the fancy footwork and whatever in front of a mass of green seats and an ‘only half-full’ stadium at best (I'm assuming they think there will be another monstrous 13,000 strong crowd by Heart standards) does not project an exciting image that does his skill any justice.

This is especially the case if the Sydney FC team as a whole are as incoherent as a unit as they were last year.

Not to mention the mistake of having Western Sydney play in Melbourne against the ‘wrong’ Melbourne in the Friday night slot. Perhaps they are expecting WSW fans to go to Melbourne once again in the same numbers they did against Melbourne last year. Maybe they want that so the Sydney media can carry on about how a Sydney based team “outdid” the home supporters of a “Melbourne” based team. I am sure I can't be blamed for that sentiment after Mike Cockerills commentary of the MVFC vs WSW match last season...

But this shows what an opportunity has been missed, as it would have made so much more sense to show one of the AAMI Park home games of Melbourne Victory versus Western Sydney (the December one in particular) as the atmosphere of that rivalry played in that [particular stadium is potentially the best in Australian sport if both sets of fans turn up for it with their game-hat on (though if the trend of hysterical bannings of core members of both terraces means this may end up not being possible for too long).

I am from Melbourne and I can already state with some confidence that Western Sydney fans will never regard the so-called “Big Red” which the media conjured up (once again no one in fan circles uses this term let alone the ‘big blue’) as anything resembling a serious rivalry. 

The big one is against Melbourne Victory for both Sydney based teams, regardless of whatever agendas the media, the FFA or anyone else tries to conjure up regarding the A-Leagues rivalries. At the end of the day it is the fans who determine this.

This works the other way round too, one of Melbourne Victory’s away games on FTA should have been the WSW away in Parramatta, because this will make for a great spectacle if MVFC fans should turn out in force. Indeed even now there will some quarters of the Melbourne fan-base that concern Western Sydney as the bigger Sydney based rival even at this early stage. I am one of them.