What a victory for AFL in Sydney, hey? Over 33,000 flood the SCG to see the Swans play Hawthorn, while next door at the Sydney Football Stadium, a crowd of, ahem, 10,000 witnessed the NRL snooze fest between the Roosters and the Knights. A colourful SCG against a stadium in funereal military blue.
That story is all over the papers. That story is easy. Lazy too.
It’s also burying the lead.
The Swans have been swamping the Sydney NRL clubs in attendances for years. Been doing it since the Bloods woke from their slumber in the mid-90s. Even if the NRL clash was a little more mouth-watering than the turgid Roosters against the impotent Knights, it wouldn’t have come close to the numbers at the Cricket Ground.
Where the game is really played, where the money is made, is where the Swans are getting killed.
Just 49,000 Sydneysiders bothered to watch the game on television. That’s 49,000 with no caveats. No Fox Sports live coverage, nor 7mate. 49,000, total. Quite frankly numbers like those are not worthy of mainstream free-to-air television. Seven News was slaughtered. Because of the AFL.
Not all of it is the doing of the television behemoth that is NRL. More people watched netball on Ten, while the day before saw more people watched bowls on ABC1 than Ten/OneHD’s Saturday afternoon AFL clash. If there wasn’t a watertight contract in place, the AFL simply wouldn’t have been on Seven yesterday.
Back in the day it was easy to poke fun when the Swans on occasion were out-rated by Iron Chef. Remember? The irony is in those days a figure of 130,000 would have caused enough alarm for emergency 9am board meetings.
Just think about yesterday’s numbers for a moment. Of the entire Sydney population interested in yesterday’s game, 40 percent were inside the SCG. The dip is astounding.
What does it matter, a record TV deal has already been done, you say? Yes, with the new television deal, Sydney’s atomic TV ratings won’t matter. With $1.25 billion on the way, no club is going broke for a long, long time, and no child entering school shall be without an AFL sponsored lunch box until they complete their HSC.
However, there is a bigger picture here - Western Sydney.
The Swans have been an established brand in the harbour city for nearly thirty years. If we take yesterday’s figures – relatively consistent over the last 12 months I might add - as the sample size, just 2 per cent of Sydney cares enough to invest three hours a week in them.
Seriously, what hope does this give GWS? When they are handed their inevitable early thrashings the media berate them, as the Gold Coast Suns know only to well. Easy, lazy stories, ill-informed too, yet destructive nonetheless.
The new club will enter the competition under a new arrangement which means exactly zero of their games will appear on mainstream free-to-air television. For a decade the heavies at AFL house played their hand hard. Every game involving a local team in the fledgling markets had to be on free-to-air at a decent time. It has been a disaster. Even the unyielding Andrew Demetriou, a man who you fancy would buy ten bingo cards at the RSL just to get the edge on the old ladies, knew he had to fold.
Sure, some games in Sydney will be aired on the diminutive 7mate, while every AFL match will be available live on subscription television, but try convincing the marginal western Sydney socio-economic group to shell out a minimum 80 bucks a month when we are about to enter the Carbon Tax era.
Not exactly a rails run for a new club in a niche sport.
There is a group in Sydney that is madly-in-love-with-AFL-lets-move-in-then-get-married-and-get-old-together. The problem is no-one else in town seems to want to dance or flirt with the sport. They don’t even want to be friends with it.
If Sydney was a giant party, AFL is the couple in corner that’s lost in each other’s eyes while everyone else is ignoring them out of resent or embarrassment for them.
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