Slackboy72
Coach
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All the talk recently of less teams in Sydney has me thinking of how AFL teams in Melbourne are coping (and before you answer, they are coping relatively well to the NRL). It became quite apparent in the late 80s that the VFL as a national product needed to reach out to their markets in WA and SA and that expansion with new teams was needed. However the number of clubs all clustered around the inner city was a 'problem'. The argument goes thus: too many clubs not representing enough people all competing for the same patch of dirt. Remove some teams and there's more territory for everyone, more fans for those left behind, thus more profits.
But this 'problem' wasn't really a problem. In Melbourne, a microcosm in itself, people didn't follow a team because they came from a certain area. They followed a club because their dad followed them or they liked that team when they were a kid. Most people who follow Hawthorn today have never lived in Hawthorn. They probably watched Dipper and Brereton as a kid and latched on. Most Collingwood supporters couldn't afford to live in Collingwood. Where the team is has become irrelevant as we are now much more mobile and transient in where we can, and do, live.
Thusly AFL has adopted a model of making the game easy to get to and in Melbourne, instead of 9 home grounds where the clubs are from they have 2 grounds that are close to transport hubs. The result on crowds has been significant. Collingwood average nearly twice as much now than ten years ago when they moved from Victoria park to the MCG.
Clearly for AFL it is not about how many teams there are in Melbourne but rather how many people support those clubs and how much they are willing to pay to do so. For AFL teams a membership of 30,000 is dissapointing. Collingwood are now one of the premier brands in the country because they can harness their strong supporter base.
Transferring this to NRL the same so-called 'problem' faces most Sydney teams. One doubts wether the majority of rabbitohs supporters actually live near their area. Where you play your home games is no longer relevant for many and in fact playing out of sub-standard 'boutique' grounds in hard to get to locations is hurting the game. Obviously the further out you go then the stronger the pull of local identity is. Regional teams such as Newcastle and Canberra would almost certainly derive the majority of their support from locals, not only because of the homogeneity of their support bases identity with the team but also because they are relatively new teams. They don't have the history that a foundation club has in the common culture. So for most sydney teams it is about the brand of your club and how you sell it.
As such if you were to rank the value of teams as a brand I believe it would fall thus:
Wests Tigers
Canterbury Bulldogs
Manly Sea Eagles
Parramatta Eels
St George Illawarra Dragons
South Sydney Rabbitohs
Sydney Roosters
Cronulla Sharks
Penrith Panthers
(Feel free to argue the ranking on this list. I'm only basing it on average home crowd figures for 2006 and 2007. Yeah, not a good indicator but an indicator nonetheless.)
If you have to lose teams in Sydney to accomodate expansion of the game you would be losing brand value in order to keep the number of slices of pie reasonable. Personally I believe we can't afford anymore than 18 teams given our current piss-poor tv rights deal. We do however need 3 more teams in QLD and one on the central coast to exploit our unrepresented heartland, turning tv-watching supporters in these regions into paid up, bums-on-seats, fanatical supporters. This follows that we maybe need two less teams in Sydney. If we were to cut Penrith and Sharks (regrettable as they are amongst the better run of a bad bunch) then it would be better to do it with amalgamation or relocation. Problem is how do you amalgamate Penrith and Parramatta ot Penrith with Wests and not lose a significant amount of brand value? And how can you move a club like the Sharks whose biggest plus is that they own their own ground?
So the question is, and the problem for rugby league in general, if we can't cut teams how do we extract as much of that brand value for these teams as possible?
But this 'problem' wasn't really a problem. In Melbourne, a microcosm in itself, people didn't follow a team because they came from a certain area. They followed a club because their dad followed them or they liked that team when they were a kid. Most people who follow Hawthorn today have never lived in Hawthorn. They probably watched Dipper and Brereton as a kid and latched on. Most Collingwood supporters couldn't afford to live in Collingwood. Where the team is has become irrelevant as we are now much more mobile and transient in where we can, and do, live.
Thusly AFL has adopted a model of making the game easy to get to and in Melbourne, instead of 9 home grounds where the clubs are from they have 2 grounds that are close to transport hubs. The result on crowds has been significant. Collingwood average nearly twice as much now than ten years ago when they moved from Victoria park to the MCG.
Clearly for AFL it is not about how many teams there are in Melbourne but rather how many people support those clubs and how much they are willing to pay to do so. For AFL teams a membership of 30,000 is dissapointing. Collingwood are now one of the premier brands in the country because they can harness their strong supporter base.
Transferring this to NRL the same so-called 'problem' faces most Sydney teams. One doubts wether the majority of rabbitohs supporters actually live near their area. Where you play your home games is no longer relevant for many and in fact playing out of sub-standard 'boutique' grounds in hard to get to locations is hurting the game. Obviously the further out you go then the stronger the pull of local identity is. Regional teams such as Newcastle and Canberra would almost certainly derive the majority of their support from locals, not only because of the homogeneity of their support bases identity with the team but also because they are relatively new teams. They don't have the history that a foundation club has in the common culture. So for most sydney teams it is about the brand of your club and how you sell it.
As such if you were to rank the value of teams as a brand I believe it would fall thus:
Wests Tigers
Canterbury Bulldogs
Manly Sea Eagles
Parramatta Eels
St George Illawarra Dragons
South Sydney Rabbitohs
Sydney Roosters
Cronulla Sharks
Penrith Panthers
(Feel free to argue the ranking on this list. I'm only basing it on average home crowd figures for 2006 and 2007. Yeah, not a good indicator but an indicator nonetheless.)
If you have to lose teams in Sydney to accomodate expansion of the game you would be losing brand value in order to keep the number of slices of pie reasonable. Personally I believe we can't afford anymore than 18 teams given our current piss-poor tv rights deal. We do however need 3 more teams in QLD and one on the central coast to exploit our unrepresented heartland, turning tv-watching supporters in these regions into paid up, bums-on-seats, fanatical supporters. This follows that we maybe need two less teams in Sydney. If we were to cut Penrith and Sharks (regrettable as they are amongst the better run of a bad bunch) then it would be better to do it with amalgamation or relocation. Problem is how do you amalgamate Penrith and Parramatta ot Penrith with Wests and not lose a significant amount of brand value? And how can you move a club like the Sharks whose biggest plus is that they own their own ground?
So the question is, and the problem for rugby league in general, if we can't cut teams how do we extract as much of that brand value for these teams as possible?