Of course there are, but clearly the biggest is your teams aren't winning. winning garners support, from fans, sponsors, and kids wanting to play.
Winning is quickest and easiest fix. Your National team is the only team that can garner support across all areas of the country. Your parochial "state vs state" bullshit hamstrings you and limits the support of those teams.
yes because a "war" in 97-98 certainly will effect crowds in the mid 00's. It would have increased crowds and viewers immediately, but unless you can keep them they will go. Your teams losing makes that so very much easier. a dozen years of sucking made it a certainty.
Because there is no incentive for kids to play. Why would any kid want to play for teams that keep losing. Why would schools have teams that no one wants to play in? And its not like Australia is a your nursery anyway.. the amount of NZers and Islanders that are being signed up is staggering.
Or you are grasping at straws. Your coaching is terrible, you have a erratic idiot for a national coach, two Kiwis and a South African, each coaching differently with no common goal in mind. Its no wonder your teams can't win. Who in their right mind would want to play a game where their rep teams aren't any good?
You just have no data mate. Heck, you didn't even know that the Tahs had 10k lower average crowds in 2014 than when they won the comp compared to a year in the mid 00s when they didn't even get a home semi.
The only data that isn't affected by significant extraneous factors just massively contradicts your claims - citing the late 90s when the AFL wasn't organised in Sydney and Super League war had decimated League support just isn't as pure as the mid 00s era v the periods of success in this decade.
And yes, the Super League war undermined Rugby League for a solid decade... it took about that long for the game to truly rebuild itself and get to where it is now. Again, you're on League Unlimited, so you ought to get that.
You can bang on with your very thoughtful argument that "your coach is shit and you suck and that's why the game is crap" but doing that ignores vastly greater structural problems (hint, money is a big deal and the NRL and AFL have a f**k tonne more of it).
Put it to you this way, Super Rugby is a critical plank of RA's funding, but it's been anaemic for years. That's why we had to cut a side...
Now, having a competition like Super Rugby fuelled solely by Pay TV cash in the late 90s probably made a tonne of sense. The NRL was a mess, AFL had limited investments via their expansion sides in the Northern States and soccer wasn't a thing.
But then what happened? Well first up a few years into Super Rugby:
- soccer launched the A-League and the socceroos brand started to eat into the Wallabies space as the big international brand Australians care about;
- The NRL slowly got its shit together, eventually becoming the billion dollar business it is now, reinvesting a lot of that into lower tiers and juniors programs;
- the AFL got its shit together with a similarly large billion dollar deal and even stronger balance sheets, investing over $200 million in both the Swans and now GWS Giants EACH that is heavily focused on providing cheaper pathways and alternatives largely in Union heartlands
Both these major rivals have 16 and 18 team very well funded competitions that each present 4 days a week of prime time and free to air content.
Where has that left RA? With a product that provides 4 full time pro teams as professional pathways, has 2 days of prime time content a week for the most part and a thoroughly confusing conference structure, all wedded to pay TV, which has 30% penetration in Australia and is falling thanks to online streaming services.
At the end of the day, THAT is what has killed Australian rugby. The Wallabies not having any sort of rivalry with the All Blacks isn't awesome, but frankly it's Super Rugby's failure to adapt to the fast changing and vastly more aggressively competitive Australian football landscape that has killed it most.
The levels of funding at RA have been so poor and the ratings so bad, that they were charging their feeder clubs in the Sydney and Brisbane comps extra to keep afloat. That impacts on what the grass roots can do to grow the game.
The Wallabies winning 20 tests in a row that included the last world cup and 2 bledisloes wouldn't have altered any of those underlying factors. Sure, it would have given us a bump in the ratings and crowds, but like the Tahs they'd still be lower than the early 00s days of lower market competition and safer grass-roots environments.
