The importance of product availability

[Perth Red]

So prey tell us

How upset was everyone when the Western Reds jumped to Super League in 1995 & 96?

Or how upset Adelaide fans were?

Like I said the majority of fans here were very unhappy! Hence crowd drop off and the grassroots being decimated. I met someone who was on the board of the reds pre news ltd take over and the stories he told me of how divided and bitter it all became was incredibly sad. The game was absolutely buzzing here pre SL and afterwards was stuffed. It took a decade before it got back off its knees so don’t tell me it was just sydney that cared!

as for Adelaide, well they were brought in for SL so the fans wouldn’t have really cared I guess which comp they were in.

 

[Get Rid of The Donkeys]

Why

Perth jumped to SL
Adelaide were a SL love child

Why would their fans desert them after 1 year

You're looking at it from a Sydney fan's emotional perspective. People outside of Sydney didn't care about the history and tradition of the NSWRL because a) they had no emotional connection to it and b) the NSWRL and its fans pissed and shit all over the history and tradition of every other competition.

Adelaide and Perth were true expansion markets and needed to be nurtured for 10-20 years to have a realistic chance of cultivating a sustainable supporter base. When Arthurson and Quayle decided Sydney meant more than everyone else, they convinced people from Adelaide and Perth that RL isn't a national game and they're better off supporting their AwFuL clubs.

 

[Pippen94]

Basic marketing theory suggests that the ease of access to a product, or it's availability, is directly linked to how popular that product will be. In other words the more convenient it is to consume a product the more it will be consumed.

Whether they realise it or not, the AFL have embraced this theory and it almost completely explains why they've been more successful than the other football codes in Australia.

While all the other codes have the majority of their matches behind a pay wall the AFL have pushed hard for all their clubs games to be on FTA in that club's region at the cost of short term financial gain, thus making it as easy as possible for the majority of people in each club's market to access them.
All their teams play out of centralised stadia in their cities, thus making it as easy as possible for the majority of fans in any given city to attend their games.
They have two clubs in every major capital city in the country, thus having at lease one major product and one alternate in all the largest states, and making supporting an AFL club easily accessible to the vast majority of the population of Australia.

These things (and many others) directly correspond to the growth of the VFL/AFL over the last 40ish years. In other words you can watch the AFL's jump in supporters as a result of these practices being introduced to the league, and to reinforce the point one last time, as they increased the ease of product availability more and more people consumed it.

Basically if the NRL wants to grow it's market share both nationally, and locally within the 'heartlands', then the best way to do that is to increase the sport's product availability as much as possible in every situation, even if it sometimes means making hard decisions and taking a financial hit in the short term.

It's also the only league in the world spending millions propping up expansion teams. Not everything they do is perfect or even wise.
Centralized stadiums only works in Melbourne because of nature of all clubs representing (at least originally) representing inner city & how Melbourne is a very centralized city unlike Sydney.
Explain to overseas ppl that arrangement & they'd be bloody confused.

 

[Get Rid of The Donkeys]

ARLC should really look at expanding into south-east Asia and the South Pacific. There's no major sporting competition in the area that has a strong international profile, so there's a void waiting to be filled.

Our game could become the NFL/EPL of Australiasia within 20 years if it put its mind to it. We're in the same time zone, which gives our product a huge advantage over NFL/EPL. To do it we would need to expand to 24 or 28 teams, split over two conferences and four divisions.

4 x Sydney
3 x New Zealand
3 x Brisbane
2 x Perth
2 x PNG
1 x Adelaide
1 x Canberra
1 x Gold Coast
1 x Melbourne
1 x Newcastle
1 x Townsville

1 x Singapore
1 x Indonesia
1 x Malaysia
1 x Philippines

Potential to add teams to Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan.

 

[The Great Dane]

Centralized stadiums only works in Melbourne because of nature of all clubs representing (at least originally) representing inner city & how Melbourne is a very centralized city unlike Sydney.

That's not true-

Furthermore, most of that growth doesn't come from Melbourne's inner-city, in fact it can't possibly because not enough people live in the inner city to sustain it, therefore it has to come from people traveling from right across the city to attend games, as anybody that's been at Flinders Street Station on a weekend during the season can attest. In other words by moving all their games to either the MCG or Marvel the AFL made their game days more accessible to a far larger portion of the population of the city, and there's no reason why the NRL couldn't do similar in Sydney.

Furthermore centralised stadia doesn't necessarily mean every club sharing one or two stadiums right in the middle of town. It can mean clubs sharing better stadiums within 'their' region of the city, i.e. all the inner west teams sharing Bankwest for example, and the NRL should be pushing for more state of the art stadiums like that across as many regions of the city as necessary and pushing for clubs to play all their games at them.

 

[MugaB]

ARLC should really look at expanding into south-east Asia and the South Pacific. There's no major sporting competition in the area that has a strong international profile, so there's a void waiting to be filled.

Our game could become the NFL/EPL of Australiasia within 20 years if it put its mind to it. We're in the same time zone, which gives our product a huge advantage over NFL/EPL. To do it we would need to expand to 24 or 28 teams, split over two conferences and four divisions.

4 x Sydney
3 x New Zealand
3 x Brisbane
2 x Perth
2 x PNG
1 x Adelaide
1 x Canberra
1 x Gold Coast
1 x Melbourne
1 x Newcastle
1 x Townsville

1 x Singapore
1 x Indonesia
1 x Malaysia
1 x Philippines

Potential to add teams to Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan.

Ok twiggy, go and get you billion dollars and run the asian teams, i get the idea but when you forget RU did this (well twiggys RU) and its not really the top tier RL the NRL produces

 

[Get Rid of The Donkeys]

Ok twiggy, go and get you billion dollars and run the asian teams, i get the idea but when you forget RU did this (well twiggys RU) and its not really the top tier RL the NRL produces

They can start off by creating an RL 9s circuit that runs across SE Asia, with a few rule changes. First rule change would be 20 minute halves and 6 tackles per set. On top of this, take 8 or so NRL games to these countries each year to build an audience. It will give our game a huge leg up over RU and AwFuL.

Singapore has 5.5m and is in the same time zone as Perth. It has a 55k National Stadium, with a retractable roof and the capability to bring its seating infield for RL games. It would be a good place to take State of Origin, Grand Finals and a great place for a team to relocate to if things turn to shit in Sydney.

National Stadium, Singapore - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Singapore - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

The fact Singapore is in the same time zone as Perth makes an NRL team in Perth even more valuable, especially if it is added alongside a Singaporean team. Spreading the game to a very rich market that has 5.5m will add money to our game.