Thats becasue they are left to the clubs to decide and negotiate.
Nope all the contracts that the clubs in question negotiated with the ACT government were negotiated in with the AFL.
In the case of North Melbourne the AFL oversaw the whole process to make sure it was up to their standards, in the cases of both the Bulldogs and GWS the AFL negotiated and organised the deals for the clubs.
re Canberra, all agreements are open for negotiation. I'm sure if the NRL guaranteed an international game every year or two they could get the Raiders out of the 12 game deal. Maybe the NRl could chip in with a year the redevelopment costs to get them a better deal? Where there is a will there is a way.
I'm sure your right, except that the NRL would never agree to anything that would appease the ACT government because ACT would only agree if the internationals included the Roos and the NRL could make more money from those internationals by holding them in other cities then they could from holding said internationals in Canberra while taking Raiders games to other cities.
The NRL wouldn't agree to any deal where the NRL help pay the new stadium as it'd cost them more significantly more money then holding a few Raiders games abroad would make them in return.
I live in Canberra and have seen the impact of these deals from an AFL point of view and they have actually maintained a presence for the AFL in Canberra.
I half agree, it has maintained an AFL presences in Canberra, however it is almost exclusively within the people from outside of Canberra and you can't maintain a sport on the transient part of a community forever.
Most of those people will go home or move on once their business in Canberra is finished, what's left is the Canberrans and with us all that has come of these teams coming and declaring themselves 'Canberra's team' has done is offend and in the long run that'll come back to bite the AFL squarely on the balls.
Without these deals the AFL would've continued it's slow decline due to the Raiders and Brumbies but they seem to have stalled it and arguably started to turn it around.
What steady decline!
The AFL's participation numbers in Canberra were roughly steady until the late 80's through to the late 90's where they dropped (I'll let you guess why) after that they evened out again and have steadily increased with population as it grew.
I might add that outside of the private schools RU's participation numbers in the ACT took a significant hit though that same period of 89-97ish before jumping significantly up after 2001--2005ish (again I'll let you guess why) and then evening back out again.
I don't ever remember the Western Bulldogs settling here
They came here around 2006-7 and if I remember correctly they agreed to a five year deal (or something similar) with the ACT government, but pulled out after the first or second year.
though I was here for the Kangaroos and they did increase their memberships here.
During the period that they were playing here sure, that was the cheapest way to get tickets to all of their games in Canberra for the season, in fact most of the people that bought those memberships were fans of other clubs happy just to be able to go to any AFL.
But once they left I doubt that many of those Canberra members stayed members.
GWS verdict is out but there is some gear around town. (they got too far good a deal with the Government). Thankfully GWS is terrible as well so the Raiders have been let off the hook for the moment.
The verdict is still out I guess, the crowd numbers are steadily dropping, the ACT members average is stagnating and the majority of those who are still buying memberships and attending games are fans of others clubs.
I can't see the Giants pulling out of their deal, it's so good that they'ed have to be insane to that, but I also can't see any significant changes in the amount of interest in them in Canberra changing unless they win the comp, which I can't see happening.
Raiders are now going to struggle as an ongoing reality because of the limited and transient population and corporate appeal.
The size of the population is growing significantly and the transience of the population is dropping significantly.
All of our corporate appeal problems (and a fair amount of our fan engagement as well) could be fixed with equal shearing of FTA time as the only problem we have with convincing companies to join us is convincing them to pay us the same amount as they would pay a Sydney club but only get a quarter of the publicity for their investment. The Storm will likely face similar issues once the 'Big three' and Bellamy move on and you don't have as much success.
I go to the games and there is a good core but other sides are simply going to get bigger in the next decade and the Raiders can't keep up without broadening their appeal.
With the way that we're treated by Nine, 20 years of mediocrity and the current success of the team, until recently the administrations treatment of the fans, marketing, branding, etc it's not surprising that it's been hard to grow our appeal.
Apart from the media outside Canberras utter contempt for all things Canberra (compounded by the fact that 90% of the RL media is based in either Sydney or Brisbane), the Raiders have been working on all their problems and seem to be making slow but fair advances.
Were you at the final against the Sharks two years ago, 25 thousand Raiders fans, the majority from Canberra or the surrounding region, the fan base is here it's just frustrated and disenfranchised.
