Despite the disappointing crowd, the event itself certainly had plenty of pluses ranging from TV ratings, strong media coverage, some great games and players taking it seriously, good corporate uptake both from a hospitality and sponsorship side (Telstra, Downer, NSW Government, Flight Centre, Minelab, etc), so its definitely worth pursing.
For me, I really enjoyed the two days, and everyone I dragged along did as well. Bankwest is an amazing ground, and was a good pick as a ground for the tournament as even when there weren't many there, there was still a good atmosphere and for a lot of the close shots, especially used in highlights, you don't actually notice the empty seats.
Why the crowd was so poor, I can't exactly put my finger on it. Marketing can always be 'bigger' but it wasn't like there wasn't effort put into this one, especially relative to other internationals. Going up against Everest, and other events is never ideal, but in Sydney, it is near impossible to find 'clear' weekends.
Arguably a Saturday / Sunday split could have worked better for crowds, but then again there weren't that many more on Saturday than Friday, so I don't know if they had done that it would have driven up the crowd numbers. Being selfish, for me and my friends, with young families, the Friday / Saturday timeslots was definitely easier to get leave passes for than losing both days of the weekend.
For me, I feel what they'd need to get right next time would be:
- Don't hold off the on-sale. Tickets were held off way too late in the year, with the event first announced, then 'travel packages' put on sale months later before tickets came available. Any hype and excitement back in January had long gone by the time people could buy tickets.
- Pricing needs to be looked at. The top Tier sold the best, which shows the 'cheap' seats weren't considered 'cheap' by the fans and thus not bought.
- Teams need to play more games. On Friday, once your team had played, that was it... same on Saturday, a number of teams were 'eliminated' by what felt like 4pm. This would have killed any potential walk up / people running late (after all more tickets were generated than attendees) and left gaps for the limited crowd to disappear.
The later was a real bug bear for me at the game... I know that inviting more teams adds to the cost of an event, however there was no reason in the games between the Group Games, Semi's and Finals that they couldn't have had some of the other teams play for Bowls, Plates or whatever... Would have been better than the artists they had playing music and would have kept the crowds in the ground for longer.
