Ticketing, scheduling and bad footy to blame for AFL crowd decline: Fans association
12 June 2014
The AFL has seen a sharp drop in crowd numbers in Victoria, New South Wales, Tasmania and the ACT this season, and AFL Fans Association President Brian Clarke believes variable pricing, scheduling and a poor quality of football are to blame.
Speaking exclusively to The Under Age, Clarke labelled variable pricing a tax on football.
“We regard variable pricing as very unfair for the fans. We regard it as a footy tax, and a blatant grab for cash,” he said.
Variable pricing allows the AFL to charge different prices and for tickets according to demand, and to change seating categorisations according to match popularity.
The Fans Association has put forward a formal complaint to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).
Clarke also pointed to scheduling as a factor in the underwhelming crowd figures.
“Monday night is a terrible night for football. It’s a concept borrowed from the USA, where the Monday night is often the top ranking game of the week, but the AFL needs to realise that the A in the AFL stands for Australia and not America, and that this concept just does not work here,” Clarke argued.
Monday night football has seen a steady drop off in crowd attendances since its introduction to the AFL in 2009. Clarke used the recent Sunday twilight match between St Kilda and the Gold Coast Suns as an example of poor scheduling.
“To get 14,000, plus a few more, at an AFL match just shows you that people are voting with their feet,” he said.
The match had an official attendance figure of 14,625, and is currently the lowest attendance for a football match in Victoria for the season.
Clarke also told The Under Age the defensive style adopted by coaches was pushing fans away from football.
“What we’ve got now is a series of rolling mauls, constant stoppages, and we’ve got a very unattractive style of play,” Clarke said.
He criticised clubs’ overuse of the interchange leading to frequent substitutions of players on the field.
“The problems have stemmed from the interchange … The interchange was used as a device to give players a rest, and under modern AFL coaching systems, has been turned into a strategic tool,” Clarke said.
“It leads to more contests, which creates more rolling mauls, it creates more soft tissue injuries, and it creates more unattractive play.”
The president of the association, formed late last year, argued against the cap at 120 rotations, believing that the cap should be set at 40.
“A proposal was put forward to the Game Committee to reduce interchanges to 80. We feel that that (the cap of 80) is too high, and it should be reduced to 40 a game.”
Clarke acknowledged defensive coaching is an issue, but said that “the interchange is the root of the problem (ugly football).”
Interchange statistics from specific clubs seem to back Clarke up. Ross Lyon-led Fremantle, often criticized by football purists for playing a dour, boring style of football, average the most interchange rotations in the league at 115.7 per game.
Port Adelaide and Geelong, two sides praised for playing attacking, direct, and entertaining football, are both in the bottom five of the league for rotations. Geelong draws more than 40,000 fans to their matches on average, while Port Adelaide has an average home attendance of almost 45,000.
South Australian football as a whole has seen fantastic attendances this football season. The completion of a redevelopment opening Adelaide Oval to AFL matches has sparked a spike in SA football attendances, with crowd figures in the state rising by over 50 per cent, from 30,264 to 45,618.
“The AFL would be very happy with the new stadium in Adelaide, because it has kept crowd figures up,” Clarke said.
“It’s a credit to the AFL for getting the Adelaide Oval redeveloped.”
Adelaide Oval recently hosted a clash between top of the table Port Adelaide and reigning premiers Hawthorn that attracted a crowd of 52,233, the highest AFL crowd ever at a South Australian venue.
http://theunderage.com.au/2014/06/12/ti ... KA1a4.dpbs
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even with the expansion teams 
