There are 9 Australians compare to 6 New Zealanders [including 2 youths] in the Wellington Phoenix. For each Australian team, they would only need to travel once or sometimes twice to NZ in a just over 3 hour flight trip to play the Nix during the season. Still a small price compared to the fact that the Nix has to play every second game in Australia. But yet, the Nix manage to do better than most Australian teams on the management side of things with the extra cost. The reason that there is a Wellington Phoenix team is that fact there are over 4 million people in New Zealand and plenty of ex-New Zealanders in Australia so the market is large to consider their worth like any other Australian team. The only real problem, if any, is that there are 6 Kiwis in the squad, 4 senior players and 2 youth players, not the long distance trip or the financial backing. It's hardly, lets keep Australian, Australian problem when there are more Australian players than New Zealand players in the Nix's club. Plus it seems to increase the crowd numbers at certain games when an Australian team plays the Nixs compare to when they play other Australian teams. So it would be crazy for the FFA to let the Nix go.
We dont need you dude, you need us, we can manage costs fine too, aussies can do things just as well as kiwis can mate, I know you will find that hard to believe raised in a constant were better than aussies at everything environment, despite no proof of that (Ill give you union). I just think it would be better for the Aleague to keep travelling distances down, concentrate more teams in the south east pocket of Australia with the longest necessary trips being to Perth, Adelaide or Brisbane. Maybe in 50 years time when we have faster transport somehow, something that can get from Perth to Auckland in under 3 hours.
Yes, there is no parking at Skilled Park. However, transport is free if you have a ticket. I don't understand why as by the railway station (next to the stadium) there is a large vacant car park which no one is using.
Well I have to be corrected after analysing the season. There was an article in the four-four-two website that had Wellington favourable last season at one time. I couldn't find it among thousands of other articles. So I have to do a bit of research. In the 2009-10 season: Average attendance: Melbourne 20,750 Sydney 12,987 Adelaide 10,765 Perth 9,205 Wellington 8,965 Brisbane 8,650 Central CM 7,430 Nth Q 6,723 Newcastle 6,358 Gold Coast 5,392 Av=attendance 9,796 Bascialy Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide are above attendance with Perth and Wellington the best of the below attendance in the season. Attendance at Wellington away game compared to local average attendance. Melbourne 17,644 + 18,819 Average =18231.5 -> 2,518.5 below average for them Sydney 11,718 + 10,653 Average = 11185.5 -> 1,801.5 below average for them Adelaide 9,070 -> 1,695 below average for them Perth 9,368 -> 163 above average for them Brisbane 7,084 + 6,307 Average = 6695.5 -> 1,964.5 below average for them Central CM 11,137 -> 3,707 above average for them Nth Q 6,191 -> 532 below average for them Newcastle 6,655 +4,239 Average = 5,447 -> 911 below average for them Gold Coast 4,209 +4,202 Average = 4,205.5 -> 1186.6 below average for them Basically for Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and Brisbane there are below average turn outs but then you have to measure the rivalry factor in which they do get large crowds for that. Gold Coast was disappointing to everyone. Central Coast was greatly boosted. Perth, North Queenland and Newcastle was on the average crowd expected. So all in all, it was typical attendance read out for a mid-table club. But if you look at the comparsions to the season's average attendance of 9,796 per game. Melbourne 18231.5 -> better Sydney 11185.5 -> better Adelaide 9,070 ->average Perth 9,368 ->average Brisbane 6695.5 ->bad Central CM 11,137 -> better Nth Q 6,191 ->bad Newcastle 5,447 ->bad Gold Coast 4,205.5 ->bad It tells a slightly different story. In general: Melbourne and Sydney are lifting the average and Perth, Brisbane and Wellington are close to average and the rest is sadly lacking.
Mmmmm?? Only union? Lets look at some of the other teams sport in recent times: Commonwealth Netball: NZ Gold, Australia Silver Men's Rugby League World Cup 2009: NZ Winners, Australia Runners up Four Nation Rugby League 2010: NZ Winners, Australia Runners up Women's World Cup 2009 Cricket: NZ Runners-up, Australia 4th IRB Sevens Rugby: NZ Winners, Australia Runners-up. 2010 Commonwealth Rugby Sevens: NZ Gold, Australia Silver Women's World Cup Rugby Union 2010: NZ Winners Women's World Cu Rugby League 2008:NZ Winners World Men's 2009 Hockey Champion Challenge : NZ Winners World Women's 2009 Hockey Champion Challenge : NZ Winners Men's FIBA Oceania Championship 2009: NZ winner, Australia runners-up. A1 GP: NZ 7th, Australia 8th. (NZ worst season, Australia's best season ) Louis Vuitton Trophy: NZ winner, Australia still has no IACC boat since the 1995 sinking and the trashing in 2000. FIFA Men's World Cup 2010: Australia 21st, NZ 22nd I'll give you that and the softball. Plenty of proof that you need us to push you to the brink. If it wasn't for us Kiwis pushing you, you might not be as competitive in the world stage. We complete you
Actually we have 36 medals to your 177 medals at Deli. That means we have 121,325 New Zealanders to each medal we won compare to the 127,292 Australians to each medal you won. Oh yeah, great comeback with the Tennis (of all sports). Didn't know it was a especially a team sport besides the doubles. I suppose Anthony Wilding's 4 Wimbledon single titles and 4 double titles, 2 Australian Singles and a double has far exceed your statement. This lead us to "chances of getting more medals at a general sporting meet." Strictly removing "numbers of medals" because of population volume, lets look at the Gold Medals first over the other medals as they usually look at in medal tables. Lets stick with the Summer Olympics: 1936: our one Gold medal beats your one Bronze medal 1976: NZ 2Gs, 1S, 1B beats Aus 0G, 1S, 4Bs 1984: NZ 8Gs, 1S, 2Bs beats Aus 4Gs 8Ss 12Bs Done you over three times, already. Lets look at something else http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/spo_sum_oly_med_all_tim_percap-medals-all-time-per-capita SOURCE: The Golden Book of the Olympic Games NZ is ranked #11 and Aust is ranked #12 in the all-time summer olympic medals per captia. Our 183.395 per 10 million people to your 174.216 per 10 million people. In the Winter Olympics, we are still better than ya. Our 0.247831 per 1 million people in #26 beats your 0.199104 per 1 million people in #28.http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/spo_win_oly_med_all_tim_percap-medals-all-time-per-capita Even our recent FIFA ranking point per captia is better than yours. 94.919 per 1 million people is better 30.911 per 1 million people. http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/spo_fif_wor_ran_percap-world-ranking-men-per-capita We don't have envy or desire to get one over you. You are the one who has the envy and desire. You brought it up and I answered with the statistics. And BTW you never dominated us in the real stats per capita. Now don't bother me with your unproven statements. We are starting to get off topic. The truth is A-League need us as much as we need them and besides the differences in our central and local government, the trade between our two countries will be a common economic trait now and in the future. Our citizens are flowing between each other endless.
ZoidburgFC. You don't anything. I pointed out the untrue statements that you made in the previous post and used statistics to prove you otherwise. So all you got is to change your statements. How sad. Very sad. Medals per capita is very relevant in comparing countries because there are no other standard measurement to work with. To turn a blind eye to that is pure ignorance. Saying that by having more gold medals blah blah blah is unrealistic to prove being better than some else as everyone knows that it happens on the day and that the winner is not necessary the consistently the better person, it takes peaking at the right moment. But that does not say that you don't do that, it is obvious that you do. Another thing is the amount of money that you throw at large academies to produce great competitors. I assure you that if you try and get the same support system in NZ, there are very little of that support, yet our competitors push and pass some of the performance that your competitors do at these event. At the end, our competitors generally overcome greater hurdles than your competitors with less resources. That is not to say that your competitors haven't the toughness or less hurdles to overcome, but with less resources, getting that extra edge is that much more harder that it will reflect in the end results of the actual medal awarded. Having to refer to the silver and bronze placing is not less of a result when speaking about consistent high achievement. You talk about "chances of getting medals at general sporting meet". You fail to know about the three times we have done better than you. Granted that we are unlikely to achieve that as a total medal count because both countries have improve such that we both compare per captia with NZ being slightly favourable. Ok, I will give you that the endless flow is not there by numbers. I don't have a problem with that. However, it means that even more the need to have NZ teams there. By teams per captia, technically there are room for another two teams from NZ without losing football standard. The only hurdle would be the new clubs financing that most clubs are struggling at A-League level so the criteria may be tightening up in the future as FFA is identifying the problems by experience. The Wellington Phoenix learnt from the mistakes of NZ Knights and Football Kingz. But the Fury and the Gold Coast are having teething problems working off a poor business model or a poor regional market in their first year. Perth, Newcastle (Kingz as well) have self-structured change-over problems from NSL to A-league, Perth and Newcastle were under FFA administration and the Kingz was dismantled for Phoenix. Only Adelaide of the old NSL survived the self-structured change-over to A-league. Melbourne, Sydney, Queensland, Brisbane was restructured from combining old NSL clubs and breaking up old ethnic lines. If there is anything to learn, the success of the A-League is not by having this team over that team simply because it is an Australian team over an NZ team or a Singapore or an Indonesian team. It is the success that will produce the right amount of football standard necessary that will ultimately translate into the national teams. What lacks is the enough footballers of the sufficient standard and getting it showcased for the population. Lets face it, the Australian and the New Zealand population are not enough nor is the amount of coaching standard and depth that compares with numerous European leagues of high quality at this present time . . . for a very long time. Although A-League is a AFC league and we compete against the likes of K-League and J-League, ideally we should look at attracting players from other AFC leagues and at the same time drawing players back from some of the less european leagues along with expanding the league without losing money or losing football standard. Having a second trier league [promotion/relegation] in the future and the likehood of having two teams in a city or region is part of the success formula to increase friendly rivalry and promote crowd size. The best thing is for all the A-league Clubs to have a competitive look to their game to attract the crowds. The better the competition in the games the better the people outside the hardcore fans will come. Attracting the non-hardcore fan is a lot tougher than you think it is and the FFA is in for the long term strategy and is not in rush to expand and is willing to help grow slowly and support each club to achieve independent stability in one step at a time. Know what capacity the FFA can achieve is important. Having Perth and Newcastle in administration was important in see how much they can support and rework the club strategy. (Knights was a different and independent matter) Its a long way from the likes of the european leagues. There are not the types of owners or investors for the A-league as it is for the EPL (which attract them around the world) that has a long tradition and history. But slowly when all of the AFC accepts the A-League as their own, the investors will come from Asia and increase the profile in other countries. To do that is to produce a consistently strong national team on the back of the A-League. It is increasing apparent that you also need to show that the players in A-league can demonstrate that a high level of footballing ability to the world's game. By having the New Zealand National team regularly performing at a high level due to the A-League exposure, it reflects greatly on the A-league and attract investors. In Europe, players can easily go and play in different countries leagues and at times when a national team does well, scouts look at the leagues these players reside in to reflect the strength and the football abilities and hereby enhance reputations of the league and attract more money. However in this nick of the woods, regionally you have mainly NZ to increase player pool of efficient football standard as well as OFC and the ASEAN AFC and EAFF AFC. The need is not just because of football standard but also having various football styles that challenges the players to be more complete as a player and help the players to adapt to the change of game at international level. It is hard not to ignore that both NZ and Australia perform at a reasonable level at the world cup so the rest of the world is sitting up and taking notice at this region where the A-league is. Sure the players are mainly developed at overseas leagues but it has shown that it is not the place that these players are born but also of the early and late development of the players. Nevertheless, A-League is now even more closely watched because of some of the players now have international profiles but more likely because the potential of players for stronger oversea leagues that some clubs are willing to be more secured in knowing that players from this end of the earth can be with less risk and even on a cheap. This will help the players development and allow growth. Even non-national rep players have a little better chance. To say that "We don't need NZ" is very short sighted and just simply naive.
Alright- keep this thread on track please. Any more off topic posts will be deleted. Expansion Thread.
At the moment it looks like the Fury will survive (though not without losing their best players again, thanks FFA) and we're at eleven for '11-12, unless Jabba decides to pull the plug. You'd think FFA would be pretty keen on getting that number to a nice twelve pretty soon, and hopefully they'll have learnt something from the last bidding round. '12-13 maybe?
The biggest lesson that needs to be learnt is they need to stop trying to target limited areas as it means that potential teams outside those areas just don't get the opportunity to try to put a bid together. If they opened up the process and selected the best teams, rather than trying to pick the winner at the start and then try to make the best of it they may have more luck.
They are trying to kill the fury off and I say GOOD! Its just too far away, get rid of the nix too, keep Perth as the only long trip, and lets open up new teams at Canberra and Wollongong!
I hope the Fury stay. IMHO they are the only expansion team in 'new' territory. GCU cannibalized 2k off Roar's support, Heart did the same to between 6-10k of Victory's support. At least FNQ is new to the game. I like that the nix are in. In the future I see Oceania disbanding AND being absorbed by AFC, with 4 mil people, if the league continues to improve and make strides forward, there'd be no reason FFA couldn't try again with Auckland(creating a natural rivalry with Welly = bigger crowds due to away support and local media hype?)) and maybe even eventually Canterbury. Teams could hit Christchurch and work there way up the country to limit travel worries. A New Zealand angle to the league would be like the 3 Canadian clubs in MLS. I've no problem with it at all. As New Zealand improves its football, the All Whites would be much easier as an opponent from a Green & Gold Army travel point of view. there's no reason the above can't happen and still include Canberra and Wollongong. Don't forget West Sydney... there's 5 new clubs to potentially add to out current 12. Aim for 16 and pick the best/strongest 4 bids to reach 16( my magical number) magical because 16 teams gives a balancedH&A round of 30 rounds(+5 wks finals) and 16HAL teams gives 16 tier 2 clubs a nice round number of 32 for the FFA Cup.(~4wkends) giving abt a 35 wk season(with mid-wk games over summer/school hols), long enough to tempt back some of the players from Europe who want a longer season to aid there development. but not so long as to tire out the old buggers like Skoko/Lazaridis/Agostino who left it too late to return to Australia to play.
I sort of agree with the above post. However, I think it was mention about capping at 14 teams by Frank Lowry and maybe creating that weaker/smaller second trier league for promotion/relegation purposes. That would give it 26 rounds plus 5 weeks of playoffs. The second division maybe a bit smaller at 8-12 teams and of course having a smaller prize money. The budget of these teams will be naturally smaller with less rounds but it would be within the financial capacity of what would be naturally smaller clubs with a smaller region pull. With 22-26 teams for the FFA cup, it wouldn't too difficult of a long term challenge for the FFA. I think that 22-26 teams was what FFA has imagine would to regionally cover the whole of Australia and NZ. Although I haven't sat down and list the potential places myself.
You have to think of practibility. As much as I hate to admit it but Australia is dominated by what the bogans call football. The AFL and NRL dictate much of what areas the A-league can tap into. So this ultimately detracts the money spent for Association football. I think the FFA and Ben Buckley have to put a halt on all the sudden expansions, get more intact with their teams they have and help better the clubs they already have so that teams like the fury don't go into financial troubles every year. Then you have bad marketing from many teams. Look at Gold coast, the only good thing that Clive Palmer has done with his side is give free tickets to attract crowds, but that only came about because of his bad original marketing. Nathan Tinkler in my belief has done well at the Jets and as soon as he rescued the club from folding he alligned a game against LA galaxy and formed a friendship with the club which will possibly see more games between the two. And playing performance has little to do with anything about crowds. Adelaide came last last season yet still drew above average league crowds, gold coast came 3rd, almost blitzed the competition till the final weeks yet drew crowds of 3,000. Sydney in my belief had a good idea with the festival of football but they somehow didn't tap into the market to attract crowds. IMHO i think the NRL had something to do with that. I dont understand why more Australians dont take in two sports to attend and support. Although i go to more soccer games then the rest i still am a rugby league fan and used to always go to toyota park a few times a season and do like the swans and the waratahs and i used to watch the NBL when i was younger and the kings when they were at their prime. There is no reason why australians dont follow the soccer and i think its the stubborness many australians possess when it comes to their football code. If they put this aside they can tap into more markets, more cash and more support and one advantage soccer has over the other football codes is that its always the second favourite in the city. Its the only reason why A-league have games in more cities in australia than the AFL or NRL, its also why there is only one local derby. Because they can only have enough support from a city for one team rather than a couple of teams. So these points in my opinion need to be addressed before more teams can be added to the competition. 1. FFA funding the teams more and helping campaigning and promoting league, also preventing so many restrictions on the teams so they can perform better internationally. 2. Teams management needs to address its own needs, try to reach out to fans as well as playing more attractive football. 3. The last and hardest point is for the football fans to try convince their hardcore bogan footy fans to attend matches with them. I have dragged some of my friends to sydney games and they dont usually watch sport at all but they all seem to have taken a liking to it. The sooner we can get dual support for codes i think soccer will have a better edge over the rival football codes
I think costs is the main problem, things are tighter now so familys pick and choose who they will follow. Tinkler is a wonderful businessman, and has realised getting bums on seats at Newcastle is much more important than making any short term profits, which the Gold Coast guy hasnt worked out yet.
Hit the nail on the head with my point. We need more owners like Tinkler who takes problems first hand and does something about it, which obviously didn't happen with Sydney Rovers and why they couldn't form a side, i heard a South Coast bid had backing from one of the richest men in Australia but it may have had a similar effect as to whats happening in Gold Coast And i also agree totally with the costs bit now that i think of it. Another point i forgot to mention is the television networks dont help people familiarise themselves to the a-league and the standards. Only those with foxtel can watch the games if they dont attend the games. Isn't there a free to air agreement that pay television cannot take full ownership of major australian sports. surely the soccer is a major australian sport.
At the very least Football is ahead of Rugby Union in this country in a commercial sense - and that is from the mouth of the ARU, not the FFA. I consider that an accomplishment, because Rugby Union is an established, parochial sport.
Tinkler sees problems and fixes them quick and does it with alot of good old fashioned sense, he has saved the Jets from extinction, from that egotistical fool in charge before. He also will do the same job with the NRL team there, the admin village idiot of Australian rugby league, the Newcastle Knights. Im not sure of the TV arrangements you mention, but going to the game is much better than watching it, you get alot more out of football live than any other sport.