A-League Big Bashed

It’s enough to break my heart, but I sense that just as one may have hoped the Hyundai A-League gaining a piece of media turf, along has come a new summer sports phenomenon destined to usurp it.

At least in the short term.

Already, despite its infancy and so far of purely novelty value, the KFC T20 Big Bash League appears to be very generously treated by the metropolitan newspaper editors.

After round 14 of the A-League in the first full weekend of January, both the Sunday Telegraph and Monday’s Daily Telegraph of Sydney splashed the Big Bash on their lead sports pages.

The Sydney Morning Herald and the two Melbourne dailies didn’t quite match this (yet) but there too the T20 got far more generous space, and a far higher editorial ranking, than the A-League.

The TV and radio news bulletins all prioritised the Big Bash above the A-League. Exactly why is a mystery.

The reason this should be of some concern is that football chose to move to summer over 20 years ago with the express purpose of moving away from the seasonal competition for box office appeal provided by the other ‘football codes’.

Since then the only other major summer sporting preoccupations have been a brief Test and one-day cricket season, a couple of decent golf tournaments and the fortnight long Australian Open tennis.

Now part of that summer has been populated by the Big Bash with 32 well publicised, fabulously hyped matches over six weeks. Okay, that’s nowhere near all of the summer and it’s only a short slice of what the entire duration if the A-League entails. But it is, nonetheless, a new highly appealing product smack in the middle of the football season and one with the potential to eat into the A-League’s capacity to draw fans.

I am not privy to the T20’s crowd averages (its website seems uninterested in publishing them) or its television ratings. But I’m curious, especially to know how the Big Bash games may have impacted on the A-League box office.

I’d also be curious to know if the differences between those figures justifies the kind of sexed up media favouritism the Big Bash already enjoys in comparison to the A-League in most parts of the media.

Could it be that it’s another case of the old sheilas, wogs and poofters mentality? I think probably yes. I can smell this stuff from light years away.

In any case it should all be sounding some warning bells in Football Federation Australia’s media and marketing departments. It’s a challenge FFA cannot afford to ignore.

And it might be a good start to look at the lingering Gold Coast United problem. The empty stands at Skilled Park, proudly paraded on national television, are the biggest marketing problem the A-League now has. They’re a festering sore.

The Big Bash has just made it bigger. Imagine switching the TV channel from the raucous Big Bash, with its heaving crowds in the background, to a GCU game, to its lifelessness and its deathly quiet. Urrghh!

But then, maybe one shouldn’t get so stressed.

As one wise-head recently tweeted, ‘The danger is that [the] Big Bash is both exactly what mainstream Oz sport fans want, and everything football shouldn't be.’

Football’s real big bash

That said, FFA appears to have hit upon a good thing with the League’s round 13 marathon, the so-called Big Wednesday.

As far as football fans are concerned, this was a far bigger bash.

The day’s seven and a half hours of action, plus all the chit chat, may have seemed a bit daunting before it started but it ended up being a thrill a minute, an embodiment of the cliché: ‘too much football is not enough’.

Now FFA must grab it and schedule it for roughly the same day every January, and then persist with it.

Football fans love a good habit and good things in the game should always be made habit forming. If Big Wednesday is persisted with, soon enough it will be something the fans will expect and probably want. Its appeal will grow and so will its crowd numbers and TV ratings.

An event sponsor, which FFA unsuccessfully pursued this year, will come crashing through the door.

An excellent experiment that has paid off handsomely. Well done.