The new A-League season kicked off two weeks ago quietly and with little fanfare. The first two rounds attendance combined reached a total of 131,566, down significantly year-on-year compared with the first two rounds of the 2018- 2019 campaign.
With the Sydney derby taking place this week and the A-League clubs now in control of their own marketing destines, McKinna wants to see more done to promote the league and garner headlines.
“We have to push,” he told The World Game. “We had a meeting, Simon Pearce and Scott Barlow came to the meeting with the coaches and CEOs and football managers, and basically the thing that came out of it was ‘we hate each other for 90 minutes when we play, and we work together the rest of the week to build the game’.
“And we need to build the game. I’ve always been a positive one, but the last four years there has just been too much negativity about the game whether it was constitution, whether it was FIFA, VAR.
"We have to engage, we have to engage with the community, we have to engage to get your members. Our membership is going well and it’s on par with last season, which was a record.
“We had issues during that time with staff, no excuses. But we’ve been chasing our tail to get back where we are now, which is over 9,000 members.
“For a place like Newcastle to be sitting fourth in the membership sales compared to Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide and these guys is a credit to the Newcastle punters sticking behind the team.”
McKinna was involved in a stunt earlier this month, dubbed ‘F3 Flag-gate’, that saw a Jets flag titled ‘Newcastle: A Class Above’ unfurled at Central Coast Stadium, during the Mariners’ FFA Cup semi-final against Adelaide United, ahead of last weekend’s F3 derby. The cheeky infiltration was picked up by the media and received excellent coverage. McKinna wants to see more of this kind of promotion that creates talking points.
“We spoke to the Mariners [beforehand] that we have to spice the game up because he’s gone flat,” he said. “When I was there I used to fight with JP and Richard Money, there was a bit of banter, there was Hutch, Joel Griffiths. The banner got people talking about the game."
“I went to Melbourne that week and everywhere I went people were talking about it. The A-League hadn’t been on TV yet so it got people talking about it, a bit of banter. “It worked for us as we had 2,500 to 3000 fans travelled to the F3 Derby.
"There was six bays chock-a-block and then there was fans scattered all about. We had 100s and 100s doing the march before the game, we had Craig Johnston down there, we had the guys from Moving Mountains there. It was a really good night.”
