Yeah, obviously not a great number but like you said, somewhat acceptable. Fifteen thousand at their world-class home is another matter.
Yeah, obviously not a great number but like you said, somewhat acceptable. Fifteen thousand at their world-class home is another matter.
Iām so confident that I will guarantee that we will see that score line at some stage throughout the game.
It seems that the writing is on the wall for ABJ and his time here, Soni really hope he can leave with a derby win.
Iāve never understood that whole concept. At the very most, people will go for a single game to check out the new stadium. After that, whatās the point? People go to stadiums to see teams, they donāt go to stadiums to see stadiums. Thereās European teams playing out of absolute shitholes that are raking in decent and regular supportā¦
I can explain this in 3 stages
1 - Because they had loads of members, 1/3 of whom didnāt bother to show up except for derbies, they thought a bigger stadium would mean even more mmembers
2 - When they moved to spotless during the stadium build, memberships and attendance cratered, they wronly assumed it was because Spotless was a shithole and not in Parra. They completely failed to take account of their shit performance, the end of the āshiny new thingā phase and more than half their regular audience getting out of the habit of going to the game every week.
3 - Their crowds have not changed much since spotless because theyāre still shit, the RBB have essentially given up trying, and the club has offered no good reason for people to go back.
I think weāll face issues with re-engaging with fans who have lost the habit, but weāve been far from shit and the cove has been solid all the way through, so we should see a moderate bump when we go back to SFS and a steady growth if we continue to be successful.
You failed to add the RBB would have more than likely driven some families away with all of their antics
Covid has got me out of the habit of going to games. I am sure it has for others as well.
WSW needed another 10 years at least building the FOMO before they did what they did with the stadiums.
Personally, I think they should never have messed with that stadium.
100% agree, as has the lack of the SFS.
I cannot wait for us to return home
Bossi reporting that the crowd is expected to be over 22,000
This season may not be directly affected by Covid limiting numbers but has been indirectly affected in the scheduling which has seen huge numbers of midweek games, great and continuing uncertainty around fixtures, and a very compressed calendar where the games are coming at you thick and fast, and often clashing with our own football commitments.
There have been plenty of cases even on this forum devoted primarily to discuss SFC and the A-League, where people were surprised thereās a game on in the evening, featuring our own club. These are dedicated signed-up members. Imagine then if you support Wests and going along involves your shit show of a team pissing on you with disdain.
Personally, our family used to miss 1-2 out of our usual 13-14 home matches per season, but this season weāve probably made around half because the midweek-heavy schedule is a total shit for students who already have their own training, homework etc.
Given all of that, I think the continuing low attendances are pretty understandable and we can accept that it wonāt get better this season. Problem is, as you and others pointed out above, if not going becomes a habit.
Iāve whinged on here a few times about games clashing with our own football commitments, but I havenāt seen too many others do so. Is it just us that find itās making us miss games? It bodes really badly in the unlikely event that we do end up going to a winter season.
Low crowds this season come from:
1 and 2 are easily solvable. 3, will hang around for a year after the world returns to a semblance of normal. At the end of the day, people have had it drilled into them to stay 1.5m away from each other, avoid crowds and stay at home, for the past 1.5 years. The social anxiety that stems from this, will take a while to fade and return back to pre-covid levels .
Is it just us, or have NRL/AFL crowds been affected the same way in terms of Covid, granted they have better coverage and advertising of their sports.
Pretty much this and Iād throw in that i suspect a lot of people havenāt bought memberships or those flexi memberships because when the season started we genuinely had no idea if it was going to be possible to attend most games and itās only rusted on people like most of the people here who were willing to take a gamble or just financially support the club regardless.
No alarm bells around crowds are ringing for me this season, Iām waiting to see what next season looks like from that perspective.
My understanding is thereās been a drop off there too, just not as dramatic as A-League has been.
comparing 2019 to 2021, thereās a decrease in an average of 2000 per game from approx 14K down to 12K. AFL and NRL have the added benefit of mainstream media support with high rates of advertising. The AFL average will be affected as well, by the huge ANZAC day crowd down in Melbourne that was 70K from memory last weekend.
A-league is also affected by poor management and stagnation in growth, followed by double standards by Police etc. It came out that Police were preventing A-League supporter groups from standing and singing when restrictions were lifted, and then allowing the exact same thing at NRL/AFL games.
Pretty sure Iāve whinged about this on here somewhere. In the last 3 or 4 weeks Iāve missed playing a game to go to Gosford, arrived at Leichhardt at almost half time after finishing my game, missed Victory at home to train and will have to Uber to parra this weekend as Iāve got a late kick off. Totally understand some of my mates saying fuck this and just not attending matches any more.
/whinge
I think to an extent the NRL have the same issue. I feel that crowd numbers for Souths games are down (we had a sub 10k home crowd this season) and I just did a quick calculation and NRL crowds are down compared to the same stage in 2019 (12,959 v 16,151).
And to take this thread totally off topic this kind of thing will be a bigger issue if the A-League ever moves to winter.
If it moved to winter weād almost certainly have to revisit how scheduling works, because aligning with grassroots is half the point. In particular I think the staggered fixture schedule where we never have concurrent games would have to go, so that particularly Saturday afternoon games arenāt a thing during local comp season, and evening fixtures are back to like 7.45 or whatever.