ASB Premiership Professional?

I'd love to know where the money comes from to pay players. You need a minimum salary ($30k?), and you probably need a squad of 20, so you've got minimum $600k before you even think about coaches and the other support staff you need for a professional sports team. Much as I'd love to see this happen, unless we find the aforementioned 8 crazy rich people, it's out of reach.

 

Haha. Conspiracy theorist. I'd be happy if pokie money was left out of things full-stop. I'd be happy if, as I said above, individual club directors were freed to source funds from wherever they chose, as happens all across the planet. And as to why you think clubs going pro would lower the standard of the league.....?

90% of NZ saw Mexico play in the Hex and thought 'yeah the AWs will roll them'. All teams in the Scottish Premier League would diddle ACFC.

There are degrees of professionalism, as in VPL, NSWPL, UK Conference, etc. Some players earn more, some less. Support staff similar. Our season happens to be very short, which further depresses outlay. Some individuals would take the risk. OK, it might fail. But when will we ever know if we don't try? In the days of the old National League some clubs - the Mount, Gisborne City, quite possibly others - were all but semi-pro anyway, and the players who played for them performed appropriately. However no club stood to win $600,000 from World Club Cup qualification - or, as has once happened with ACFC, $1.2 mill from same.

I wasn't referring to the Scottish Prem even if Ali was. But the level beneath isn't so great, yet all those clubs are legitimately paying their players.

Yeah but there is no comparison.

Scotland: Funding of rugby = fuck all. Funding of football = lots

NZ:.....

 

Do I need to go any further? There is more coverage of football in Scotlands daily pages than there is pages in the Herald. NZ has zero fucking interest in the ASBP whether is it professional or not.

 

But to prove I am not anti it all and think small, lets decide to all go professional. Lets do some maths on it all, shall we? First off, an existing team in an existing environment.

What was the Phoenix salary cap?

What was their sponsorship income?

How much money did the FFA give them to cover the cap?

How many punters through the doors?

How many years did they break even?

 

 

Now lets do the same exercise for the ASBP

Squad of 20 and to be professional, you really need to be getting $40k per season minimum so lets set the cap at $1m shall we?

What income do they generate for sponsorship? Well according to Terms figures, excluding CWC cash and Pokie money, last year, all franchises combined to bring in a grand total of about $500k across ALL teams.

How much will NZF give to the 8 teams to cover the cap. You can bet the answer to that is a tidy 0

How may high paying punters do most games get? 200 at the most.

Do we need to go further with this?

Not. We'll stay small. Quite possibly get even smaller. And I'll stop banging my head against the brick wall.

We have no choice but to stay small because there is no market that will sustain anything bigger.

Please, explain how you think this is all funded. Since we are thinking so small and have not got it right, please show us the errors of our ways and how you think this professional league all comes together. I truly want to know because if you have the solution....

See posts #9 #26 #28.

Anyway I'm outta here. Got a plane to catch.

So your answer is get local business to invest when a: its not happening right now and b: as you said, you don't believe there is this pool to be tapped into of money that is not currently in the sport.

 

So........

Yes that conversation with the local business owner would go well. You know how you give us a few grand each year and we give you some free tickets and your name in our programme, plus a billboard at our stadium in front of 300 people each week? We're now going pro so our expenses have gone up tenfold so I need more money please.

Business owner says will I get 10x the exposure, including 3000 people through the gate each week?

Ummm....

could follow something akin to the basketball model or Arena football in the US. A couple of players on good money and being full time, a few mid level payments made to some and the bulk free or costing bugger all.

That sounds familiar - have we not got a code like that already in a competition - *** Premiership? 

The reason we won't have a pro league is fairly simple, we dont have quality players that are worth paying to watch.

As any amateur league anywhere in the world, teams attract players to sign with incentives like accommodation, jobs and a bit of money on the side (unofficially) for "coaching" etc . My local side, Canterbury United, must have have found a bit of money this season because they've signed several foreign players from regional leagues in the North Island and this week brought in a new striker from Cambridge City in England.

ASB Premiership official website: http://www.asbpremiership.co.nz/index.php?id=48

Attendances: vary a lot from team to team. My side, Canterbury United had an estimated 600 at the weekend's match v Auckland and it doesn't drop much below that - it's a small ground at English Park in Christchurch without much seating - but a good atmosphere.

Attendance stats for the top four play-offs last season: 

#       Team                      Total  Matches  Average 

1	Waitakere United	2038	2	1.019
2	Auckland City FC	987	1	987
3	Canterbury United	650	1	650
4	Hawke's Bay United	478	1	478

Overall:                             4153     5      831

TV Coverage: Much improved this year with a game every week on national free-to-air TV. NZ has just switched to digital TV nationwide - "Freeview" and a new sports channel started on this platform in May, "Sommet Sports."  They have a lot of football, including one ASB Premiership match from the weekend every Monday night. Although they are only broadcasting Waitakere United's home games, other supporters do get to see their side once a season - and it's interesting to see what the other sides are like.

Sommet Sports program schedule & website: http://sommetsports.co.nz/on-now/

The football they cover: http://sommetsports.co.nz/soccer/   (English Premier League: all Liverpool & Chelsea games, Bundesliga, Europa League, England internationals etc.)

All the Waitakere matches broadcast can be found complete on You Tube here (OFC Channel):  http://www.youtube.com/user/OFCfootball/videos

 All the larger towns have regional TV stations, some of whom broadcast the local ASB Premiership side's games some seasons. Canterbury Television where I live used to, though not currently

Some clubs have highlights or even sometimes full games on You Tube. Last season my team, Canterbury, had full games available on You Tube, but don't seem to this season. If curious, this is a place you can see full ASB Premiership games albeit from last season:

http://www.youtube.com/user/mainland0nz/videos

These are all currently active:

Auckland City TV You Tube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/PhototekNZ/videos

Waikato-Bay of Plenty United channel -full home games: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UClIHK2pK_H-oU09GLaIq6FQ/videos

Hawkes Bay Utd channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/HBUcam/videos

To be fair though, he is not far wrong.
We saw 3 televised games last year and 2 of them were just fucking average. While its not a conclusive, you would take that as a strong indicator.

population of 68 million vs 4 million. There is your answer. If we had 68 million, we would have 10 levels of professional rugby.

How very North Shore ....sans the fishing ....

Scotland's top teams can earn qualification for Champions league and Europa league though. Ever heard of television rights, football culture etc. We have neither in NZ. I'm not sure you have any idea how this sport actually works here Alireggae. We all want to see it improve (and it is on many levels; and yes there are setbacks; such is life). However the discussion regarding a professional tier in NZ has been going on pretty much forever here. Football forums and fanzines are having almost exactly the same conversations now that were had 10 years ago - scarily so. Getting the grassroots right is the first and most important step because it is the foundation on which we build something. WOF was only rolled out 2 years ago. I reckon that needs 5-10 years to give it a chance. In the meantime the older elite youth and senior football will need to be re-assessed (but not necessarily overhauled). Now that WOF is rolling on, it may be time to look at that again, or may not. The reasons we have a franchise system is because clubs were going broke trying to play in a national league. Plenty on here will remember the drama over East Auckland and others missing out when NZ Soccer claimed they didn't meet the criteria and went for an 8 team league, instead of 10. In a way the current franchise league is approaching a winter club=summer franchise set up. Just look at our 3 biggest population centres for that.

With all of that said, I believe the future is bright. Primarily because with more young kiwi players than ever playing in professional leagues all around the world, they will raise their expectations of the game here and bring their experience back - either short term for the Phoenix or All Whites, or longer term in a coaching, managerial, admin or other capacity.

And once again, please outline the difference in 'money in the game' for rugby vs football in Scotland? When you contrast that with how it is in NZ...

 

You will never be able to compare football in this country to anywhere else because we are literally the only country in the world (next to the USA and Australia) where football means nothing. Find a country with the same population and a sporting mix where football sits behind rugby, league, cricket and netball or 4 other sports and then we can start comparing. Hell the national basketball league gets more bums in seats than our ASBP does. Why we keep going back to Scotland is beyond me... Football is their national sport for crying out loud and the 2nd one (rugby) is very distant. Pub fighting comes in 3rd so really, they have football that is so far ahead of the number 2 sport, and there is not a 3 or 4 sport. When you are funding, it all goes into football. All kids want to be are footballers and its in every single tabloid sheet with streams of article. Scotland is an incredibly bad comparison.

Businessmen will open their pockets to throw money at rugby in this country. That will never ever happen for football.

"It's the economy, stupid"

"If you use Scotland as an indicator, though - 4 levels of pro football with similar population."


So what is your actual point then? All you have just done is strengthen the argument as to why pro football will never work in NZ

The other thing about Rugby in Scotland is that its only professional at their equivalent of super rugby level (Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Italy joint competition).

I also wouldn't hold Scotland Football as a bastion of professionalism, they have severe financial problems, and are at a level where they have fewer Scottish national players in the entire league than the Phoenix has all whites, in fact most of their squad comes from the championship in the UK.

So despite it being the number one sport in an area with a similar (but denser) population, plenty of history, and and a dedicated fan base there are severe problems with finances and the quality of the football.

The best we can hope for football in NZ is to have another team or two in an expanded A-League in the distant future.

I must admit I am not in favour of it either really. Get rid of the imports first and then see what players are left over.

I agree that the best vehicle for professionalism in NZ is the A-League. It's so obvious. All the hard work in setting up the league has been done, it has critical mass and it's in a much larger market than NZ. It's also a known quantity for new entrants and the risks are low. From NZs perspective the growth of professionalism here can also be managed in a much more measured way - club by club rather than trying to turn the whole ASB Prem pro at once. The only real disadvantage is a loss of "sovereignty", but who really cares about that compared to what we currently have? We're talking about a sports league not the economy.

The idea that the top tier of a sport in a country needs to be a purely domestic national league is at best, unnecessarily restrictive, and at worst, xenophobic.

That, in turn, clearly positions the ASB Prem as an amateur development or feeder league to the A-League or other pro leagues. The only casualty might be the CWC (the only real consequence of the sovereignty issue) but the lost revenue wouldn't actually be a big problem if we got the player payments problem under control (and I'd back us to still do quite well anyway).