So Wharfies and Diamonds will be representing the Capital in the National Women's league alongside the Wāhinix. Good to have a 70% club based league now. The KS Cup final rematch will be epic.
🏆 | National League - Full Draw 🙌
The NZF National League Championship draw for both the Men and the Women is now available! 🤩
💛 = Home Fixture 🖤 = Away Fixture
Here is how you can support the Wellington Phoenix Women's & Men's Reserves 👇 pic.twitter.com/KnmBWvJ83d
Looking to be an interesting season. Auckland City, Wellington Olympic probably slight favourites again. Suburbs will be tough, Christchurch as Southern League and Chatham Cup winners have to be respected too. That's probably the contenders - then expect Nix reserves and probably Rewa/AU to make up midtable, with the other Central teams and Cashmere likely to struggle. But who knows!
Looking to be an interesting season. Auckland City, Wellington Olympic probably slight favourites again. Suburbs will be tough, Christchurch as Southern League and Chatham Cup winners have to be respected too. That's probably the contenders - then expect Nix reserves and probably Rewa/AU to make up midtable, with the other Central teams and Cashmere likely to struggle. But who knows!
Petone will struggle a fair bit but I'm looking forward to getting along to the games.
Olympic look good but their defense is no where near as solid as last season, could be an upset or two in there.
Can only speak to the Northern League teams, but: Eastern Suburbs (5,570 minutes, or 25.57%), Auckland United (4,808 minutes, or 22.08%), Manurewa (3,815 minutes, or 17.52%), Auckland City (2,860 minutes, or 13.13%).
So little noise from NZF about national league despite it starting in a couple of days. Assume all men's and women's matches will be livestreamed on youtube, think they were last year?
So little noise from NZF about national league despite it starting in a couple of days. Assume all men's and women's matches will be livestreamed on youtube, think they were last year?
Wow ok. They're heralding it as completely free and accessible, although to be honest I loved the ubiquity of matches streamed on YouTube, so easy to access from any device anywhere. This is just another account and app to add, probably harder to get casual fans watching.
There is this weird relationship with NZF and broadcasting.
In the ASB premiership the franchises had to pay something like $15-20k per season for games to be streamed on SkyTV. The set up was heavily geared towards airing games in Auckland. Southern United only had one game live in 2016 (I think memory is a bit patchy tbh) and that was away to Auckland City. There was at least the predecessor for Kiwi Football Fix where domestic games would have a highlight reel aired once a week.
Then they switched to one game per round being filmed and put the onus on clubs to record their own games and upload them to Hudl which is where they get the GOTW comp footage from.
One of the coaches at TW told me that ~$35m a year is spent on unregulated gambling on the men’s national league every year in Asia. It almost feels like the move to YouTube, and now to FIFA+ was to increase the viewership in south east Asia to pump up its numbers.
It’s a cynical point of view, but it feels like any attempts to broadcast the games are done to lure international sponsorship for NZF but disregarding the local impact of the game and the visibility of clubs locally. If more effort was made to get kiwis watching clubs could get sponsorship from bigger companies.
So little noise from NZF about national league despite it starting in a couple of days. Assume all men's and women's matches will be livestreamed on youtube, think they were last year?
I like the initiative a lot, but having used FIFA+ in the past, it won't be about the accessibility because I think from memory you can just sign up and browse through like you would for Youtube.
What it will come down to is the user interface and overall quality of it all, which, unless it has been rectified, is terribly clunky, slow and often when I've used in the past I've encountered streams just dropping out completely or having really poor picture quality/glitchy coverage.
If they've sorted that out, then they're on to a winner.
Looking forward to the National League kicking off this weekend.
Fifa+ app looks fairly easy to use. Menu top left has a NZ Football section with upcoming internationals and men and women national league games listed, as well as past WC game highlights. The upcoming games have a countdown but don't have a reminder option which would be nice. There's quite a bit of other content on there as well such as docos and classic matches.
I'm just watching the replay of Nix reserves v Auckland City from yesterday on FIFA+ website. I had a lot of lagging until I clicked on the cog (options) symbol at the top right and changed the quality to "SD" from the default "HD+" Now the video is playing perfectly.
