A few possible factors spring to mind regarding the overall decline in crowd numbers in NZ sport over the last couple of decades. This is all just my speculation, and some of them overlap with each other:
- more people shifting to different cities, leading to a decline of born-and-bred locals who feel a connection to local teams
- increased income inequality hurting the demographics that used to attend. Just because mean incomes or even median incomes have risen in line with inflation doesn't mean that the relative disposable income has stayed the same for most people. I think young families with kids and couples with or without kids are especially relatively worse off than their equivalents 20 years ago. Even if they aren't saving for a house they're more likely to be on fixed-term or contract work for instance.
- increased globalisation means local sports are competing with global sports brands like the IPL, EPL, or NBA. Also more people get news off the internet, rather than newspapers or tv, which means that people can choose what to follow more. Back in the day, you could only really follow the sports that mainstream NZ media followed unless you put in a fair amount of effort to follow something else (or had Sky at least)
- rugby turning professional and the subsequent "branding" of the All Blacks completely changed the relationship of many NZers to rugby. In order to squeeze money out of it, rugby has been pushed out to encompass the whole calender year almost. With a relatively small player pool, the games get repetitive. Fans prioritise ABs and don't bother as much with the rest. Also, because the media focus so much on rugby and it's pretty much year round, cricket has suffered from a decline in exposure over the summer months. Theres no gap in the rugby schedule for other sports to get a look in. Even in December/January there's analysis and predictions etc
- the feedback loop of less people attending, so less people talking about it, so less people attending, so less people talking about it....
Might think of some more later