The Wellington Phoenix Effect

Wellington is a success story which many had doubts, as Phill Chadwick reports they have relegated Perth Glory to last in several areas including the league ladder.

Back in April this year, I expressed some doubts that the new Wellington Phoenix club would turn out to be a success. Now, with the benefit of ten rounds played, and five home games at the Wellington stadium, I have to admit to being pleasantly surprised.

The single most important factor in the success of an A-League franchise, in the absence of a rich benefactor with a bottomless bank account, is home game attendance. In this area, Wellington's football fans have done a magnificent job. The club's home games average more than 11,000, and the difference between the highest and lowest crowd is just 4,294.

To be precise, the numbers for the first five home games are:
Maximum 14,421
Minimum 10,127
Average 11,743

But what does this mean?

Well, an average of more than 11,000 indicates a level of support that the NZ Knights could only dream of and looks like a sustainable base on which to grow. What is more significant to me is that the worst crowd was still in excess of 10,000. That indicates that there is a large "hard core" of supporters that will turn up no matter what.

So, well done to the Phoenix fans, it certainly looks like there is a good basis for optimism there.

The title of A-League basket case has therefore passed firmly from New Zealand to Perth.

The tragedy of this situation is that just a few years ago, Perth Glory were the benchmark club in this country. In fact, the entire A-League was built on the blueprint of Perth Glory.

Theirs was the model of a broad-based, well supported community club, with no whiff of the "ethnic" basis that had dogged the older NSL clubs. Perth's crowds were phenomenal in the last years of the NSL and it was surely expected that they would carry that success on into the new competition.

Other than Adelaide United, which had played just one season in the NSL, they were the only organisation to survive the Crawford Report reforms.

They are now a sad and sorry shadow of their former selves. Their best crowd this season was 8,508, and their worst was just 6,252. These numbers are not sustainable in the long term and something must be done to reignite the interest of those WA football fans that have abandoned this once great club.

For the league as a whole, we are now half way through the third season and can begin to make an assessment of its longer term potential.

I drew some graphs plotting the Maximum, Average, Minimum and Total attendances round by round for the full 52 rounds played so far and it makes for very interesting reading, particularly when you add trend lines.

The first, and most striking feature is that the long term trends are all positive. Total attendance, probably the most important statistic for the League's bottom line, shows strong positive growth of nearly 20% per year and must give confidence to the FFA that their strategies are working.

So far this season, only Central Coast and Perth are averaging less than 10,000 a game. The Mariners' current on-field success will surely boost their numbers.

The �Melbourne Victory Effect� can be seen clearly in a marked increase in Maximum attendance. There is a distinct step up between the first and second seasons and that seems to have been sustained into the third. They average nearly 30,000 a game and are responsible for all of the attendance records.

The �Wellington Phoenix Effect� is likewise pretty evident in boosting the Minimum attendance line. As soon as the Phoenix entered the competition at the beginning of this season, the Minimum attendance jumps up significantly.

Another interesting point is that the previous round, Round 10 of season 2007/08, with a total of 73,230 punters was the second highest attendance ever, just behind the 80,000 for Round 16, season 2006/07.

This was achieved with a 27,000 Testra Dome crowd - about average for Melbourne. The previous record was made in the round that saw an astonishing 50,000 at Telstra Dome to watch Melbourne play Sydney. So, while Melbourne fans still lead the way, the other clubs' supporters are strongly contributing.

No doubt the FFA hierarchy will take confidence from these trends, and so should we football fans.

Football in this country is alive and well. And growing.