How to rebirth the Phoenix/The "What can we do to improve?" thread

Finkler was a good player in the Victory system but he would struggle for game time over there this season. Barbarouses averages about five goals a season for the Victory. Realistically he wasn't going to do too much more for us. It's nothing to do with the city or anything. It's just about recruiting well and picking a system for our players. The most important thing we do is sign a good manager so they can choose where to go from here. Clearly, a lot of players are going to have to leave the club as our squad needs an overhaul.

I doubt the FFA would agree to that.

Well, we have one answer to the titular question: drop Bonevacia and Finkler.

And perhaps play a team that is tired from ACL travel every week.

or just have the forum crash on game day.

Based on these comments from the Perf game forum, what Welnix really needs to do is some serious marketing research on how widespread attitudes like these mentioned below are (in Wellington as well - this isn't an Auckland thing given RoF crowds), and what they can do to counteract them. Because this is coming close to "failed brand" territory, i.e. people will get the idea that THE PHOENIX SUCKS AND NO-ONE GOES and it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Plenty of this in Wellington and across the Tasman too. Ultimately the only way to turn it around is winning

On the weekend Smeltz did a much better job dropping deep and contributing to the build up of our play than Finkler has done most of the season - our 2nd goal Smeltz is involved a few times, once on the left wing by the half way line before supplying the defence splitting pass to Kosta. His work rate has also been superior.

That is probably one of your best ever comments and so much on the money it is not funny. Why have fans and fairweather watchers gained the attitude and what can we, the club, do about resolving it and make going to Nix games the cool thing to do again?

Does anyone know how our crowds improved when we were top of the league for that short time.  I realise we might have been at the Hutt Rec then, but I can't remember if it translated to our Westpac crowds afterwards?

I agree it's winning, but people also need to identify and care about the team. It doesn't seem like that is happening.

Hutt rec 9,000 crowds at each of the three games.

I think the theme there is free tickets. This is a problem I've highlighted previously where giving away a lot of free tickets (to sponsors etc) just makes free tickets so readily available that the public develop a culture or habit of only going when they happen to come across a freebie. It devalues the experience. 

I think that they'll be a bit more careful about where free tickets go. Potentially giving them to lower socioeconomic groups, or to schools - rather than people in the city they might send more of those freebies out to the Hutt valley. 

I think eventually that'll lead to the Phoenix match experience being valued more highly, plus others who may not usually have thought of going into Wellington city to see the Phoenix being fans, and considering coming again when they can. 

I know music journalists who had the same thing, they just wouldn't go to concerts unless they got free tickets - even ones for bands that they were lifetime fans of. It becomes a thing when it's almost an insult to have to pay.

The other thing is that our crowds in previous seasons have been okay at 8-9k is pretty good for a mid table team in a city the size of Wellington, but the Phoenix have kept telling us that they are bad and we need to get more, if the crowds were bad at 8k they must be appalling at 6k. The reality is that the crowds have been fine until this season, the club should have talked them up more.

The main culprit is the news coverage, the average punter would be shocked to know that we're only two points off a finals spot. They assume we're dead last, and that we're dead last every year when in fact we are a competitive football team.

It can change, what annoys me is that the members of the press that are football fans aren't behind the team, they have enough of a challenge to get air time with the rugby bias out there and then any story is negative.

Coming 6th in a 10 team league is rubbish though, even if it is a playoff spot, especially when the front 4 (or 2, or 1) are so far in front.

Not so sure. The 2 Sydney and Melbourne clubs should occupy the top 4 spots every year, something has gone very wrong if they don't. It's almost as if we are coming 3rd in a 6 team league these days. We might sneak into the top 4 occasionally, but for the most part the top 6 should be par. 

This is also why "win the league and the crowds will come" isn't exactly a reliable strategy. In a perfectly even league, we should win once every 10 years - but the league clearly isn't even, so we will win the league even less than that. 

You can't rely on winning to bring crowds. It'll top us up every so often, but it's a very lazy solution. 

As Ryan said, our crowds have actually been quite good for a city our size until this season (even now they're not so bad). The problem has come because nix management threw the narrative of poor crowds into the media by criticising crowds for the last few seasons. 

Plus the whole thing over our licence makes everyone panic about our crowds, causing the public to assume we are doomed, a narrative the media are all too happy to run with because it makes a great headline. 

Half the teams in the league have to come 6th or below though. Literally.

This season we are 8th. The previous 4 seasons we came 10th, 9th, 4th and 9th. We're 3rd to last in the league but that's still on track to be better than 3 of our last 4 seasons. Forget the media coverage, forget the free tickets, forget the expectation that the Sydney and Melbourne teams will lock down the top 4 spots. Those might all be contributing factors but ultimately the reason why most people think we suck is that we suck. There isn't a misconception or misrepresentation holding us back. What's holding us back is the cold hard truth: we are shark.

If we can't stop being shark then no amount of marketing or positive media coverage is going to change the perception of the club as a bunch of losers. Our only hope in that case is to build ironic support from Wellington hipsters. We should look to moustache wax companies for sponsorship.

We have two advantageous over the top teams to win the thing.

The first is we have the biggest talent pool in the competition having access to Australians and a monopoly on Kiwis, the monopoly on Kiwi players should also ensure our squad players are cheaper as there aren't other teams to drive the price up, as unfair as that sounds. This is an advantage I feel we've never really exploited, although we are closer in an Ernie Merrick built team than a Ricky Herbert built one,  but is somewhat mitigated by the lack of international windows in busy years like this one.

The second is we don't have the pressure that teams like Sydney and Victory do to win the thing every year, we can patiently plan and build a team for a title tilt every three or four years with the knowledge that our best players are taken from us by the big teams (or overseas) after we've invested a couple of years in them. This is our main strategy IMO, and this year was supposed to be the first go at the title in the new academy era, but it didn't quite play out like that as we know.

I know there are plenty of people who wish that we'd spend more money, and maybe we should, but we're never going to be able to outspend Melbourne City unless one of those billionaires that have a secret hideaway in Wairapa decides to do something for their new "home" region.

So much this forget any of the other BS fix this problem and i have no doubts problems over attendances will largely disappear.But hey much easier to blame everything other than what is causing the seemingly lack of interest in the team. Has been said by many people over the years but the constant threat to the fans by those involved .in the Phoenix is vert tiring and not the way to handle things.

There must be some research on this very topic. Tegal, what you say makes a lot of sense and I get what they are trying to do - attract new fans and turn them into new fans. That may work when a club first starts  but the club has been around for a long time now and its not an unknown like it would be if they were brand new. The public know who the Nix are, how poor they perform etc and so that is at the back of their mind when determining whether or not they attend [either for free or paying]. The bottom line is that if the Nix were performing and/or putting on a great show and the game day experience was good, then people would be going anyway and a freebie would just be a bonus.

"win and they will come" also only works to a certain extent for a city our size. In 09/10 which was our most successful ever, we averaged crowds of 8966 for the season. 

So this idea that anything less than 10,000 is a bad crowd, is unrealistic. 

problem is that the Phoenix themselves were the ones perpetuating that 10k figure a few years back.

yep, which is what I said a few posts back :)

I only read posts that have been reported.

With the cricket going so shark, might get a few more people  to come along maybe?

Not convinced by "stop sucking and they will come". The Warriors suck and they get respectable crowds. Is it an ethnic thing? Are Palangis too cool to stick with a losing team?

Per capita the Warriors get significantly smaller crowds than us.

true but i do think that was actual numbers. Not the "pluck a number out of the air method" presently used

Yes that would work because the FFA have always been sympathetic to our geographical and international issues. 

I know many people here don't rate Anfony Hudson in any way. But his comments about the All Whites' "underdog" mentality becoming an excuse for mediocrity reminds me of what Ernie Merrick used to say about "the nicest bunch of losers you'd ever meet". This tends to reinforce my contention that the real problem is team or maybe even organisational culture.

The underdog mentality exists because we play like shark against teams that we should be much better than in the islands.

So when we play against teams outside of OFC, we are the underdogs because we could only muster up a 0-0 draw with Papua New Guinea.

Well just pack up and join Asia like we (Australia) did. Would have a positive effect on the Nix' future too

Not going to happen, Australia had to get the blessing of the AFC, FIFA, and the OFC.

That, and you'd kill off so many pillars of the game in this country.

do we have any links to efl ,epl ,msl etc.. how come we dont have teams too loan players from?  i also notice when we loose a match every man and his dog is on disqus or here laying down their 10 cents worth of negativity but when we do good hardly a proud note. supporters groups take the good with the bad otherwise we are just watchers and critics, i here redbull want to make a team from scratch in the a league now theres a group aussie would give us up for......

We don't have any players to 'loan off' and why would we be loaning them to teams in leagues above the A-League?

The parent clubs wage comes under our cap so they'd have to be marquee, also our business strategy is to sell players.

We did try to get a payer on loan but nzf fudgeed it up.

I agree.  Also that age group would have been 8/9/10/11 when the Nix were founded 10 years ago.  More then enough time to have turned their blood yellow.

not loan ours loan off theirs cant you work that out just by what you wrote. im no grammar freak so im sorry

The Knights had this with Chelsea.  From memory I think the Kingz had a similar arrangement with Charlton Athletic who were a decent side then.  Nothing came of either arrangement except an AW friendly against Charlton in '06.