I'm sad we haven't had one good season for many years, and the crowd figures show it. Having one good season, making playoffs comfortably etc would boost the attendances hugely, and has flow on effects the next year.
It just hasn't happened for us for a whole season unfortunately for a long time. One awesome half season! Can't blame the owners, or a particular manager I don't think, just sport sometimes works that way.
Sport is frustrating.
To substantiate this point, according to an article I read this morning the Hurricanes have boosted their average attendance by almost 7000 people after they started playing well consistently. If the Nix can have a couple of consistent seasons results wise, the 10k metric shouldn't be too far off by the end of it.
That's the Hurricanes really don't see how after a couple if consistant seasons you expect us to be averaging 10000. Think its going to take a bit more than that saday.
Yep - to get anywhere near that 10,000 level of average crowd then somehow, greater levels of interest in attending live football matches have to be generated in the Wellington population. Not only that, to get near the 10,000, those greater levels have to be higher than those currently generated in pretty much any of the other centres hosting A-League teams. Wellington will have to have a cultural shift to get way more football mad than pretty much anywhere else in Australasia.
So its going to take a bunch of some fairly special things happening that go beyond just the nix winning more games. That just appears to be the way it is with live sport these days. Crowds are hard.
But if somehow if more of the very big grass roots interest in football - as evidenced by the its dominantly high and growing participation rates in junior sport (including both boys and girls) - could be somehow activated into more attendance - then maybe we might start getting somewhere serious. This does mean more thinking about families and kids. Like it or not they are where the biggest football-related numbers are. Some more strategies to get to adults through their kids might be a good start. Here's a couple of thoughts.....
While it might seem to short-term thinking bean counters that the ticket revenues might dip a little at first, how about all kids free for all games for a start? Long term it may be a net winner. Westpac and Welnix must already know this. I know they've tried a few different things for making Westpac more fun for kids like bouncy castles etc, but that one high-profile cost-reduction focused thing as a standard setting would seem to cut out one big attendance barrier straight away and also send a strong signal to the community (and better PR perhaps - maybe that is wishful thinking but you never know). Hell why not start trying stuff like this seriously.
How about a nix kindy-type setup at the stadium so the really little ones can be covered and their paying parents freed up? Who knows what might work. If we want to try getting towards a 10,000 average in 2 years we need a lot of innovation.
That is just a couple of ideas and there are probably hassles with them, and we'd need a lot of new and different things to be happening so why not try? What else could we add to a basket of things to get more people through the gates? Any bright ideas? It would take a lot of different angles all probably only achieving small individual gains, but when they start adding up who knows?
