I've said it before, and Ryan said the same thing on the last page, but forget about all this per capita/catchment area stuff around our crouds- in absolute terms they're not even bad and they are trending upwards. CCM's crouds were way worse than ours last year. Croud numbers are a red herring in this debate, as are memberships (other than adding people to their mailing list, what difference does the membership figure make to the FFA independent of croud numbers?). The real metric issue if there is one is TV deal revenue. If there is an issue with crouds its that the stadium is too big and the seats are too yellow and it looks bad on TV, which might slightly affect excitement and interest among the TV audience. We can't directly change the TV deal at this stage but if there is a notable bump in interest in the club on both sides of the Tasman between now and the next TV deal we might have a chance. Ironically all this talk of getting rid of us has given us a bump in the interest stakes, now we need to sustain it. But increased crouds in Wellington won't matter squat if TV ratings flat line, and if TV ratings leap without our crouds increasing there may be hope.
Before anyone says it, I know our ratings aren't actually that bad, but if The FFA think they can get better from a SS team then they might ditch us. Really it should be Newcastle going first but the fans of Newcastle are Australian and are in more of a position to pressure the FFA than us kiwis are.
This is spot on.
2 of the 3 key metrics Gallop talked about (crouds and memberships) are not even the FFA's primary concern, they are the club's. We need to improve those two not because they directly help the FFA but because they directly help Welnix.
The TV ratings argument is complicated but cutting us as part of a risky strategy to replace us with a (hopefully) higher rating team doesn't make much sense. The FFA would have no guarantee that at re-negotiation time the ratings would be any higher than they are now - there's just too many other variables in play. On the other hand, if you line up two more expansion teams over the next 4 years and have them signed up and ready to go that is a guaranteed increase from 135 regular season games to 165 (22% increase). So regardless of your average viewing figures at that point you are going to be at least 20% better off. Unless, of course, you have saturated the market already but then your expansion strategy was just the wrong one in the first place. Even then, the average viewership would need to drop by at least 20% before you've actually got less eyeballs overall.
If it was just the Nix ratings that were plummeting then fair enough, but it isn't, it's the whole league. The FFA should be fertilizing the ground not lopping branches off the tree hoping to grow bigger ones in their place.