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.
The problem isn't really our Fox ratings, but our ratings in NZ are terrible. So you can kind of see the FFA's point, why pay for a NZ team when we get nothing from NZ - a Sydney team that does the same as us makes more sense. We need to be bringing the NZ market to the table and we just aren't.
I don't agree with this as there is no guaranty that a Sydney team is going to get the same ratings as us on Fox, and there is a pretty good chance of ownership issues and financial problems. I think if they drop the nix they will regret it, but on paper you can see the arguments from a purely business point of view.