You know the point Iâm making, rubby is a grand event especially during the winter months when the GAA stops.
They know this and cash in on meaningless games at Xmas (provinces) and November (internationals) due to their marketing efforts plus the fact that many in the upper echelons of society of this country big up these events.
The knockout stages of the URC should be a serious sporting occasion but Munster canât sell out Thomond as it doesnât suit peopleâs social schedule and very few actually care about Munster v Cardiff blues.
Thankfully GAA is too fast to play it after every score. I hated the introduction of music at the final whistle in finals and now other games in croke park. All it does is drown out the crowd noise and atmosphere.
Munster and Leinster sell lots of season tickets donât forget.
Rugby went the way the gaa has gone now but it is rowing back. A lot more free to air games. The biggest issue with rugby now is the season is too long. September in June and invariably youâve only six days to sell the tickets for the knock out fixture.
That is woeful scheduling.
I think very few really care at gaa games too. Most counties have huge bandwagons when they start winning. Rugby is no different.
I think rubby and GAA can easily coexist. The biggest rubby county in Ireland is selling out every hurling match they have. Every rubby man on here outside Dublin is also a GAA man
Rugby is more popular than it was 30 years ago but less popular than it was 20 years ago. The Heineken cup was way more popular than watever the current incarnation is. Maybe its my age but todays rugby stars are far less interesting or engaging. O Driscoll, O Gara, O Connell etc were way easier to warm to and were way bigger stars than anybody currently playing.
Most of that because is rugby went behind a paywall like the gaa is doing now but thankfully that is changing and itâs back on free to air a lot more.
Hurling is played nearly every single day of the week in the vast majority of counties and certainly in the counties that want to play it. I know you like to wind up, but try better.
Rugby is a minority sport and barely tolerated and certainly not played to any great degree or number by a huge amount of the population. Its marketed very well at the âclubâ level, but thats about it really.
Argentina doesnât have a top level club competition. Their players all have to play in Europe. They had a Super Rugby franchise for a couple of years but the competition effectively collapsed. Thatâs what I mean when I say itâs in âno manâs landâ.
The Waratahsâ average attendance is around 12k. It was nearly 20k a decade ago. The competition they play in is dying, they finished bottom of it this year.
Rugby Union football in Australia only has the Cadbury Wallabies as a major selling point, and even then, outside of the World Cup and maybe the Lions once every 12 years, the public are only interested in the New Zealand games, and they donât even sell out now. 68k at last weekâs one. The more batterings the team takes, and theyâre taking a lot of batterings lately, the more the dagger is twisted in the heart of the sport.
The Swans crowd as far as I can see is mainly a middle class one drawn from the Eastern suburbs and relatively near inner northern and western suburbs (though the Swans as an entity is attractive to the whole of Sydney). Thatâs the rugby union heartland. Going to the SCG to see the Swans is very attractive for families or as a precursor to a night out. Sydney is producing its own AFL players now and my understanding is Aussie Rules has made good inroads into the traditional schools which produced rugby union players. The Swans team tomorrow has a proper core of star players from around the Sydney/near Sydney area. Heeney, Gulden, Blakey, Mills (even if heâs out, heâs the club captain). AFL is very attractive to the corporate set. The Swans drew an average home attendance of 39k this year and it would be bigger if the SCG held more.
NRL will probably always be king in Sydney especially Western Sydney where the GWS Giants will have a much harder time making a success of themselves as club. But for all NRLâs popularity the attendances it attracts on a weekly basis are poor. 50k was the largest crowd it attracted during the home and away season this year and that was in Brisbane. Games at the Sydney Football Stadium or the Olympic Stadium, even finals usually have sparse attendances and are very poor spectacles. Outside of State Of Origin and the Grand Final NRL it doesnât have many âeventsâ. Itâs strength is the old school shithole grounds like Brookvale Oval and Leichardt Oval. But overall it has an image problem as being a bogan sport.
The AFL is Australiaâs equivalent of the Premier League or the NFL, itâs the dominant sports league in Australia. Itâs national and it packs the crowds in everywhere. You just donât get 70k-90k going to NRL home and away games on a regular basis like you do in AFL. Crowds create interest, they create spectacle and make children want to play the sport.
I think NRL is even more ingrained in Queensland than it is in New South Wales but thereâs a similar dynamic going on with AFL in Brisbane too. The Lions are a very attractive proposition across the board in terms of potential spectators, sponsors and getting children into the sport, everything.
If you donât have that major professional league in your country - and worse if you have rival major professional leagues in other sports - and rugby union football in Australia has both of these problems - you will always have a problem, because you donât have anything to bridge the interest gap and the player production gap to the international game where the main interest is.
Maybe but in America, Iâd guess American football has terrible participation numbers, pretty much nobody plays it beyond school and yet the sport still dominates America.
You only have to look at a lot of the posts here by the split season zealot purity brigade to know this is true. Thereâs a mean, miserable, xenophobic streak running through it all.
âEventsâ and people who attend them are sneered at.
The health of a sport depends a lot on events. It always will. The GAA seems determined to remove any semblance of an âeventâ from its calendar. Itâs complete suicide.
NRL has higher television audiences I think. Could be off here but with a large part of the NRL base being bogans as you say, Iâd imagine the lower crowds could be because of proximity to the stadiums and having less disposable income than AFL fans.
I think the Swans crowd is probably quite similar to a rugby crowd at home, middle class, good for families and few people care that much about the result
NRL teams in Sydney all have their own shithole home stadiums with lower capacities at which they play most of their matches. These are mostly way out in the sticks.
The two âneutralâ venues in Sydney, the Sydney Football Stadium and the Olympic Stadium, both have a couple of problems in terms of attracting crowds. The NRL heartland in Western Sydney is a long way away from the city centre where the Sydney Football Stadium is - Penrith is probably 40 miles out - and itâs awkward and annoying to get there. The Olympic stadium is soulless and lonely and people donât want to go there. Thatâs a problem the GWS Giants have as well.
With AFL in Melbourne, the heartlands from which the teams take their names - Collingwood, Carlton, Richmond, Hawthorn etc., these are all âinnerâ suburbs pretty much a stoneâs throw from Melbourne city centre. In Dublin terms it would be like Phibsborough, Drumcondra, Ringsend, Ranelagh etc.
All the Melbourne AFL games now take place at either the MCG or the Docklands stadium which are both in or near the city centre and it makes them easy to access. While Melbourne is a highly spread out city, its geography is more radial than Sydneyâs and the MCG has always been seen as âthe home of footballâ. NRL in Sydney never really had that same sort of âMeccaâ of a stadium. It does in Brisbane with Lang Park (Suncorp Stadium).
There was a nice juxtaposition last week where the Swans were playing Port Adelaide at a sold out SCG while simultaneously next door Cronulla were playing North Queensland Cowboys in front of a sparse attendance at the Sydney Football Stadium in what was effectively an NRL quarter-final knockout tie.