A-League’s $1m bid to woo fans

A-League clubs have begun a $1m social media campaign as the first step in a concerted bid to arrest years of sliding fan interest.

Melbourne Victory fans during a Melbourne derby game. Picture: Stuart Walmsley

The A-League clubs have begun a $1m social media campaign as the first step in a concerted bid to arrest years of sliding fan interest.

Aware of the damage to the brand of the competition after a lengthy battle to gain control of it, the A-League owners have sanctioned the campaign across five social media platforms to try to re-engage a younger audience and start selling the competition’s story.

It comes on the back of research conducted for club owners which they believe show there is a latent market of consumers interested in the A-League but not going to games — and which may show declining TV ratings are to a significant degree attributable to viewers migrating to streaming games via the internet.

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It comes after persistent negative headlines about falling fan interest that don’t make palatable reading for the owners now that they have their hands on the A-League’s steering wheel. Crowds are down by 3.5 per cent on the equivalent number of rounds last season.

TV ratings have fallen more significantly. Viewers on Fox Sports, which shows all games, are down some 24 per cent to about 39,000 a game. The switch from Ten Bold to ABC1 as the free-to-air broadcaster of one game per round, at 5pm on Saturdays, has delivered a 50 per cent increase on the last few rounds of last season, though from a small base up to an average of about 53,000.

The owners say the competition suffered from a lack of marketing during the bitter battle to achieve separation from Football Federation Australia, which was resolved just over a year ago.

Though the deal is still to be completed, the owners are effectively in control of the A-League and beginning to make long-promised investments in marketing and promotion.

The social media campaign will use a mix of bespoke content, highlights, memes and fan-driven material, particularly seeking to engage younger sections of the near 2 million Australians who play the game but only a fraction of whom go to or watch A-League games.

However, viewer decline might not be as serious as the headline Fox Sports figures suggest.

The increasing variable for all sports has been the rise in streaming, with viewing figures not yet distributed to the sports they show, let alone the wider public.

Optus Sport and Kayo, two of the biggest sport streaming content providers, have revealed their total number of subscribers at more than 700,000 and 382,000 respectively — but not viewing figures per event.

However, a body of research undertaken for the A-League owners by a global data analytical company has provided some clues.

It was shared with senior club officials on Friday, who say the focus-group-based research shows a reach for games via Kayo and the Telstra MyFootball app of more than 100,000 for each of last weekend’s four games — in some cases getting closer to 150,000.

Research for Roy Morgan this week showed almost 2 million people watched at least part of an A-League game in the past year.

The Daily Telegraph