Tough Times for Professional Soccer in Australia
John Duerden
The A-League has seen attendance plummet over the last few years, and this week it had to drop a team because of financial problems.
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It has been a tough few months for Australian soccer. The national team failed to make it past the first round at the 2010 World Cup, its bid to host the 2022 tournament ended in humiliation and the country’s top players are heading overseas, leaving behind an A-League struggling with falling attendance and financial problems.

It may sound apocalyptic, but people involved in the game are confident that the future is bright, if lessons are learned. Those may lie not in Europe but the United States, a nation that, like Australia, failed in its attempt to hold the 2022 Cup but has succeeded in establishing a soccer league as an integral part of the competitive sports landscape.

Australia can’t yet make that claim. Three years after the A-League was born in 2005, to replace the failing National Soccer League, the league’s average attendance stood at a healthy 14,600 a match. By the end of the regular 2010-11 season in February, the figure had fallen by more than 6,000, to fewer than 8,500 fans a game. The nadir was reached in the same month, when 1,003 attended North Queensland Fury’s match with the league leaders, Brisbane Roar.

Fury has lost so much money that this week it was dropped for the 2011-12 season. The club’s position was “too big of a financial risk” for it to continue, Football Federation Australia said in a statement.

Sydney Rovers won’t be joining the league, either, as the new franchise has been unable to provide the necessary financial guarantees. The A-League was expected to feature 12 teams next season, but instead is set to have just 10.

It evokes memories of a similar stage of development in the United States when the M.L.S. contracted from 12 to 10 clubs in 2001, five years after its establishment. With 2010 average attendance well over 16,000, the M.L.S. will expand to 18 teams for the 2011 season and hopes to have 20 the following year, including three Canadian teams. The lessons of American success are not lost on Craig Foster, a former player for Australia’s national team and the chief soccer analyst for the Australian broadcaster SBS.

“It wasn’t until there was a significant core of administrators in the United States who understood and were passionate about the game that America really started to take great strides,” said Foster. “It is a critical time right now. There is an incredible hunger for the game in Australia. The question is capitalizing on it.”

That task lies with Ben Buckley, the chief of F.F.A., who admitted that the group had taken its eye off the A-league during the bid for the 2022 Cup, when $45 million was spent in return for one vote, the lowest of the five candidates. (Qatar won the rights to play host to the 2022 Cup.) Buckley’s background is in Australian Rules Football, known as A.F.L., a rival sport of soccer.

“There is a misconception in Australia that because the former National Soccer League was poorly run there were no competent football administrators,” said Foster. “So the balance has swung from one extreme with people with great passion but little administrative competence to the other. You can only strategize for that if you know the game.”

If administrators don’t have that international experience, an increasing number of players do. Out of the top players for Australia at the 2010 World Cup, only Jason Culina played for an A-League club. With the A-League salary cap of 2.35 million Australian dollars for the full roster, one marquee player aside, East Asia provides an increasingly attractive alternative to Europe for players from Australia. (The Australian dollar is at parity with the U.S. dollar.)

International defender Sasa Ognenovski left Adelaide United in 2009 to join South Korea’s Seongnam, a team he captained to the 2010 Asian Champions League title. In the 2011 Korean season, he will be joined by three more former A-Leaguers. “Some players have left, and it needs sponsors to come in so the salary cap can be raised and clubs can keep their best players,” said Ognenovski.

“Overall, though standards have definitely improved. The A-League is going forwards, not backwards. There is a definitely a bias against soccer in the media although it has improved. When I started playing in Australia, a match report in the newspaper would be smaller than the palm of my hand.

Now matches get a full page. In 10-15 years, soccer will rival the A.F.L.”

That is what the A.F.L., which in 2010 attracted an average attendance of about 38,000, higher than the English Premier League, is afraid of, according to Adelaide chairman Greg Griffin. While, just as in the United States, soccer has relatively high levels of participation, it has to compete against entrenched and traditional Australian sports, which also include cricket and rugby.

“The A.F.L. is negative towards us,” said Griffin. “It fears that soccer will take a foothold in Australia. There’s already more kids playing soccer than A.F.L., and that point has to be made to the politicians who hand out millions and millions to A.F.L. and very little to soccer.”

A.F.L. media manager Patrick Keane refused to enter into a debate over the sport’s attitude to soccer.

“Our focus always is to try and make sure the A.F.L. continues to do its best in the areas of promoting our game,” Keane said. He added that the goal of the A.F.L. is “to run a strong, vibrant national competition,”

“As to what is the leading sport in Australia, that is for others to judge and they can do so looking at basic indicators which include: a 2010 nationwide A.F.L. club membership of 614,251, a total attendance of 7,470,302 in the 2010 season and a Toyota Grand Final that was the most-watched sporting program of the year with an average national audience of 3.639 million.”

Even Adelaide, which has managed to maintain its attendance levels since the start of the A-League, is far from those numbers, but Griffin is confident that the league is ready to move forward.

“The F.F.A. was probably concentrating pretty heavily on the World Cup bid, but now that is dead and buried, I think we’ll see a massive injection for next year.

“The league is only six years old, and now you are beginning to get genuine tribal feelings, and the F.F.A. has to build on the rivalries.”