RLWC Attendance-O-Meter

[Archie Gordon]

Well, nearly all over for the attendances.

I'm gonna miss checking boxes with traffic lights and motorcycles, as well as being asked to pardon the interruption. Feeling a bit emotional.

[Hull Kingston Bronco]

53 minutes ago, fighting irish said:

What do they do, that's so much better? Can we learn anything from them? 

Now that's a very interesting question. In you look at the data, it's as much that AFL is an outlier in having such high attendances per capita (it's the 4th highest average-attendance football league of all codes in the world) as it is that NRL underperforms. I did a paper on it once for some consulting work we did down under, was a while back now but just a few thoughts I can remember from it >

1. Rugby league works more naturally on TV. Like football, it's a left-right game whereas AFL is much more 3-dimensional. And in League the action is more usually within a confined 10-20m space. Watching League on TV is like a slightly concentrated version of watching it live, you're still getting 80% of the experience. But in AFL the live experience is completely different to the TV experience. Having no offside rule means the ball frequently drastically moves location - when you're at the ground you can see so much more of what's going on, things that are directly relevant in the moment. So the "you need to be there" factor is much more true for AFL.

2. AFL implemented a shared-stadia model in Melbourne more effectively, in central locations. League games in Sydney are more dispersed, suburban, or large grounds in inconvenient locations (with some exceptions). Combine this with that first factor, and you have a recipe for high TV following of a chosen club versus match attendance. Especially when you consider every single match is carried live, and Pay TV market penetration is much greater than it is here. Much more people proportionally will have Fox Sports packages, than have Sky here. 

3. Relentless focus on memberships and community engagement. The AFL went in earlier, and harder, firstly on promoting membership programmes as a way of retaining audience loyalty, and secondly on the strategy of junior community participation as a pathway to new consumers - programmes like Auskick etc. To some extent they wrote the strategy on this stuff for many sports globally (Peter Deakin brought some of these AFL ideas into League here at Bulls, and other SL clubs followed - later replicating it at Saracens, and Union more widely). The NRL has since executed similar strategies, Melbourne and Souths for example have bulging memberships now, but not as effectively across all clubs (and of course they're later to the party, so playing catch-up)

4. Sydney culture vs. Melbourne culture. Melbourne is much, much more of a one sport town. Sydney has more sports diversity. Working in Melbourne AFL really is the lingua franca of the office, much like football is here. You need to follow it to some extent, it's equivalent to the "weather" conversation in the UK. League just doesn't perform that role in Sydney - even though it's the leading sport, it isn't dominant in that sense. 

5. Class barriers, yes, that old chestnut. It's not as bad as for us in the UK, but still a factor. In Melbourne AFL has long been the code for all levels of society - enabling it to penetrate deep into Govt. for influence, and Education sector for participation etc. In Sydney, whilst the #1 sport, League was still seen as the working mans game. A Rugby Union diaspora still acted in institutions to limit the reach of the code in Govt., and it's role in Education settings - directly in the private sector (where Union is played, League rarely), but also indirectly in the state system where teaching staff have also 'looked down' on League (as not 'from' their class cultural background), and so football and cricket lead participation. The latter is reducing rapidly. 

Sorry, wittering on, but it's an interesting subject (for me anyway)

 

  

 

Edited November 18, 2022 by Hull Kingston Bronco
typos

[RL Tragic]

20 hours ago, Leonard said:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/rugby-league/63656512

Not sure if already posted. Plenty to pick the bones out of.

 

 

 

resounding

/rɪˈzaʊndɪŋ/

 

adjective

 

unmistakable; emphatic.
 

 

I think we can all agree it’s not being a resounding success as he states. I’m quite staggered by this guy .

 

1/ Opening ceremony debacle , Regardless of fault does this happen at other world cups . 

 

2/ Attendances not only missing benchmarks he set down by 50% (resounding success  )  But actually being less than the event 9 years ago that he stated the day after the opener had already being beaten .

 

3/ Overloading of games at venues, How could a professional sports marketeer not know thus would lead to ambivalence and overload on the pockets of the local market.

 

4/ Poor match day atmosphere , If they didn’t think it was poor they wouldn’t have drafted in bands etc half way through.

 

5/ Ticketing website out of the mid 2000s. Woeful from a professional event , Make it easy for your customers to purchase.

 

6/ Ticketing pricing and allocation making many games look dreadful on TV . 
 

7/ Ticketing pricing.

 

8/ Numerous outright lies about ticket prices , Attendances , sales . 
 

9/ Not ONE single sell out throughout the whole competition ( Resounding success) .

 

 

 

Im sure others could add more . In short YES there have been some positives the wheelchair competition has been a revelation as has the Womens World Cup and the TV coverage . However this should have been SO much better with the funding a free to air TV broadcaster that worked with us . The fault lies squarely at the door of the organisers I’ve said it before and speak from experience , In the private company world , to have organised an event  of any size and exhibited such gross incompetence , he would have been out the door with very limited future opportunity in his industry . I am angered that he has the temerity to cover his own failings by using the BBC website to lie again and tell us it’s all rosy , The lack of respect for the spectators of this sport ,  that he thinks we are oblivious to the shambles he has presided over points to an arrogance and lack of respect for the grass roots of the game . 

[Hull Kingston Bronco]

19 minutes ago, RL Tragic said:

 

 

 

resounding

/rɪˈzaʊndɪŋ/

 

adjective

 

unmistakable; emphatic.
 

 

I think we can all agree it’s not being a resounding success as he states. I’m quite staggered by this guy .

 

1/ Opening ceremony debacle , Regardless of fault does this happen at other world cups . 

 

2/ Attendances not only missing benchmarks he set down by 50% (resounding success  )  But actually being less than the event 9 years ago that he stated the day after the opener had already being beaten .

 

3/ Overloading of games at venues, How could a professional sports marketeer not know thus would lead to ambivalence and overload on the pockets of the local market.

 

4/ Poor match day atmosphere , If they didn’t think it was poor they wouldn’t have drafted in bands etc half way through.

 

5/ Ticketing website out of the mid 2000s. Woeful from a professional event , Make it easy for your customers to purchase.

 

6/ Ticketing pricing and allocation making many games look dreadful on TV . 
 

7/ Ticketing pricing.

 

8/ Numerous outright lies about ticket prices , Attendances , sales . 
 

9/ Not ONE single sell out throughout the whole competition ( Resounding success) .

 

 

 

Im sure others could add more . In short YES there have been some positives the wheelchair competition has been a revelation as has the Womens World Cup and the TV coverage . However this should have been SO much better with the funding a free to air TV broadcaster that worked with us . The fault lies squarely at the door of the organisers I’ve said it before and speak from experience , In the private company world , to have organised an event  of any size and exhibited such gross incompetence , he would have been out the door with very limited future opportunity in his industry . I am angered that he has the temerity to cover his own failings by using the BBC website to lie again and tell us it’s all rosy , The lack of respect for the spectators of this sport ,  that he thinks we are oblivious to the shambles he has presided over points to an arrogance and lack of respect for the grass roots of the game . 

I agree with much of this analysis, and if Dutton said the same things in an internal review I was at I'd roast him...

But to be fair we have to recognise he's talking to the wider public here, and our media partner to-boot, so his role is not to forensically analyse failings or possible improvements there. It's to sell the s*** out of how great the sport is and how much progress we're making. It's his duty in that context, and if he didn't I'd burn him for that!!

We need to talk the game up externally. Here we can say what we want, in the next board meeting the team can be held accountable. But that's not for this BBC interview, so he's doing exactly what we want him to do here. 

 

[RL Tragic]

Just now, Hull Kingston Bronco said:

I agree with much of this analysis, and if Dutton said the same things in an internal review I was at I'd roast him...

But to be fair we have to recognise he's talking to the wider public here, and our media partner to-boot, so his role is not to forensically analyse failings or possible improvements there. It's to sell the s*** out of how great the sport is and how much progress we're making. It's his duty in that context, and if he didn't I'd burn him for that!!

We need to talk the game up externally. Here we can say what we want, in the next board meeting the team can be held accountable. But that's not for this BBC interview, so he's doing exactly what we want him to do here. 

 

Fair point there and you are quite right  , as I’m sure you and many of us are I am just angered that with a decent management team making common sense decisions this could have been a phenomenal World Cup everything was lined up and we seem to have had the Frank Spencer’s of event organisers in charge , I feel a bit robbed to be honest and think this guy and his team is responsible for us missing a once in a generation opportunity. 

[RP London]

1 hour ago, RL Tragic said:

 

 

 

resounding

/rɪˈzaʊndɪŋ/

 

adjective

 

unmistakable; emphatic.
 

 

I think we can all agree it’s not being a resounding success as he states. I’m quite staggered by this guy .

 

1/ Opening ceremony debacle , Regardless of fault does this happen at other world cups 

It's not exactly the same but didn't London 2012 have North Korean flag and anthem for the South Koreans at the football, or a similar muck up.. 

How many times are there floodlight failures (didn't the stadium of light have one on opening night?)

Concerts/gigs get cancelled for technical issues, an entire Mudford and sons tour had to be rearranged due to not realising how long it would take to dismantle and re set up their staging..  (I remember as the gig in Sheffield I was supposed to go to for my birthday got moved by 6 months).  

These things do happen and it's the stadium not the organiser..  

I'm all for calling dutton out but not sure this one is on him.. 

[Dave T]

11 minutes ago, RP London said:

It's not exactly the same but didn't London 2012 have North Korean flag and anthem for the South Koreans at the football, or a similar muck up.. 

How many times are there floodlight failures (didn't the stadium of light have one on opening night?)

Concerts/gigs get cancelled for technical issues, an entire Mudford and sons tour had to be rearranged due to not realising how long it would take to dismantle and re set up their staging..  (I remember as the gig in Sheffield I was supposed to go to for my birthday got moved by 6 months).  

These things do happen and it's the stadium not the organiser..  

I'm all for calling dutton out but not sure this one is on him.. 

This article:

https://www.totalrl.com/world-cup-organisers-apologise-as-opening-ceremony-failure-explained/

Highlights that it wasn't the stadium, it was the company RLWC hired that was at fault. And the production values of the whole tournament has been poor - it is on them. 

 

[RP London]

30 minutes ago, Dave T said:

This article:

https://www.totalrl.com/world-cup-organisers-apologise-as-opening-ceremony-failure-explained/

Highlights that it wasn't the stadium, it was the company RLWC hired that was at fault. And the production values of the whole tournament has been poor - it is on them. 

 

Fair enough.. 

[Dave T]

9 minutes ago, RP London said:

Fair enough.. 

Don't get me wrong I have sympathy - it isn't Dutton and his team who do the tech, but my sympathy wears off slightly when you see the amount of technical glitches that we have seen through the tournament. 

It suggests maybe a level of cheapness. 

[meast]

22 hours ago, Jacob565 said:

26,000 in Bristol tonight watching Bristol bears play the springboks B team.

What group is that in?

[Jim from Oz]

2 hours ago, Hull Kingston Bronco said:

Now that's a very interesting question. In you look at the data, it's as much that AFL is an outlier in having such high attendances per capita (it's the 4th highest average-attendance football league of all codes in the world) as it is that NRL underperforms. I did a paper on it once for some consulting work we did down under, was a while back now but just a few thoughts I can remember from it >

1. Rugby league works more naturally on TV. Like football, it's a left-right game whereas AFL is much more 3-dimensional. And in League the action is more usually within a confined 10-20m space. Watching League on TV is like a slightly concentrated version of watching it live, you're still getting 80% of the experience. But in AFL the live experience is completely different to the TV experience. Having no offside rule means the ball frequently drastically moves location - when you're at the ground you can see so much more of what's going on, things that are directly relevant in the moment. So the "you need to be there" factor is much more true for AFL.

2. AFL implemented a shared-stadia model in Melbourne more effectively, in central locations. League games in Sydney are more dispersed, suburban, or large grounds in inconvenient locations (with some exceptions). Combine this with that first factor, and you have a recipe for high TV following of a chosen club versus match attendance. Especially when you consider every single match is carried live, and Pay TV market penetration is much greater than it is here. Much more people proportionally will have Fox Sports packages, than have Sky here. 

3. Relentless focus on memberships and community engagement. The AFL went in earlier, and harder, firstly on promoting membership programmes as a way of retaining audience loyalty, and secondly on the strategy of junior community participation as a pathway to new consumers - programmes like Auskick etc. To some extent they wrote the strategy on this stuff for many sports globally (Peter Deakin brought some of these AFL ideas into League here at Bulls, and other SL clubs followed - later replicating it at Saracens, and Union more widely). The NRL has since executed similar strategies, Melbourne and Souths for example have bulging memberships now, but not as effectively across all clubs (and of course they're later to the party, so playing catch-up)

4. Sydney culture vs. Melbourne culture. Melbourne is much, much more of a one sport town. Sydney has more sports diversity. Working in Melbourne AFL really is the lingua franca of the office, much like football is here. You need to follow it to some extent, it's equivalent to the "weather" conversation in the UK. League just doesn't perform that role in Sydney - even though it's the leading sport, it isn't dominant in that sense. 

5. Class barriers, yes, that old chestnut. It's not as bad as for us in the UK, but still a factor. In Melbourne AFL has long been the code for all levels of society - enabling it to penetrate deep into Govt. for influence, and Education sector for participation etc. In Sydney, whilst the #1 sport, League was still seen as the working mans game. A Rugby Union diaspora still acted in institutions to limit the reach of the code in Govt., and it's role in Education settings - directly in the private sector (where Union is played, League rarely), but also indirectly in the state system where teaching staff have also 'looked down' on League (as not 'from' their class cultural background), and so football and cricket lead participation. The latter is reducing rapidly. 

Sorry, wittering on, but it's an interesting subject (for me anyway)

 

  

 

100% All of this.

 

But you have to add two other very important factors: AFL administrators over the past 30 years have been much more clever and definitely played the long game, plus the overall interest in progressing the game has more importance than the interests of the clubs - So the exact opposite of the NRL!

 

The second vital factor is the fact that the NRL went through the idiotic super league war, which for one gave AFL the biggest free kick in the biggest sports market in Australia: Sydney. To say nothing of the general sports fan in Australia who was turned off by rugby league forever, I am still meeting former rugby league fans in Sydney who say they don’t watch it any more mainly because of that idiotic war and now watch AFL instead.

 

[RP London]

36 minutes ago, Dave T said:

Don't get me wrong I have sympathy - it isn't Dutton and his team who do the tech, but my sympathy wears off slightly when you see the amount of technical glitches that we have seen through the tournament. 

It suggests maybe a level of cheapness. 

Totally agree.. I was going to say something about contractors and trusting specialists but you are right with the website etc it does start to become a pattern. 

[RL Tragic]

38 minutes ago, Dave T said:

Don't get me wrong I have sympathy - it isn't Dutton and his team who do the tech, but my sympathy wears off slightly when you see the amount of technical glitches that we have seen through the tournament. 

It suggests maybe a level of cheapness. 

Why didn’t they just use the guys Newcastle use who use the system on a regular basis

[Dave T]

1 minute ago, RL Tragic said:

Why didn’t they just use the guys Newcastle use who use the system on a regular basis

I suppose they had a production company who was in charge of everything. The same reason that at the grounds things like shot clocks and scoreboards at the ground weren't in use. God knows why, it was an appalling approach. 

[Hull Kingston Bronco]

23 minutes ago, Jim from Oz said:

100% All of this.

 

But you have to add two other very important factors: AFL administrators over the past 30 years have been much more clever and definitely played the long game, plus the overall interest in progressing the game has more importance than the interests of the clubs - So the exact opposite of the NRL!

 

The second vital factor is the fact that the NRL went through the idiotic super league war, which for one gave AFL the biggest free kick in the biggest sports market in Australia: Sydney. To say nothing of the general sports fan in Australia who was turned off by rugby league forever, I am still meeting former rugby league fans in Sydney who say they don’t watch it any more mainly because of that idiotic war and now watch AFL instead.

 

Yes you’re right, I really should have said that too:

> The SuperLeague war split the sport, precisely at the moment the Pay TV boom started. A hugely destructive distraction. The AFL used surplus funds to integrate and expand its geographic reach. We wasted it on player salaries and legal fees. 

> The AFL has long had much stronger central control, akin to the NFL (albeit without the same collaborative ownership model). This creates an environment for long-term, strategic planning. Rugby League suffers from the same divisive, internecine, club-centred, short-term small mindedness in Australia as we have here - just with bigger budgets, and more mass media involvement (amplifying it all tenfold). 

[Jim from Oz]

Just now, Hull Kingston Bronco said:

Yes you’re right, I really should have said that too:

> The SuperLeague war split the sport, precisely at the moment the Pay TV boom started. A hugely destructive distraction. The AFL used surplus funds to integrate and expand its geographic reach. We wasted it on player salaries and legal fees. 

> The AFL has long had much stronger central control, akin to the NFL (albeit without the same collaborative ownership model). This creates an environment for long-term, strategic planning. Rugby League suffers from the same divisive, internecine, club-centred, short-term small mindedness in Australia as we have here - just with bigger budgets, and more mass media involvement (amplifying it all tenfold). 

Yep 100%

[Guest]

Nice full house for the wheelchair final - still waiting to see if they included Dave T's no show.

[redjonn]

9 hours ago, RP London said:

You point blank said that insufficient people were interested anyway... on a post that was questioning how we can get more people interested and why more people aren't interested..  

You think you can read into what people are saying beyond what is written, you may say you didn't specifically say "why bother then" but that was absolutely 100% the tone of your post in response to a post about investigating "whys" to help come up with plans for change... 

Thought I said maybe.... in respect to the general debate as to why it wasn't attended to the levels we would have liked.  Although I  have not bothered looking back to check as not worth the effort as the debate is all subjective with us having subjectivity differences that won't change.

Nevertheless thanks for your input and discussion to my comment.

We have

[Dave T]

1 hour ago, Leonard said:

Nice full house for the wheelchair final - still waiting to see if they included Dave T's no show.

I've heard they are still in a meeting working out what approach to take. 

[Guest]

11 minutes ago, Dave T said:

I've heard they are still in a meeting working out what approach to take. 

They paid the French ref to go all John Cleese to take attention away from the gaping hole you left. 

[Dave T]

1 minute ago, Leonard said:

... from the gaping hole you left. 

I mean, that's just unkind.... 

[RP London]

2 hours ago, redjonn said:

Thought I said maybe.... in respect to the general debate as to why it wasn't attended to the levels we would have liked.  Although I  have not bothered looking back to check as not worth the effort as the debate is all subjective with us having subjectivity differences that won't change.

Nevertheless thanks for your input and discussion to my comment.

We have

But as you've said it's not about exactly what you said, it's about reading into what you said.... 

Oh and you failed to finish your post.... 

Edited November 19, 2022 by RP London

[Just Browny]

14 hours ago, Archie Gordon said:

Well, nearly all over for the attendances.

I'm gonna miss checking boxes with traffic lights and motorcycles, as well as being asked to pardon the interruption. Feeling a bit emotional.

I found the humility to pardon the interruption one final time this morning when it took a good 20 minutes to download my tickets. We'll miss it when it's gone.

[Leyther_Matt]

1 hour ago, Just Browny said:

I found the humility to pardon the interruption one final time this morning when it took a good 20 minutes to download my tickets. We'll miss it when it's gone.

Distributed my 7 tickets for today weeks ago. Can’t wait to try and log on later when inevitably one of the party has inevitably deleted their email or drops their phone in the pub.  

[faithfulbyname]

OT looks pretty full