Indo: Aussie plan can help Eircom League bounce back

Irish Independent

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Aussie plan can help Eircom League bounce back
Wednesday September 21st 2005
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SOME day soon those very busy people in Genesis are going roll out their third report into Irish soccer.

Genesis III will be a white paper on the Eircom League and is expected to outline the path to success on and off the field for domestic football.

It will be interesting to see if they make any comparisons between soccer in Ireland and Australia because experiences 'down under' are very similar to those 'up here'.

Eighteen months ago the Australians took a long hard look at their national league and concluded that all was not well. It was facing intense competition in the domestic market from more dominant codes of football and while they had low television ratings for the domestic game there was high interest in television coverage of Champions League and Premiership soccer.

They also had low gates, low revenues and low wages with many clubs experiencing financial problems. Those same problems are replicated within the Eircom League and when Genesis deliver in the coming days we going to find out if Irish soccer has the balls to tackle them in the same forthright manner as the Australians.

They disbanded their domestic flagship, the National Soccer League, and launched the A-League, which kicked off four weeks ago. They have eight clubs, seven of which are based in separate Australian cities with the other in Auckland, New Zealand.

Each team has a squad of 20 players and a salary cap of $1.5m Australian dollars for 19 players, which is around €950,000. The other player is a marquee player who can be paid as much as the club can afford so Sydney were able to splash out €500,000 on Dwight Yorke to bring their salary spend to just under €1.5m. They signed an exclusive television deal with a cable sports channel, attracted a blue chip sponsor in Hyundai and ran a television commercial aimed at youth in Australia and New Zealand.

Their target audiences are the 16 to 24-year-olds as well as old soccer supporters from the defunct National Soccer League and families. The campaign worked as the opening weekend saw a cumulative attendance in excess of 70,000 at the four games and although this figure dropped by week four it was still at 46,605 which represents an average of 11,000 per game and is very much in line with their projections.

Here in Ireland some clubs in the Eircom League Premier Division have annual payrolls of between €1m and €2m and are only attracting ten per cent of the average Australian gate.

At the recent "Money, Marketing and Media" seminar organised by the Eircom League, Professor Bill Gerrard of Leeds University Business School presented the A-League as a case study for the delegates to consider and then made several suggestions.

He proposed the introduction of a salary cap in the Eircom League and suggested that the marquee principle could also be used to attract popular veteran Irish stars back home or sign highly skilful players who can pull in the crowds.

Although the average weekly attendance of 12,000 is up six per cent on last season it's only quarter the size of the A-League and it is probably costing more per spectator than Australia. Gerrard suggests the introduction of Championship play-offs to make the league title race more exciting and increase attendances.

The Australians have been radical and innovative in a bid to save their domestic game and the Eircom League may soon find that they have no choice but to follow suit.

Gerry McDermott
Bootroom

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Well it just shows ye what can be done here.

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Originally Posted by Buller

Well it just shows ye what can be done here.

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Yeah 2 franchies for Dublin South Wanderers & North Dublin Celtic.

:D

What are you on about Pete??

It's an interetsing idea but the whole playoff thing is really annoying. I don't think it'd be very effective.

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Originally Posted by pete

Yeah 2 franchies for Dublin South Wanderers & North Dublin Celtic.

:D

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Excluding that part of course... ;)

a play off for promotion ok. not for the league. The rest of it about wage cuts etc makes sense. If shels could get 10,000 people week in week out we could fund everything !

I hope this genesis report on the EL really shakes things up

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Originally Posted by pete

Yeah 2 franchies for Dublin South Wanderers & North Dublin Celtic.

:D

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No screw that - Dublin is big enough to have four teams if marketed properly, add two from the North, one team from Connaght, and then merge Cork, Waterford, Limerick and Cobh into the Munster Wildcats (who could play their home games at a redeveloped Thomand Park).

The Corkies are well used to name changes, but us Dublin clubs have been going for decades and that tradition needs to preserved!

I presume you're on board with this idea Pete? :p

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Originally Posted by TheOwl

...add two from the North...

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Derry City and Belfast Glinftonville!?? :D

Didn't the league undergo an overhaul which included disbanding some teams and making new franchises? I'm sorry but this is Europe where football tradition goes back a century and you cannot wipe the slate clean and start it all up again. With a salary cap how can we ever advance in Europe either?

I've advocated a franchise type system on these boards before. I think it would be foolish not to at least consider it.

This "guru" seems to have completely ignored the fact that Irish clubs must compete in European competition, we are not just one big island with teams playing each other over and over again.His ludicrous idea of paying our own local Irish players small wages, and then paying a big salary to some f*cking has-been from cross-channel must be the stupidest gombeen idea I've ever heard. We pay the young lads very little, and we pay the "veteran" loads of money?:rolleyes:
Supposing Cork City get to play Roy Keane (or the big pub sign Gary Breen:D ) for a season - an old man who is a multi-millionaire gets paid most of the wages at the club, while the other 19 get the rest.
So to any young lad who wants to play football and make a living out of it here, you might as well put a sign outside every club ground saying "if you want to be able to negotiate your own contract and get top wages, f*ck off to England for a few years and when you are past it there, come back to us"

"Prof" Bill Gerrard is a f*cking arseh*le, and obviously didn't spend 5 minutes figuring out the the only comparison between football in Ireland and Australia is that in both countries, football is played on an island.

Gerry McDermott should know a damn sight better at this stage.
What a crock of sh!t :rolleyes:

lads, a lot of clubs cant afford some of the wages being paid. Most clubs are in serious financial difficulty. I thought a wage cap until clubs have attendences worth speaking about made sense.

I dont think anyone is calling for a franchise type system.

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Originally Posted by TheOwl

one team from Connaght,

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theres only 1 team in Connacht anyway:)

"launched the A-League, which kicked off four weeks ago. They have eight clubs"

Give it a couple of months and it'll get very repetitive.

Another reason the National Soccer League disbanded, although it is not
publicised much, is that there were 4 teams based in the Sydney suburbs
Sydney Olympic, Sydney United, Paramatta Power and Marconi Stallions.

The trouble was that each club is from a different ethnic background and
there was trouble among rival fans at these derby games.

Olympic are based in a predominately Greek suburb of Sydney, United were
originally founded as Sydney Croatia, Marconi in an Italian part and Paramatta
had a bit of everything, as it is a good bit out of the city. Fans saw derby
games as a rivalry between their country of origin rather than club rivalry.

I was a regular at Sydney Olympic games for a while but any time they played
Sydney United there were very few club colours on display in the crowd,
most people were draped in either Greek or Croatian national flags.

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Originally Posted by thejollyrodger

lads, a lot of clubs cant afford some of the wages being paid. Most clubs are in serious financial difficulty. I thought a wage cap until clubs have attendences worth speaking about made sense.

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A wage cap makes sense if it's a proportion of turnover, not a flat rate across the board. Even at a flat rate some clubs would still be in trouble trying to pay a full squad. This can't be done though until accounts across the league start being properly audited and checked out.

If you were going to replace the league with rebranded franchises it'd be Southeast (Waterford, KK), South (Cork, Cobh), Southwest (Limerick), West (Galway, Athlone), Northwest (Sligo/Harps), North (Derry), Northeast (Dundalk/Drogs), Midlands (Longford, Monaghan), with 4 teams in Dublin divided up geographically. Shels and Dublin City would go out to the new Shels site and merge together. Bohs would stay in Dalymount, Pats would move out to UCD and merge with the college and Bray Wanderers, and Kildare County would move into tallaght with Rovers, rebranding their name to the Tallaght Titans or some other such rubbish. Gives you 12 teams, with a third of them in the Dublin area. Add in 2 or 3 teams from the North if you want to expand the league and there you have it.

Would it work? Not a hope! Terrible idea. Is easy to do in a country with such a large urban population but can you really expect people to go from Sligo to Ballybofey every Friday night for a match, or go to Galway from Athlone? It'd never work. The only way Irish soccer is going to work is from the grassroots up. If young players aren't brought up being told that the EL is a good and viable league to play in, then we'll never start to develop clubs capable of competing in Europe.

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Originally Posted by Ash

Another reason the National Soccer League disbanded, although it is not publicised much, is that there were 4 teams based in the Sydney suburbs
Sydney Olympic, Sydney United, Paramatta Power and Marconi Stallions.

The trouble was that each club is from a different ethnic background and
there was trouble among rival fans at these derby games.

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Just like dublin so. ;)

We have Gypsies, Travellers, Inchicorians & Oillites :D

Oillism is more of a religious cult than an ethnic group!!
Easily forgotten are seerians who are a seperatist bunch who reject the more established groups.
And a threat to the natural order has been recently discovered to the south in the form of the langeronians.

The clubs we have at the moment are grand. soccer is mostly an urban sport and there is always going to be more intrest in dublin than the rest of the country.

as someone suggested, a better idea would be a wage restraint in relation to income.

i dont know how they will get bigger crowds though. were not really a nation of week in week our supporters