Second Season Promises Better Football

Phill Chadwick ponders over what the second A-League season will bring from all involved including the media.

The inaugural A-League season stands as a triumph, not only for the three trophy winners Sydney FC, Adelaide United and Central Coast Mariners, but for the concept as a whole.

The football was of reasonable quality, the attendances were excellent, and public interest in the sport was raised.

On the back of that success, and our more recent World Cup adventure, what lies ahead?

I have to admit to some trepidation during the lengthy off-season, fearing that the first season may have just been a flash in the pan. For this concept to evolve into a viable long term professional competition, respected on the world stage, it needs the second season to be significantly better than the first.

By better, I mean of better quality, both in terms of the football played, and in the professionalism displayed by the clubs.

Let's look at the quality of the football. And that means the quality of the footballers. This season sees an influx of good quality foreigners and a smattering of returning Aussies. All of them will contribute to an overall boost to the standard of football we will see each week.

The great strength of football, as opposed to AFL and to a lesser extent NRL, is the ability of our clubs to recruit the best players they can afford from the whole world. Unlike AFL we are not restricted to the few hundred thousand Australian boys playing that code. NRL has a wider reach, but it is still heavily constrained in its talent pool.

Football suffers none of that restriction, and the clubs have been very active in recruiting foreign players. To me, these players are more than football technicians, they are symbolic of the global integration that this sport has.

They show both football fans and casual observers that we are on a truly world stage and can look to vastly enlarged horizons. In a world that is rapidly globalising in all aspects of society, football is an outward looking, inclusive force for goodwill and global acceptance.

There is a new Foreign Legion on display this season, ready and able to display their talents. Players like Petta, Zhang, Gemmill, Da Silva, Claudinho, Alessandro, and the rest, join Yorke, Qu and the other foreigners already on board.

Likewise, returning Aussies Vidmar, Okon, and Lazaridis bring real quality and local interest to the league. That this class of player now see Australia as a destination in the twilight of their careers is a huge vote of confidence in the concept.

Particularly pleasing is the apparent improvement of New Zealand Knights. Last season they were embarrassing both on the pitch and in their crowd support. A major improvement this season may just save that franchise from oblivion.

But the quality of media coverage has not yet caught up with the quality of the competition.

Sweeney Sports recently released a report on the public's interest in various sports, under the headline "Soccer Continuing to Challenge other Football Codes". Bear in mind that the survey was done before the World Cup euphoria. It is fair to say that interest would be even higher if the survey were done today.

The most interesting and disturbing aspect to me was the discrepancy between the public's interest in football on television (41%) and the amount of coverage dedicated to the sport by that medium.

AFL and NRL receive saturation coverage in the free to air television networks both in match broadcasts and in news reports. By contrast, football is largely ignored. Sometimes English Premier League results are read out, but mainly, I suspect, as a filler. A-League gets only cursory attention from the mainstream television stations.

These stations should wake up to the huge latent interest that is currently unsatisfied. When 41% of people express interest in televised football, as compared to 51% for AFL and just 39% for NRL, there must be a deep well of unfulfilled demand just waiting to be tapped.

SBS do a fine job, with limited resources, and Foxtel cater well to that minority of households that subscribe. The rest of us are badly let down.

When mainstream television, newspaper and radio outlets give this sport the coverage demanded by the public's interest, a feedback loop will develop, further enhancing interest. That day cannot be far off.

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