A few weeks ago, Mike Tuckerman posed the question “what is up with Brisbane Roar crowds?”. His article was focused on Roar home games, but it might surprise many to know that Brisbane are the second-worst drawing away team of any current A-League club, ahead of only Wellington Phoenix.

Even Perth, the farthest team from the Eastern seaboard, has a lifetime average of 11,084 per away match to Brisbane’s 10,895.

It begs the question why?

Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Reddit Email Share

As it happens, Perth is also the only venue where Brisbane Roar draws an above average crowd. Travel then, is obviously not the issue.

Only Victory currently have more trophies than Roar, and only Victory have scored more goals per game. Brisbane have won more games than any other in the history of the league and at the time of writing tops the all-time points table.

While their football in the early years of the A-League could have been called dull and uninspiring at times, their all-action style under Ange Postecoglou revitalised the league, and they have consistently been one of the more entertaining sides of the past six seasons.

It is not the quality of the football then.

Thomas Broich must be one of the best players to ever grace the A-League, and for years has been worth the price of admission on his own. Even today, he is consistently one of the best on park.

Having also had the likes of Besart Berisha, Matt McKay, Robbie Kruse, Tommy Oar, Ivan Franjic and Michael Theo, the only player to win five grand finals, once again, there have been plenty of names that football fans should want to go and see.



By any measure, games against Brisbane Roar are ones that fans across the country should be marking on their calendar when the fixture list comes out.

Yet they don’t.

Tuckerman’s article suggested, and with some justification, that the club needed “to do more to pull their weight at the box office”, and certainly that applies locally.

Nationally though it must represent a failure by the FFA not only to promote Brisbane better, but the entire league, and it must be a contributing factor to attendances in Brisbane as well.

The press that promotes the sport nationally is centred in Sydney, and to a lesser extent Melbourne. It is perhaps understandable then that they focuses on the so called marquee matches, the Big Blue, the Victory v City derby, and the Sydney v Wanderers derby.

A-League management also seems to have taken the view that focussing on these events provides more bang for their buck in terms of promotion. The theory is that promoting these ‘bigger’ games will provide a certain amount of spill over effect for the rest of the league.

I would argue that this point of view is failing. While attendances at these big matches are impressive, currently league attendances are the worst they have been for three years. Many people seem to be attending these big games as ‘events’, rather than as football fans genuinely interested in the clubs or the competition itself.

Most clubs are hovering around their lifetime average attendance and ratings on free-to-air television, supposedly the thing that was going to help launch the A-League to the next level, are disappointing to say the least.



For me, the focus on these big games carries an unspoken implication that the other clubs and matches are not as good, supposedly because these big games contain something special, something other games do not.

It seems to feed into the football cultural cringe, our still deep-seated belief that football in Australia is not good enough overall.

Constantly we hear that we need marquee players to lift the profile of the league, yet we do little to lift the profile of some of the excellent players we already have, and I am yet to be convinced that marquees provide any real long-term boost. If they did, Sydney FC would have replaced Alessandro Del Piero the day he left.

We are constantly told that the standard of the league is too low. For years it was stated that we couldn’t even compete in Asia let alone against the rest of the world. After the recent success of both the Wanderers and the Socceroos the comments changed to ‘well it’s only Asia’, as if competing against half the population of the world was an easy thing.

Regardless of individual issues though, the failure of A-League crowds to support the likes of Brisbane Roar, the stagnant attendances overall, and the poor television ratings, all point to a league that is not marketing itself the way it should.

The excuse that the standard of the league is not high enough is ridiculous. These are the clubs we’ve got. Fans of Norwich, Hannover 96, Frosinone, or Levante don’t stop supporting their clubs because they’re not as good as Arsenal, Bayern Munich, Juventus, or Barcelona. Fans of the EPL and Bundesliga don’t stop watching because Spain and Italy have dominated the champions league.

The FFA should be doing more to encourage fans to attend all matches, not just a handful of high-profile fixtures that many of us will never attend, and that have no more bearing on our own clubs than any other match.

Poor attendances for Brisbane Roar games, both home and away, are a symptom of underlying issues with the perception and marketing of the whole league. They are not the whole of the problem itself.

Advertisement