HPN Chat is definitely the second in a series of pieces where HPN chats about the big and small issues of the day. This week, we talk about when games are played, the role of football in the cultural fabric of Australian society and Chris Judd’s ghostwriter.

Cody Atkinson (cody), Sean Lawson (arwon) and Ryan Buckland (ryanbuckland) are the parties involved below.

cody

So, have we all read Chris Judd’s (ghostwriter’s) column on the joys of modern football fixturing?

How much does Thursday Night Football excite everyone here?

arwon

They trick me into thinking it’s the weekend then I realise I still have to get up and go to work.

It also takes away a TV game from the weekend I think, like the this weekend we didn’t get Richmond v Geelong on Sunday.

ryanbuckland

I like it mostly for what it does to the rest of the weekend, in full rounds it helps stretch out the fixture.

In bye weeks yeah you get these silly broadcast deal related quirks like a 3 vs 4 match not being broadcast on free to air.

arwon

I’m also selfish. I hate when the Swans are given Thursday or even Friday games because I can’t drive up from Canberra for them without taking time off work. But that’s just me obviously.

ryanbuckland

It does seem to be a very TV-centric time slot. Without looking I’d think the vast majority of the Thursday games are played outside of Melbourne.

arwon

I’m not sure why. Melbourne has centrally located stadia and functional public transport. Thursday/Friday nights aren’t great even for Sydneysiders to get home then go the ground – place is often still filling up through the 1st quarter. I’d imagine Perth and Adelaide work well being smaller cities.

(Also Manuka worked well on a Friday)

cody

Last week Thursday Night Football had 416,000 viewers in 5 metro. Friday Night Football had 612k.

ryanbuckland

Interesting… On Free to Air?

cody

Yep.

ryanbuckland

Which game was it again? (that probably says a bit haha) It was Port-Dogs yeah?

cody

Yeah, the Adelaide-Richmond game got 638k earlier in the year. And the opening match got 664k.

ryanbuckland

I mean 400,000 people watching something on free to air television is a pretty good number in 2018 one would assume. Particularly on a Thursday night.

cody

It scrapes into the top 20 for the night.

ryanbuckland

Oh. Indeed haha.

cody

Below repeats of Grand Designs. But above QI repeats. 600k gets you top 5ish.

ryanbuckland

Grand Designs is pretty great though so that’s fair enough. It was a lot closer to Mr Worner’s platonic ideal of a shoot out in the end as well.

cody

Also, Judd posits that ads placed in the post-game show are better than during the game.

ryanbuckland

Sample size of one: I haven’t watched more than a minute of pre-game or post-game shows in 2018, and that’s only because my DVR recordings kick in a little earlier than the official match start time.

cody

Yep. There is also legislative maximums for the amount of ads during prime time broadcasts. I’d be shocked if those aren’t being pushed right now anyway, so the trade would be “the most valuable ad slot in the country” for bits in between BT yabbering on.

cody

This whole conversation is pretty new and old at the same time. Until the mid-late 80s practically every game was played on a Saturday afternoon.

Personally, I hate Thursday night football. My thought-pinions are that the quality of football is generally worse, and that it is harder to stay engaged for four nights of the competition.

arwon

Night football is often sloppy period, and didn’t Footballistics find that it’s lower scoring?

cody

Footballistics: the book everyone in this chat is talking about and contributed to. Out now via ABC Books.

ryanbuckland

Hahaha. Thursday night football has been a point of discussion in the NFL recently too. From a quality perspective at least, noting the NFL is terrible and makes its players play on a Sunday then back up on a Thursday. In a more physically painful sport.

arwon

From Footballistics:



Day games have more scoring shots and higher accuracy, makes a difference of about 4 points a game vs a night game.

What is the NFL discussion?

ryanbuckland

In a general sense: Thursday nights are terrible. The play is scrappy, players get injured far more frequently, the fixture has been fairly poor.

cody

The NFL is in a tough spot there, not entirely of their own making. The Sports Broadcasting Act states that they can’t compete with College or High School football over there, which are traditionally played on Saturday and Friday nights respectively.

arwon

That’s so alien.

cody

Basically it comes from anti-trust areas. The main reason they offer Thursday Night Football is that it is the most palatable of a bad set of options to fixture 16(ish) games a week. The AFL does not have the same set of restrictions.

arwon

Along with playing in London.

cody

Yeah, the NFL has gone ahead with international expansion – with games in Canada, Mexico and the UK now.

arwon

The equivalent here is playing games in NZ to get an 11am AEST timeslot.

cody

I think for the NFL the conversation is a touch more complex – it has shown an intention to expanding to at least two of those three markets in the past, and only the London option gives them the extra timeslot. I think in Trump’s America the Mexico option is probably off the table, lest an insane twitter war commences.

cody

Do you see the optimal AFL schedule as having one game in each “slot”, or something different? (Slots could be Thursday 7pm, Friday 7pm, Saturday 1pm, 4pm, 7pm, Sunday 2pm, 5pm)

arwon

I’m not sure they all need to be separated, no.

ryanbuckland

I would probably prefer more separation, but I don’t see it as necessary. I mean what you’ve outlined there Cody would probably ruin my life.

arwon

Avoiding overlap certainly shouldn’t be a high priority.

ryanbuckland

Yeah, it’s a nice to have as far as I’m concerned but not a have to have.

cody

On a related note, Judd had another idea – double Friday night games. Thoughts?

arwon

At this stage we seem to just be at ideas for the sake of it. What does this resolve or improve? Is he just trying to keep Carlton on Friday nights by making an off Broadway spot for them? Just go play Sunday night til you’re good, mate.

ryanbuckland

It’s certainly an idea for the sake of it haha. That’s Judd’s (ghostwriter’s) speciality this year. But as far as The Tao of Judd goes, this one isn’t so bad. I guess the thinking is Thursday night football is good (which is in the eye of the beholder) but because of the limits on days break it’s not possible to have one each week.

arwon

Certainly compared to his efforts masquerading as a freelance endocrinologist it’s pretty harmless.

ryanbuckland

Two Friday night games has been raised a few times recently.

cody

The interesting thing is that Judd’s ghosty has seemingly stolen this one from somewhere else too. Anyone want to have a guess where from?

ryanbuckland

Bigfooty?

cody

The NRL.

ryanbuckland

Haha and that’s not mentioned at all in the piece is it.

cody

From 2007 on the NRL has shown two games a week on Friday night, with the second game being replayed after the first on FTA. This year they have also started year-round Thursday Night Football.

ryanbuckland

Indeed.

arwon

6pm starts… It’s dreadful stuff.

cody

It is exactly Judd’s Ghosty’s suggestion.

ryanbuckland

Hahaha. 6pm is too early. They could start a little earlier than 7:50 one would assume though.

cody

Yep – some weeks it is two timeslots, in the past it was two simultaneous games. An NRL game has a run time between 100 and 120 minutes – a fair whack shorter than an AFL game. Despite both notionally having the same amount of playing time – 80 minutes.

ryanbuckland

Judd’s suggesting the two games could overlap though isn’t he?

cody

Yeah, at the same time I think, which the NRL has done in the past (and occasionally still does). The NRL gets around the overlap by often putting a QLD hosted game with a NSW hosted game, with the home states carrying their own fixture. If the AFL did the same, it would be the only workable solution (surely). A Victorian game and an interstate game.

ryanbuckland

Yeah I’d think that would work (if it’s something that were to happen). It would probably help lift 7s FTA ratings because it would help them optimise their offer in two or three markets.

cody

I think it would provide a short term boost to something that may not be necessarily broken, but also to provide a long term improvement.

ryanbuckland

It comes back to Sean’s point though: is there a problem here, or is it just a balloon to be left to float into the stratosphere?’Things are never as bad, or as good, as they appear to be.

cody

There’s a forum, and a handful of forum threads, that track this stuff with a bit of an obsession, and a heavy dose of code warz.

TV ratings always suffer when there are sort of big events that impact it – read the Commonwealth Games and the Royal Wedding. The biggest drop in ratings was seen in Melbourne and Adelaide, which are also the two markets that most often show games on the main channel, and were subsequently bumped to 7Mate during the Commonwealth Games.

Like with any sort of reliable measure, you have to always consider environmental impacts when looking at raw data. If you do that, you can surmise that the AFL ratings are probably flat as compared with last year.

ryanbuckland

Exactly.

I still think there’s something to be said for the fact football can still draw around half a million people to a TV screen to watch the same thing at the same time. Everything is so fragmented now. Craig Little’s piece in The Guardian last Monday was a very strong contribution to this discussion IMO.

arwon

Haven’t seen that.

ryanbuckland

The crux of it was footy just isn’t what is was as a cultural touchstone, it’s a form of entertainment for most people now. Which means viewership is more subject to tastes and preferences.

arwon

Ah OK. I guess that’s true of most things under the atomising effects of late capitalism.

cody

I think it’s partly due to increased media choice certainly. Casual viewers have a far greater ability to chose something that they would prefer to watch. About 20 years ago most of Australia had 5 (or less) TV stations to pick from, and outside of that not much else. Even five years ago Streaming services were barely a thing. Even YouTube isn’t much more than a decade old.

ryanbuckland

For sure. It’s the reason Tim Worner was so forward in his comments earlier in the month. He knows without live sport free to air networks are in strife. They merely become a means to deliver sensationalist news and reality TV.

cody

Yeah, FTA networks are rapidly pivoting and diversifying themselves (think the multichannels). Sport has to play a part in that.

arwon

I miss the GAA.

cody

BTW, I normally love the writing of Little, but I didn’t necessarily agree with his core thesis in that piece.

I think the key reason that football doesn’t have a strong a place as the cultural heart of society is that it only had it by default. Australian society has changed a lot in the past few decades, and for the better. More people consume football than they ever had before, both in person and remotely. But more importantly, more people than ever before don’t consume it.

ryanbuckland

I hadn’t thought about it that way. And I think you’re likely right.

cody

When my grandparents (literally) stepped off the boat in Australia post-WWII, there was little choice but to be interested in the local game. My grandmother married a VFL player, and the other side became mad Collingwood fans (the less said about that the better). Due to the cultural environment of the time, they had little to no opportunity to pursue previous hobbies or passtimes. Football was Australian culture by default, probably up until the 70s or 80s.

arwon

Similar story with TV as monoculture more generally. You couldn’t even record and replay stuff til around then. A couple of channels and that was what was available.

cody

Yeah, if you lived in the country, a couple of channels and the ABC on radio is pretty much what you got.

arwon

Even in the 2000s I think it was still just the ABC and a composite commercial channel in the North West.

cody

Tasmania still only has two commercial channels, plus a third composite channel.

We have strayed *a long way* from a fixturing discussion.

ryanbuckland

Hahaha it’s all important. It gets at why the zeitgeist is the zeitgeist.

arwon

The fragmented cultural landscape of modern telecommunications and lack of unifying collective institutions typical of modern capitalism are intimately related to fixtures though!

They’re key underlying factors to what fanbases are and will be. Probably goes well beyond whether Carlton play on Fridays. And of course it’s why yelling “tradition” is a bit hollow. Traditions are dead unless they’ve proven useful and then… are they really still traditions?

cody

Australian Football was largely stagnant (publicly) for decades. Each state had its own competition, and its own way of doing things. That time is done. What is more useful is discussing *what* ideas are good and worth keeping, and what are trash and worth sending to Juddy’s ghostwriter.

arwon

I feel like, as with the rules discussion, we maybe lack clear problem identification or a way to benchmark. Ratings are down, okay. Fine. That’s the problem identified. But what are the causes and at what level should they be? Are they even down relative to what I assume is a declining total TV audience?

ryanbuckland

🎯

cody

Not really. And again, when you factor in that about a quarter of the season has been severely impacted, not at all.

arwon

So this is another vibe thing where professional pundits talk themselves into a crisis.

cody

I am about to utter the words I hate the most, and I want to place a qualifier on the points on which I say this (and that I strongly disagree with the rest).

arwon

Oooh.

cody

Robbo might be right (to an extremely small degree).

“You know what happens? We have bloody s**t incidents and people going after Alex Rance and Buddy Franklin for diving,” he said.

“If we had every player talking, we would have more stories from the players in the media. But we don’t get players talking and so the story becomes ‘did Buddy dive?’ and it’s just a crap discussion.”

arwon

In vino veritas lol.

cody

The correct bit here is the media cycle focuses around “crap discussions”, and Robbo (as Chief Footy Writer at the biggest footy paper in town) is the most guilty of the lot.

The issue is that footy shifts papers and drives stations like 3AW, SEN and Macquarie Sport, but there’s isn’t a dramatic increase in the amount of *actual information* to couple the rise in outlets.

Players aren’t giving any less access (from what I have seen). They still do midweek interviews with media outlets, pre and post game discussions on camera and radio. They still turn up on footy shows.

arwon

Whenever I’m in Melbourne I chuck on radio there and my head spins at the volume of shit they talk.

cody

Yep – when your format is “footy and sport”, you still need to fill the airtime/column inches somehow.

arwon

I guess without Foxtel and living in Canberra we’re insulated from that constant gyre of padding and nonsense.

ryanbuckland

I’m on the phone for ten minutes. And I come back to this:

Robbo might be right (to an extremely small degree)

😮

Robbo is directionally correct though I think. But his lack of self awareness is, as ever, breathtaking.

arwon

Maybe it was [REDACTED].

cody

Fuck, I hear the libel lawyers now.

cody

*two people typing*

libel

*silence*

ryanbuckland

Heh. I get where he’s coming from – the “state sanctioned media” quip is a dink at AFL Media, the AFL Players Association’s content arm, and the various player-first outlets popping up.

These places get preferential access to the players. Because they -are- the players. Robbo and co don’t get stories handed to them. Or at least as frequently.

arwon

Yeah I’d argue the Fox-Seven nexus is at least para-state.

cody

Yeah, added to the fact that the AFL didn’t want to concede that AFL Media employed media members until FWC told them that, yep they were. They instead tried to claim that they were comms staff.

ryanbuckland

Hahaha that’s amazing. Matt Cowgill had a good tweet about this yesterday.

implies the only 2 types of stories that can be written are either: stories that rely on access to players, or stories that are beat ups of the "Buddy dived" variety. — Matt Cowgill (@MattCowgill) June 18, 2018

Robbo and his kin reckon there are two types of stories (that aren’t match previews or reports): stories that rely on player access, and stories that are beat ups of player-related matters. Which is so untrue.

But it perhaps helps explain this negative death spiral we seem to be in from a mainstream media perspective. If there’s two types of stories, and the mainstream media is getting less of the player access ones and is resorting to more of the beat up ones, then we’re getting more beat up stories as a share of total stories in those places.

cody

Yep – the rebalance hasn’t happened yet to the analysis front.

ryanbuckland

As an aside I think Fairfax’s AFL coverage has gone in a much different direction to News Limited this year, to its benefit.

cody

Agreed re: Fairfax.

It’s the divide between the emotive and rational drivers that is hard to balance. The reasons why you want a football team to win, or another to lose, and understanding why they have/will do so.

ryanbuckland

Yeah. So circling back to the fixture, News Limited pushed really hard on the idea of the 17-5 fixture last season. With something of a vested interest. That talk has gone quiet for now. Do you think it’ll remain that way?

arwon

I hope so, it’s an insane idea, probably the worst to have ever been treated remotely seriously.

cody

I know you are a fan of it Ryan, so I’ll try to be as gentle as I can.

ryanbuckland

Hahaha I used to be.

I wrote pretty extensively on it a few years ago, but I have grown more sceptical of it.

cody

I think in previous international experiments of the idea – the Scottish Premiership, the K-League – there is an extreme drop in interest for teams who hit the bottom tier of the split, even with relegation in place. Almost always you would end up with more dead rubbers, and a lower total attendance than the current model.

arwon

It takes the inherent property of ranked post season entry, which is that the cutoffs sometimes create meaningless games because teams can’t move up or down… and adds more cutoffs which means more meaningless games.

ryanbuckland

Yeah it just shifts the line.

cody

I think a more helpful discussion is around what happens with expansion to 20 (or eventually 22) teams.

ryanbuckland

Now that’s something I have a lot of thoughts on. But it might be for another time?

cody

I think we should have a standalone chat on this in the coming weeks. But I think with an extra game a week, that’s the time that expansion to Thursday nights needs to be discussed.

arwon

Spoiler: put a team in Canberra lol.

cody

If you have 10 or 11 games each round, you probably need that extra time slot (if you are a broadcaster).

arwon

Or Monday I guess. People were oddly sour on that versus Thursday.

cody

Thursday, not the Monday night that has been rejected. NRL tried Mondays, and turns out people were like the Boomtown Rats on them.

ryanbuckland

Or… you don’t play 22 games. With 20 teams you play 20 game. So you have a 200 game home and away season, versus 198 right now.

cody

Hmmm – interesting. I think the AFLPA would be fans, but the broadcasters would probably be against it. Rolling byes to fill the gaps?

ryanbuckland

Yeah, because the idea of expansion is to have more games. And yeah you’d have an extra bye or two.

cody

Like the NFL I guess, where there isn’t a fixed time for byes for each team, instead four teams get it per week.

arwon

More teams without more games reduces the equalisation funding per club. Possibly hard to sustain given you’d be adding more minnows like North or GWS.

cody

Expansion probably won’t happen until 2021 or 2022 at the earliest. Which would leave at least one year to see if the ratings stabilise outside of a big event year (2019 is pretty thin on). The rest of that Judd piece is bad though.

ryanbuckland

Yeah shorter games is a dumb idea.

arwon

There’s actually another influence on crowds and maybe ratings which is how the big Victorian clubs are doing.





We posted about it a couple of years ago. The 2007 to 2010 period was peak crowds, not sure how ratings went. Having mostly Vic teams at the top pumped up the appeal of a lot of games there. 2012 to 15 it was mostly Hawthorn, Geelong and interstate teams at the top and Vic crowds started declining. Even now the ladder is still less Victorian at the top than that peak period.

cody

As football continues to grow nationally, and with better facilities in WA and SA, I think that trend might slide a little. Attendances have grown 3.8% so far this year on last year, and are starting to approach that peak period again. A lot of that is the Perth Stadium factor.

arwon

I’m not 100% sure if ratings movements match crowds though.

cody

Yeah, and it’s hard to adjust for external events and the general slump in ratings.

arwon

Adelaide had similar bounce and has settled into a level higher than at the old ground

cody

Here is a summary of crowds by year, courtesy of AFL Tables.

arwon

West Coast crowds against interstate sides are the highest in the comp this year, can’t see that changing any time soon Unless the stadium sucks. Does the stadium suck, Ryan?

ryanbuckland

The stadium does not suck. It is freaking expensive. As it was always going to be.

arwon

Yeah but Perthlings are rich so…

ryanbuckland

But so long as there are two teams and 22 parcels of football in a year, I can’t see the demand/supply balance shifting at all. Particularly if Fremantle make good on the positive signs they’ve shown this year, and if West Coast has joined the “never terrible” class with Hawthorn, Geelong and Sydney.

The stadium hasn’t really had a great set of game times yet either.

arwon

It must rankle the AFL that the “never terrible” teams are from a non-footy city, a provincial town, and partly in Launceston. As opposed to being Collingwood or someone who can pull a bigger audience.

cody

If you could decide the perfect fixture for you, on the scheduling of weekly games, aside from commercial considerations, what would it look like?

(imagining that your own team isn’t a consideration, i.e. fan neutral)

arwon

(Sydney at 4pm Saturday)

cody

Yeah, nah Sean…

arwon

I think it is pretty close to now. Maybe a Sunday night game to watch while sorting out dinner.

ryanbuckland

About half of the year like this (all in EST)

Thursday: 7:30pm

Friday: 7:00pm

Friday: 9:00pm (played interstate)

Saturday: 1:45pm

Saturday: 4:40pm

Saturday: 7:35pm

Sunday: 11:00am 🔥🔥🔥

Sunday: 1:55pm

Sunday: 4:50pm

And the rest of the year broadly as we have now in most weeks without a Thursday, but I’d spread the Saturdays and Sundays out with a morning start.

cody

Sunday morning is interesting – taking on what remains of the Church.

When I go to the footy, by far my favourite time to do so is a Saturday arvo, closely followed by a Sunday arvo. It’s also my favourite time to watch on TV. So if the TV deal remains the same, why not duplicate the Saturday and Sunday arvo slots? I think the Friday night split *could* work, and has done alright in the NRL.

arwon

More Saturday and Sunday arvo games could probably be done with segmented free to air audiences, ie for different markets by state.

cody

In a perfect world I would have:

two Friday night games (one FTA)

three Saturday arvo (two early, one late) (one FTA)

one Saturday night (one FTA)

three Sunday arvo (two early, one late) (one FTA).

If you need to get an extra FTA game, grab an extra arvo game. This might hurt Fox, but it would likely improve FTA ratings.

cody

Btw, apparently pick 1 is on the table for Kawhi and the Suns are now the favourite for him.

arwon

Interesting, I guess he’d be a handy replacement for Lynch.

ryanbuckland

He’d be useful as a defensive forward for sure.

(Editor’s note: the conversation only devolved from here).

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