Depending on your viewpoint, Brisbane Roar are either the victims of terrible scheduling or the beneficiaries of a chance to bounce back quickly from defeat.

No A-League club suffers as much from Football Federation Australia’s overwhelming Sydney and Melbourne-centric focus as the Roar.

Perth Glory are largely forgotten by the east-coast media but tend to use that to fuel their fans’ parochialism, while Adelaide United often seem preoccupied with battling elements within their own South Australian government.

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And neither the Glory nor the Reds seem to suffer from the vagaries of the A-League fixture list quite like Brisbane Roar do.

The FFA are quick to point to the problem of scheduling fixtures in venues shared with other sports as one reason for the fixture list’s many quirks, but that doesn’t explain why Brisbane Roar followed up a home game against Western Sydney Wanderers on Friday night with another one against Sydney FC tonight.

It was a similar story last season, when the Roar needed an injury-time winner from Brett Holman to see off the Wanderers on a Saturday night before recording a scoreless draw against the Sky Blues the following Friday. Even then there was almost a week between fixtures, not three nights.

To be fair, the tight turnaround is – seemingly – all part of the FFA’s ‘Summer Football Festival’ of 37 matches, including the W-League, across 25 days.

“This is football’s Christmas present to families,” said David Gallop in a blink-and-you-missed-it press release put out just before Christmas.



“Over the holidays most parents are wondering what they can do with their kids that is fun and affordable. The answer is to take them to see the A-League and W-League.”

A noble sentiment. Unfortunately, with Big Bash League tickets substantially cheaper than their A-League counterparts, casual sports-watching families have already voted with their feet and are attending the cricket instead.

It wouldn’t be right to talk about scheduling without mentioning the BBL, even if some A-League fans would prefer to bury their heads in the sand and pretend the competition didn’t exist.

While no-one would ever admit it, you can bet someone from Cricket Australia simply printed the A-League fixture list when it came out and then scheduled a BBL game up against the football at every opportunity. Or perhaps it’s just a coincidence that so many A-League games seem to kick off in the same city on the same night as BBL matches.

And it’s the success of the BBL at drawing midweek crowds in the middle of school holidays that prompted the FFA to come up with the Summer Football Festival in the first place.

The problem is that it smacks of reacting to a rival competition instead of coming up with a clear and consistent marketing strategy of the A-League’s own.

And by – yet again – aiming the campaign exclusively at families, the FFA once again fails to acknowledge the dedicated club members and active supporters who make up the bulk of loyal A-League fans.



So it is that Brisbane Roar supporters are rewarded for their attendance at last Friday night’s disappointing 2-0 defeat to the Wanderers by being asked to back up again on a Monday night.

And Sydney FC fans, for their part, look at a fixture many would no doubt liked to have attended and think, “Maybe next season”.

The A-League fixture list is a hot mess, and the Summer Football Festival hasn’t helped.

From scheduling Melbourne Victory and Central Coast’s 1-1 draw in an open-air stadium in Geelong on Saturday afternoon under a scorching summer sun to refusing to accommodate Brisbane Roar’s upcoming AFC Champions League commitments and neglecting to include a Sunday game this weekend, the fixture list remains another of the A-League’s bugbears.

And it’s worth talking about right now, because it’s having an impact as we speak.