A-LEAGUE boss Greg O’Rouke has defended the competition’s low-key launch for the new season, insistent that the league’s marketing budget had to be levied throughout the whole campaign.

With the kick-off of the new season just days away, players from all clubs were introduced at Port Melbourne Soccer Club this morning in a move designed to emphasise the competition’s desire to attract more grassroots players to games.

It contrasted with the glitz of last year’s “Yoshi” advertising campaign, which garnered plenty of attention but was wrapped up inside four weeks.

media_camera Players and fanbassadors at the 2017/18 A-League Season Launch. Picture: Getty Images

That featured 10-year-old Sydney schoolboy Yoshi being courted by all the A-League teams, before opting to support Melbourne City.

In this year’s version, each club has a so-called “fanbassador”, as Football Federation Australia aims to bridge the historic gap between the hundreds of thousands of children who play the game, and those who watch the A-League.

O’Rourke conceded that the A-League launch this year was more muted, but insisted it was a continuation of the “Yoshi” theme — this time designed to have longer-term impact.

media_camera A-League CEO Greg O'Rourke says they want a campaign with staying power. Picture: AAP

“We have gone with something that is true to ‘You’ve gotta have a team’ and true to the grassroots,” O’Rourke said.

“We’re trying to emphasise the connection to our grassroots participants, especially young people like our fanbassadors who don’t actually have a team (they support).

“They definitely don’t have an A-League team — they might have a team of a different code, so we need to bring them through.

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“We’ll be optimising our spend throughout the year on this campaign rather than spending an unbalanced amount of our resources on some big, flashy thing at the start of the year.

“That would look good for a couple of days but we want to build a sustained campaign that starts to bring people to the game. We want to bring people to watch games, and use our resources to do that for 27 rounds.”

FFA had been criticised last year for the absence of promotion once the “Yoshi” campaign had finished, and O’Rourke said that had been taken on board.

“The Yoshi campaign lasted a short amount of time, based on the resources we have,” he said. “It was a well-awarded campaign in the marketing industry, and we’ve kept with that theme. This is really phase two of the Yoshi idea.

“We realised that we need to make sure our games schedule and our marketing is a 31-week program. That’s why we’ve been true to the essence of it.”