Here is some free advice for Brisbane Roar. The Brisbane Bullets are back, and they’re ready to cannibalise your support.

When Football Federation Australia was announcing that Brisbane Roar’s upcoming FFA Cup clash with Perth Glory would take place at Ballymore, the National Basketball League was putting the finishing touches on its impending season launch.

Any illusion that Brisbane’s return to the competition wasn’t a big deal was shattered by the NBL handing the Bullets a plum draw for the 2016-17 season.

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And several of their early fixtures clash with Roar games.

While the Roar kick off the new season with a glamorous showdown against Melbourne Victory on October 7, the Bullets get the jump on the A-League outfit by tipping off the NBL season a night earlier against Perth.

And the Bullets’ next two home games – both in the heart of the city at the Convention Centre in South Bank – coincide with two away games for the Roar in Newcastle and Gosford.

That’s not to imply that sports fans in Brisbane will suddenly turn their backs on the Roar simply because the Bullets are playing at home.

But if Roar fans wanted a glimpse of what a concerted marketing campaign looks like, they need only look to the revamped Bullets.

Rather than opening the season at Convention Centre in South Bank, the Bullets will instead take on defending champions Perth at the 11,000-capacity Brisbane Entertainment Centre in Boondall.



And NBL supremo Larry Kestelman – the entrepreneur who paid $7 million to take majority control of the league in May 2015 – clearly thinks they’ll draw a crowd.

“The Bullets are a big part of our year and we hope it’s a blockbuster game in front of 10,000 to 11,000 people,” Kestelman told The Courier-Mail at the season launch.

All of which is important, from an A-League perspective, because the Roar offer little in terms of marketing and receive only limited coverage from the city’s media.

They’d better hope their ‘membership drive’ at Ballymore on August 10 is a success, because not for the first time, their off-field fragility makes it difficult for the Roar to retain fans – let alone attract new ones.

It’s all well and good for the well-heeled Melbourne City to sign Tim Cahill, but if any club needed a big-name marquee star, it’s arguably Brisbane.

It’s hard not to feel that the Sydney-based FFA are largely oblivious to the Roar’s ongoing struggles, with new A-League head Greg O’Rourke wasting little time in claiming that expansion is “inevitable”.

But with confusion remaining over who is actually in charge of the Roar – current managing director Daniel Cobb is presumably still finalising his consortium to buy the club from the Bakrie Group – perhaps valour is the better part of discretion when it comes to discussing football in Brisbane.

Staying on message is something most A-League clubs could probably do more of.



A handful of Red and Black Bloc members took matters into their own hands late last week, releasing a merchandise video that was part faux-hooliganism, part existential nightmare.

A more embarrassing video you’d struggle to see – it looked like the sort of thing a bunch of pre-teen sociology students would create if they’d just discovered a website called Hools R Us and the ‘record’ function on their iPhones – and it was impossible not to guffaw throughout the utterly cringe-worthy production.

Still, the RBB have at least succeeded where our own administrators often fail and managed to get us talking about the A-League by using guerrilla marketing – dreadful pun intended.

Marketing of any kind is something Brisbane Roar desperately need in the build-up to the 2016-17 A-League campaign.

In a city in which the Brisbane Broncos dominate the sporting landscape – leaving the rest of Brisbane’s professional clubs scrambling around for coverage – the last thing the Roar need is another major competitor.