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The Trident - Awarded to posters who do a hell of a lot on the Dees board
Well no. It had no bearing to my post
Once control is given to the clubs, they will vote to axe the salary cap and do all sorts of weird s**t that will give monetary power to a few teams all from Sydney and Melbourne, and severely compromise the A-League. There are some seriously dopey arguments floating around the soccer community right now about promotion, relegation, ending the cap, competing with Europe, etc, all exacerbated by this FIFA ruling. Should this happen with a brand new Tasmanian side onfield, it will take no time at all for that team and a few other non-big city teams to fold, no matter how much interest they generate at home at the start...
Can't verify this either, it comes under "don't follow soccer but I do regularly look at how things in general are going in my old home state", but I do believe they were getting some decent numbers for A-League games at York Park and wherever they played in Hobart. Tassie has had a recent history of this - there were some well attended NRL practice matches at North Hobart, and they got 4000 to show up to the Romania v Namibia rugby world cup match in 2003, plus there have been some other events up north in particular where the locals have made a strong showing...I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if these figures were true...
"Massive" is a relative term. In terms of club operations, sure, millions is heaps. But in terms of AFL business, its bugger all. I'm a footy socialist, greater good for the many through sharing and all that. It escapes the notice of many that the teams regularly under the pump are the ones often delivering the product sold to the corporates - the contributions of the Big Four, for example, have been outshone regularly by the Dogs, Saints and the Roos, particularly in the late 90's era when big tv rights became an important factor. The biggest handouts by far are for the two new sides, but without them the rights wouldn't have gone up by a billion dollars last time. All 18 clubs deliver and contribute to the product, so I have absolutely no problem with the notion of forking out a couple of million if North or whoever need it. It's their money - they earned it, it goes into the pool, and then they draw on it. The product is diminished if any of those teams aren't there, the sum being greater than the parts and other great cliches. So the AFL must be a shining example of socialism at its finest, because it will never be the NFL...and if you axe teams, the fans won't jump ship - it's not the same as driving to the next suburb for Maccas...
Biggest handouts in sport in Australia, so its relative I guess.
Relatively yuuge.
It would actually be interesting to look up the relative amounts paid out by all the major sports organisations.
You can't hammer them mercilessly for that. A century ago, the business requirements for a VFL club looked nothing like they do today. If the rules of today applied to the Hawks of 1938, they'd be a forgotten blip - alongside every other team in the comp! You need to get to the mid-80's to see it get serious, and then maybe a decade afterwards to see actual results giving us meaningful data set against the environment as set up by the modern AFL...unlike the yanks, who were playing for money 100 years ago when they didn't even have a league or standardised rules and know everything about it, we're only just emerging from our apprenticeship into the world of professional football...Richmond were taking money from kids who'd raided actual piggy banks as late as 1990...
If you don't understand the history of a subject you will never understand it fully...
No, it doesn't matter how the league is set up, or what clubs are in it, finances are based on the median. In an era of equalisation, some clubs operate above the median, and will be `taxed`, some will be around the median, and some below, and be `supported`. If you got rid of the 4 poorest clubs tomorrow, and replaced them with richer clubs (if that was possible), you just move the median up. You are still going to have a handful of clubs needing assistance to reach that median (its what a median is).
Not sure where you get that idea from but its not on the agenda. The rules regarding marque players will be cleared up, along with player movement, but the salary cap with remain.
Canberra won't work, its the most competitive market in the country for sport with Raiders, Brumbies and whilst GWS works for 4 games a year, 11 is a very different equation. To do it they would need to increase the capacity of Manuka Oval from the existing 15,000. Cricket is upgrading it to be of international standard so it can host test matches, but the Canberra government is not interested in increasing capacity beyond 20,000, this would mean the AFL would have to fund it.
