SPORTS
TRENDS -
FOOTBALL FEVER
Australia
is football mad, with interest in rugby union and soccer rivalling the
traditional ‘big two’ codes of rugby league and Australian rules.
According
to the recently released Sweeney Sports Report survey 37% of
Australians are interested in rugby union, just short of league’s
39%. Fourteen years ago
only 15% of Australians had an interest in union, compared with 34% in
league.
Soccer is booming too from 28% 14 years ago to
47% today. The popularity
of Australian rules is also up, to 52%.
Clearly, soccer has benefited from last year’s World Cup
exposure and high-profile Australian players.
Martin Hirons, director of Sweeney Sports,
attributed rugby union’s rise to a combination of factors; a mix of
professionalism, Australia twice winning the Rugby World Cup, the
growth in sponsorship income, the recruitment of former league stars
and the rise in spending on grassroots development.
“There have been enormous changes to league,
too,” Hirons explains, “league reached a peak in the mid–‘90s,
and the pinnacle was around the time of the Tina Turner campaign. League was really marketing itself as a sport then
nationally, it was one of the first sports to do so. Then, all of a
sudden, Super league came in and destroyed the fabric of the game.
League must be wondering now where its growth is going to come
from.”
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The
Sweeney survey, conducted by Melbourne-based Sweeney Research,
measures the number of people interested in each sport not their level
of interest and so does not necessarily reflect actual attendance and
TV ratings. On both these counts, league and Australian rules
are still well ahead of their rivals.
Hirons said Australian rules remains “a success story of
Australian sport”, having expanded to a national competition while
maintaining solid crowd numbers.
“We’re not measuring passion,” Hirons adds, “passion is
about how often people go and how often they watch on TV.
Australians are still passionate about Aussie rules and rugby
league. It’s unusual
for many AFL attendances to be under 20,000.” Martin also expects this year’s Rugby World Cup
to push union ahead of league in next year’s survey. In other survey results, swimming is still the
number one sport in Australia with 59% (dropping 5% over the past
year) while cricket moved to second place with 57%, ahead of tennis
which dropped to 55%. As a cautionary note, Hirons concludes that
“basketball was saying a decade ago it as going to be Australia’s
No 1 sport by 2000. Today,
the bottom has fallen out of the game.”
For
details contact Martin Hirons, Director, Sweeney Sports.
This
article appeared in the June/July 2003 edition of the Australasian
Leisure Management magazine.
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