Part I: The Recent History of Match Attendance
The finish to the AFL regular season last year was fantastic, even if your team’s chances of making the finals were already zero. All final round matches were “in play” and it came down to the final match of the regular season for the top 8 to be cemented.
The permutations through July and August were also exciting to contemplate. Optimistic, I had the Dees finishing fourth (they had just beaten West Coast in Perth for the first time in 13 years). We now know how that ended. They struggled to win another game and missed the final 8 by less than a percentage point.
It did seem like a great season but was this because so many regular seasons prior were duds?
For several years, it seemed to me that footy just didn't have that same spark. Part of it was the play with more rolling mauls, 36 players in one half of the ground, more press, more goals out the back, less lace out, more behind the stick. But footy is also about the anticipation of top sides going head to head, of upsets, comebacks, and matches "going down to the wire". This seemed to be lacking too and is also probably what made 2017 so great. It broke the excitement drought (unless you barrack for the Doggies of course).
Is there some factual evidence of the decline in the state of the competition prior to 2017? Am I the only one that thought there was a bit of stink about footy in the noughties? With some data from afltables.com, I've taken a look at various way one might assess the health of the competition.
Firstly, just to see whether perhaps there were others that thought the same, let's look at average match attendance. If footy was crap then surely the fans would stay at home. We see below that this was indeed the case, match attendance has not grown at all in recent times, falling from the heights of 2010.
Figure 1: Mean match attendance by season. Analysis commences in 1925 when Hawthorn, North Melbourne, and Footscray/Western Bulldogs joined the VFL to form a 12 team competition.
One thought here is that trends are merely an artefact of adding Greater Western Sydney (GWS) in 2012 and Gold Coast (GC) in 2011, teams located in non-traditional AFL states with small home grounds and even smaller support bases. This is certainly part of the reason. If we exclude GWS and GC matches, we do see that average match attendance has been reasonably steady since 2007.
Figure 2: Mean match attendance among different groups of teams by season.
However, what is also interesting is that attendances at matches between Victorian teams also fell away. After peaking at around 50,000 per match in 2011, the average attendance at matches between Victorian clubs went back to 41,000, down 17% by 2016. Maybe that’s why I was just not feeling it, cross-town rivalries were not what they used to be, and they weren't bringing the punters in.
If we take a look at attendances at matches between Victorian teams we see that attendance was actually down for most Victorian teams, Carlton and Essendon in particular. Average attendance between Carlton and other Victorian teams peaked in 2009 at 50,000 (and they finished 7th that year, then 8th, 5th, 10th, 8th, 13th, 18th, 14th). In 2016, attendance was down 29% to 36,000 compared to that peak in 2009. Their supporters aren’t as rusted on as one might expect.
For Essendon, their recent peak was in 2011 at 65,000 (they finished 8th in 2011, then 11th, 9th, 7th, 15th, 18th). In 2016, attendance was down 27% to 36,000 compared to that peak in 2011. Nothing like a drug scandal and most of your team suspended to keep the punters away.
Figure 3: Mean match attendance by season for each Victorian team. Loess smoothing applied.
At the hint of a upwards trajectory however, Essendon fans came back in a big way in 2017, to an average crowd of 46,000. Melbourne fans also returned to a level never seen before to 38,000 (2016 was 31,000). Richmond fans returned from an off year in 2016 up 6,000 to 47,000. Dogs fans basked in the premiership hangover, another 6,000 to 41,000. Saints and Carlton fans up 4,000 too.
Remarkably, there is only one team whose attendance has grown every year in the last 10 years, and that is Richmond. The supporters were onto something. Following a dip in 2004 when average attendance was 37,000 (and they were wooden spooners that year), attendance in 2017 is now 60% higher, almost 60,000 a match.
Victorian footy was back and this certainly played some role in why 2017 was a great season. In Part II, I'll look at the drivers of match attendance more generally, and this should give us some clues as to the state of the game in recent times.