Image: Natasha Morello
They say there’s no such thing as a free lunch, but NPL fans had a free football feast when Bulleen Lions and South Melbourne played out an exciting 2-2 draw at the Veneto Club, both in front of a bumper crowd at the gate and via online streaming of the contest.
Football Federation Victoria is exclaiming that the stream smashed viewership records, with more than 15,000 viewers of over 30 seconds – double that of last year’s showpiece event, the NPL grand final – along with the reach of one million on Facebook.
A thrilling conclusion, coupled with a crowd well over four figures at the game, translated into a worthy viewing product especially for a second-tier competition that continues to grow in reputation with ambitious clubs and increased professionalism despite seldom receiving regular mainstream attention.
Streaming the game also quashed notions that it would cannibalise otherwise-paying audiences who rock up to the game to spend their hard earned.
Rather, it was a way to grab attention when otherwise attention isn’t always given from the outside.
“Tens of thousands of viewers have seen a full ground and an exciting game in a professional and well presented online broadcast provided by the FFV media team in conjunction with NMS Media’s Nathan Sakellariou,” the FFV’s Anthony Grima said.
With Facebook algorithms, the match would have reached audiences who may not have known, or even previously been interested in, NPL football, through post shares and likes. While those without pay TV obviously have no direct access to such football, and even free-to-air football can be avoided by not selecting a particular channel with the game on, for many people scrolling through their Facebook news feeds on a Monday night it would have been unavoidable to come across this video stream.
Obviously many would have kept scrolling, but even fleeting interest can lead to an enduring relationship with a product.
“To have 1 million reach on the match post shows the power of live streaming and what it can do to raise the profile of FFV’s competitions and commercial partners,” Grima continued.
“It shows the enthusiasm for Victorian football at present, which is also being reflected in the state’s rapidly growing participation numbers and commercial investment in the game.”
In a summer of discontent for Australian football with governance and expansion issues coming to the fore, the NPL continues to come into the spotlight as people grow tired of a top-tier competition’s 10-team format in which teams play each other three times and the underperforming sides have no consequence via lack of relegation. Interest plateaus as the same narratives are exhausted.
With a plethora of sporting and entertainment products all competing for a slice of the growing consumer pie, cost becomes an incremental barrier at any level when there are many other options available to audiences.
For A-League fans, the future is clear. Fox Sports’ six-year commitment recently inked means fans know where to go to get their A-League fix and Facebook won’t be it. But the enthusiasm with which state federations are currently pushing their second-tier product raises questions about the FFA’s willingness to experiment with their own less-publicised leagues, the National Youth League and W-League.
There is no doubt a shake-up is needed after a summer where challengers in the market, particularly AFL Women’s and cricket’s Women’s Big Bash League, are being legitimately talked about as competitors to the A-League by respected members of the established mainstream media.
While AFL and cricket have embraced the notion of streaming what content they have that networks won’t broadcast, football at a national level by contrast is vanishing.
Only the National Youth League grand final was available live to fans this summer, with the entire home-and-away season preceding it not shown anywhere. Similarly, the W-League was also a difficult product to find on a weekly basis for fans, with three games out of every four not available to watch live anywhere.
Monday night’s NPL broadcast was by no means the first stone cast by a state federation to show the ease of access to social media streaming. Victoria, South Australia, NSW/Northern NSW and Queensland all live streamed multiple games on various platforms in 2016, with Facebook the most common platform for men’s and women’s matches.
So while this summer proved a comprehensive defeat for both the NYL and W-League in its battle to be visible and accessible for fans, winter offers new promise that perhaps this summer’s lessons will be learned in the coming year, and the NPL may be leading the way.