midfielder
Well-Known Member
Well written from the age about the Socceroo as a brand and are they the nations leading sports team..
http://www.theage.com.au/news/sport/soccer/so-just-how-far-can-this-crazy-affair-go/2009/10/13/1255195784825.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1
http://www.theage.com.au/news/sport/soccer/so-just-how-far-can-this-crazy-affair-go/2009/10/13/1255195784825.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1
So, just how far can this crazy affair go?
Martin Blake
October 14, 2009
THE Socceroos are the flavour of the month, year, decade. There were 40,000 people shoe-horned into the Sydney Football Stadium last Saturday night for what amounted to an exhibition match between Australia and Holland, and while they have not sold all the tickets for tonight's Asian Cup qualifier against Oman, there will be plenty of fans at the Docklands singing the national anthem.
In any case, it's the Asian Cup rather than the World Cup, and it's Oman rather than Holland or Brazil (the Omanis are ranked 74th, compared to Australia's chest-bursting, all-time-high 14th in the FIFA world rankings). But it begs the question: could the Socceroos be this country's most popular national team? Either now, or down the track?
For 100 years, the Australian cricket team has held this mantle, for cricket burrows into the consciousness of people in every corner of the country, unlike the football codes.
Five years ago it would have been unthinkable that there could be a change. Now along comes soccer, well-organised, tapping into the exponential growth of the game worldwide, with a competitive national men's team as the shop window and another World Cup to compete in next year. Tim Cahill and Harry Kewell and Lucas Neill and Mark Schwarzer are household names.
Cricket stands as the only genuine competitor to soccer in this stakes. Rugby union has not made enough ground in the southern states, rugby league is not much of a world game anyway, hockey and netball have not captured the imagination on a big enough scale, and swimming is mostly an individual sport, even if they call themselves a team at the Olympic Games.
According to Sweeney Research, the Melbourne-based company that does the most credible sports surveys on an annual basis, 28 per cent of Australians consider the national cricket team to be their favourite. That figure, taken last summer, compares with just 10 per cent for the Socceroos and rugby union's Wallabies.
But two years ago, a little closer to the Socceroos' climb into the round of 16 at the World Cup, 16 per cent of Australians rated them No. 1 among national teams. Moreover, Australian cricket is coming off 15 years where it has dominated the game around the world, has lost a handful of the best players it has ever seen, and now sits merely in the pack of good cricket teams. Australian cricket has a huge job ahead of it to remain so popular.
Sweeney's annual sports survey published in December last year had 51 per cent of Australians expressing interest in cricket as a sport (as opposed to the national cricket team), against 50 per cent for soccer. But in the 16-29 male demographic, soccer was more popular (59 per cent to 55). The Gemba group, a sports management and marketing company with offices in Melbourne, Sydney and Hong Kong, surveys Australians as to their awareness of national teams. On their last figures, the Australian cricket team was running at 87.5 per cent, just ahead of the Socceroos (84.6) in awareness. Gemba also surveys the ''likeability'' of the teams. On this scale, the cricket team was at 34.2 per cent of respondents, just ahead of the Socceroos' 27.8 per cent.
Sweeney's general manager Todd Deacon sees cricket remaining ahead of the game, largely because of its accessibility over long periods of time, by comparison with the Socceroos dropping in and then flitting back to European leagues. ''I think it's a real stretch [for soccer]. That's my view, unless the Socceroos reached a final in the World Cup. That would change everything. If you look at where we've been popular in sports, we tend to be the best in the world, and it's a long stretch for Australia to be the best in the world in football.''
Yet the World Cup is less than a year away and even Deacon acknowledges that the Socceroos have spikes in popularity that are virtually unmatchable in this country. When Australia played Italy for a place in the quarter-finals at the 2006 World Cup, there were 3.5 million Australians watching on television at 3am.
At Football Federation Australia, they are well aware that the Socceroos have become a powerful brand, in the modern vernacular. ''We certainly don't sit around here with a ratings ladder, asking where they sit,'' said John O'Sullivan, FFA's chief commercial officer. ''But we certainly think they've become one of the iconic national teams of Australia over the last three years.''
Cricket professes not to be concerned. Mike McKenna, Cricket Australia's marketing general manager, pointed to the numbers. ''It's simple,'' said McKenna. ''We've got 130-odd years of history of the cricket team representing Australia. They've done it successfully, and generally in the right way. They perform on the field and off the field. The Socceroos have attention focused on them at times because they play rarely in Australia. We don't have the peaks that the Socceroos do, particularly with the World Cup every four years.''
McKenna puts forward the room-for-everyone argument. ''In Australia we've got room in our hearts and minds for all sorts of sports. It's not a matter of only choosing one team to support and the rest fall away. You might have a greater passion for one than the other. That's where we're successful: we have a really large, passionate fan base. The Socceroos have too, but it's smaller.''
Things have changed, though, since the 2006 World Cup. O'Sullivan remembers futile attempts to promote a series between Australia and Turkey in 2004 when Kewell and Mark Viduka were not playing. ''Back then, if you didn't have Harry Kewell or Mark Viduka in the side, it was seen as a B-grade team. What 2006 did was bring to light the other players like Lucas and Tim.''
Ang Postecoglou, television commentator, former youth coach and soccer legend, still has to pinch himself when he contemplates what has happened to soccer here.
He admits it would be ''a big call'' to think of the Socceroos as being more popular than a national cricket team. But then again, the game has come so far. ''Even in year 2000, it was in everyone's perception a second-rate sport and our national team wasn't treated with the same respect as other national teams,'' he said. ''Did I believe it would happen? Yeah I thought at some stage. Did I think it would happen this quickly? No way, and not to this extent. It's been amazing.''
The lessons of 2006 are clear. The cricket team has reached out to people for years, but the Socceroos have a pulling power that is socially broader, more reflective of 21st-century Australia. As the Sydney social commentator Tanveer Ahmed observed during the last World Cup: ''It's safe to say that one sport has never before crossed social groups and ethnic communities, uniting the elderly immigrant man from Asia to the toddler from Alice Springs. Its stretch connects the banker in Martin Place to the farmer in north Queensland.''
