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ABC News
2 days ago
- Business
- ABC News
With numbers stagnating, here's how the league plans to increase AFLW crowds this year
The AFLW burst onto the scene nine years ago with the infamous inaugural lockout game at Prince's Park; over 24,000 filled the stands and thousands more were left outside the gates, unable to get in. Since then, the last three grand finals sold out, 53,034 people flooded Adelaide Oval for the 2019 grand final, 20,652 showed up for the inaugural Showdown in 2022, and the first meeting between Essendon and Hawthorn was forced to move to Docklands after such high demand. Yet crowds have dwindled the past few years, which saw just an average of 2,660 fans rocking up per home-and-away game last season. While this is largely due to inopportune time slots and venues — including a compressed fixture last season with Tuesday and Wednesday night matches and recent expansions diluting audiences — unsurprisingly, one of the AFL's main strategic aims this year is to grow AFLW attendance and fan bases. It also comes amid reports of the AFL telling all 18 clubs the women's game is losing $50 million a year. However, AFL executive general manager of strategy Walter Lee stressed the league was not worried about the long-term viability of the competition. "I want to reiterate, the competition is here to stay. We are investing, but it is here to stay," he said. "When you sort of take a 10-year vision around this kind of investment, this is no different from how we invest into Western Sydney [or] Gold Coast … It's long-term. It's trying to be visionary about it." So, here's how the league is aiming to get more bums on seats this season. Josh Bowler, AFL's head of strategy and scheduling, said this season had gone "back to a more traditional fixture structure" after trialling the compressed fixture last season, which squeezed 11 rounds into 10 weeks. While this impacted the product, with some teams playing four games within 15 days, and made it hard for crowds to get to midweek games, it also contributed to the "footy fatigue" many fans feel at the back end of the year. Yet even before that, attendance took a hit after the move to the suburban grounds two years prior. For example, Essendon and Hawthorn's inaugural 2022 clash at Docklands attracted 12,092 spectators, yet just 3,778 when the clubs played each other in Frankston the following year. Another reason for smaller crowds has been the rapid expansions. Total attendance has risen by 52 per cent since season one (195,000 to 297,000), however, with more teams in the competition, the attendance has become more diluted. This year, the season length has increased to 12 rounds within 12 weeks. It could move to 14 by 2027, but to make that move, the league must first meet key metrics agreed to by the AFL and the AFL Players' Association: an average attendance of 6,000 fans and 100,000 broadcast viewers per match. In 2023, a key metric target was an average crowd attendance of 3,500. The ABC asked the AFL what its internal targets were for this season, but the league said they would not release those publicly to avoid making them an ongoing narrative. Lee said a focus this year was "fan-friendly time slots", venue consolidation and allowing for rituals to be created around home venues. "We're playing in too many different time slots, and we're playing in too many different venues as well. And so as a fan, how do you format ritual?" he said. "Take an example with Melbourne. They played seven matches here in Victoria [last season] and in seven different time slots … So it's really hard as a fan to build that ritual." One initiative not being utilised in fixturing this year — despite the majority of clubs actively campaigning the league for it — is double-headers. When the fixture came out earlier this year, AFLPA chief Ben Smith said the union provided the AFL with a submission based on player feedback that included a desire for more "category-one venues and the opportunity to play some double-headers". The AFL said they did not want to compromise on atmosphere if the crowds weren't there yet to support it. Last season, the Western Bulldogs' round-two AFLW match was rescheduled at the last minute to a double-header with the men's elimination final at the MCG to avoid a club fixture clash. The league used this as an example of why double-headers wouldn't work in the short term. However, that match was organised the week of, with the women's game starting at 4.30pm on the Friday afternoon, before the men's clash at 7:40pm. "Even though there were 23,000 recorded [in attendance], the atmosphere at 23 per cent utilisation isn't what we're trying to project," Lee said. "I guess the conclusion is, like, 30,000, 40,000 — that's when it starts to get sort of more exciting." GWS was one of the clubs that were "strong advocates" for double-headers in the two-round crossover between the end of the men's home-and-away season and the AFLW, believing it would work for their market. "We're a young club with a new audience, a new fan base, and we want to be able to build that across our men's and women's program," GWS general manager of AFLW and football operations Alison Zell told ABC Sport. Bowler added that "the W needs to be built around AFLW", in venues that work for its product, and not fit in with the men's competition. The lack of double-headers has also contributed to no category-one venues being used for AFLW this year, limiting the ability to get crowds above the 20,000-plus mark for bigger games. While part of this is to encourage fans to create rituals at grounds such as Whitten Oval and Windy Hill, the league said it wouldn't move to larger stadiums until the crowds supported it. Players have consistently advocated for some marquee games to be played at larger stadiums, such as the Showdown at Adelaide Oval. Last year, AFL executive general manager of football Laura Kane told The Sydney Morning Herald that for future AFLW matches to be played at Docklands Stadium, games would need to attract 20,000 supporters to justify using the venue. Kane said Arsenal Women were a great example of knowing when to move from a 5,500-seat stadium to 50,000 in the Women's Super League overseas. "What was really interesting to me is how strategic they were with the one, two or three times that they triggered that big stadium experience," Kane said. "[Filling the stadium] wasn't because they hoped, it wasn't because they thought 'maybe they'll come'. It wasn't because they thought, 'let's strategically try and leverage the men's'. It was because they knew they were ready. "So the patience in that … [And] in every single fan survey or every question we ask of our fans, they absolutely love that closeness to the players, [and] the fullness of the stadiums. And so it's one of the single biggest things, biggest decisions and strategic priorities we have is where we play." Improving the on-field product is another main strategic aim for the league. "We know what people like watching, because we have AFL every weekend to look at, what are the things that people enjoy?" Kane said. "They enjoy close games, unpredictable finishes, lead changes, you know, so on and so forth and so, how do we do that? … Investing in the pathway of the young players is the answer for us." Kane said the metrics spoke for themselves with the talent in the pathways entering the system. One of the biggest factors to help improve the product, Laura Kane said, was time. "The quality of the under-18 games is unbelievable compared to what we've seen 5, 6, 7, 8 years ago." However, in the now, the AFL is strong on wanting an attacking style from teams. Essendon and the Western Bulldogs' "ugly" clash at the end of the condensed fixture last year was widely criticised for the defensive style of play from both sides. Essendon won 3.8 (26) to 0.3 (3). "I think Scott Gowans was interviewed last year and said it himself, like, we might lose by a big margin, but we're committed to playing an offensive, attacking style," Kane said. "It's a lot on the ability of the players to execute the skills, but it's also on us to help set up a framework that allows them to do that more easily." AFLW's new general manager of women's football, Emma Moore, said the AFL wanted to harness what she was calling the "Caitlin Clark effect": an increase in women's sport viewership and attendance driven by stardom. This would mean attracting fans to AFLW because of a big name like Sam Kerr (soccer) and Caitlin Clark (WBNA). "The huge opportunity that we have in AFLW is the vast volume of players that we have to begin with, and the incredible skills, personalities and champions of themselves and the sport they play, what they bring," Moore said. "So we really want to unlock that opportunity for them and so it's really clear for us that going forwards, a key play in growing our fan base is growing that connection between our fans and their players."
CTV News
7 days ago
- Business
- CTV News
Liquor service hours extending in Vancouver
Vancouver Watch Vancouver city council is expanding operating hours for bars, clubs and some restaurants, allowing some to stay open until 4 a.m.
Fox News
21-07-2025
- Sport
- Fox News
2025 MLB Playoff picture, bracket
Now that the MLB All-Star festivities are behind us, clubs must shift into playoff mode and set their sights on the road to the World Series. Here's a breakdown of how the playoffs would look if the season ended on July 21, 2025. The first three seeds in each league are division winners. The next three are wild-card teams. In the hunt: In the hunt: The first and second seeds in each league receive byes to automatically reach the divisional round. Here's the bracket breakdown: For the latest updates, check out our MLB playoff standings.
Irish Times
21-07-2025
- Sport
- Irish Times
There will always be incidents of outrageous wrongdoing when it comes to All-Ireland tickets
When it comes to it, nobody complains about the price of an All-Ireland final ticket. There is a general flutter of rebuke and name-calling whenever a hike in ticket prices is announced, but that is always months before the final. It's like giving out to the referee: they never change their mind. This year, the price of a stand ticket remained unaltered at €100, but the price of a terrace ticket was increased to €60, a hike of €5. On the week of the game, nobody cares about that. In the frenzy of want the only issue is possession. Face value, no matter how barefaced, is a bargain. Here are some immutable truths about All-Ireland tickets: there are never enough tickets to satisfy everyone who feels entitled to one; there are never, ever enough tickets for people who decide they would like to go and can't understand why there is such a panic. Some people who don't deserve tickets will get them. There will be uproar. READ MORE Who deserves what and who doesn't is the annual flashpoint at the heart of all this. There will be people who didn't get a ticket for yesterday and won't get a ticket for next Sunday who will feel betrayed. [ Cork v Tipperary live updates: Tipperary win All-Ireland after amazing second half performance Opens in new window ] For clubs, entitlement is a minefield. Every member of a club executive will be allocated a pair of tickets, and nobody will argue. But after that there is a sliding scale of people who keep the wheels turning: who run teams and tend to pitches and raise money and go to meetings and close the gates and open the gates and respond to the latest call to arms. Many of those people will resent being in a draw for All-Ireland tickets with a whole load of others who just pay their membership at the start of the year and stand back. In that hierarchy of entitlement where do you draw the line? What about the person who gave 10 years' service, or 20 years, without flinching, but are not involved now and suddenly feel forgotten? How do you explain to them that they'll have to take their chances in the draw with people who never lifted a finger? It is an impossible equation. In every club, there are never enough tickets to clear the debt of gratitude or even meet interest repayments on the debt. Limerick v Cork All-Ireland hurling final 2021: Fans looking for tickets. Photograph: James Crombie/Inpho Outside of that, there are GAA fans who support their intercounty team without being involved in a club. Not everybody is cut out to be a grass root. Many people are living away from home and have no desire to be involved with any other club. They feel entitled too. Or hard done by. Or forgotten. For these people, access to league matches is never a problem and for most championship games the same is true. Tickets are put on general sale. First come first served. For All-Ireland finals, though, it is a closed shop. In the build up to the hurling final the Cork county board received emails from people who had attached a screenshot of all their ticket stubs from all of Cork's games this year. What are their consumer rights? They have none. The counter argument is that some people are too busy with club activities on weekends to be swanning along to league games, or even the early rounds of the championship. There are only so many GAA hours in the week. Club first is the GAA's commandment, isn't it? How All-Ireland final tickets are doled out by Croke Park is always interesting. In the annual report to GAA congress the numbers are laid out in tantalising detail. Over the years, many of the categories have remained the same, but the numbers have changed. Former presidents and members of Ard-Chomhairle, for example, were allocated 1,455 tickets according to the report to annual congress 20 years ago; in the report to this year's congress that number had fallen to 800. Camogie's allocation was up 20 in 20 years to 140; Ladies football had dropped 40 to 100. In the continuing merger talks this will doubtless be teased out in the small print. The really interesting one, though, is the allocation to competing counties. According to the numbers released in 2005, each county was given just 12,014 tickets. For this year's finals, however, it is understood that each competing county was given about 20,000 tickets. The allocation to non-competing counties has dropped by nearly 7,000 in 20 years. Is that balance right yet? The GAA regards All-Ireland finals as a come-all-ye. A national celebration. Everybody knows somebody who goes to the All-Ireland final every year, regardless of who's playing. In that spirit, every club in a county that hasn't reached the final is entitled to at least a pair of tickets. What they do with them is their own business. At the end of last week, the Kilcar club in Donegal issued a statement on its Facebook page saying that 'while there was a large number of names taken by people interested in the All-Ireland hurling final, it would be more beneficial to the club and its members to swap these for football tickets.' Ticket exchanges between counties in the hurling and football finals has been common practice for decades. Unsold tickets in non-competing counties is another phenomenon that usually results in a secondary allocation for competing counties in the days before the game. Last year, that resulted in more than 3,000 extra tickets landing in Cork; this year the second wave of tickets was numbered in hundreds. The unusual element of this year's ticket scramble is that Cork, Tipperary, Kerry and Donegal all brought crowds to their semi-finals that vastly exceeded their allocation of tickets for the final. Cork were estimated to have brought 60,000 to their semi-final; Donegal brought in excess of 45,000; Tipperary brought close to 40,000 and Kerry brought greater crowds to their quarter-final and semi-final than at any time in recent memory. In Cork, the runaway support for the team caused an insoluble problem. In Donegal, it was reported locally that their allocation will cover every adult club member in a county with just 40 clubs. But that still leaves their partners and kids, and the remainder of the 45,000 who turned up the Meath game. There will always be hard cases and incidents of outrageous wrongdoing. Is there a better way of doing it? No. The atrocities will continue.
New York Times
18-07-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
The holiday is over. Now it's time to run. Welcome to football's pre-season running tests
There are no footballs. Just cones, discs and poles, and a group of players gripped by a mixture of nerves and anxiety on the start line. Welcome to the pre-season running test. Over the past couple of weeks, clubs across Europe have been putting players through their paces by using a variety of running exercises to measure fitness levels following the off-season break. Advertisement Although the bleep test that gave a generation of footballers nightmares across the 1980s and 1990s has largely disappeared from view, modern alternatives still require players to tune in to the audio while showing a combination of physical endurance and mental resilience. The soundtrack for some of the other tests is coaches shouting 'dig in' and 'keep pushing' – familiar language to anyone who has endured the torture of pre-season running – as the players race against their team-mates and the clock. With the help of some expert insight, The Athletic has taken a closer look at half a dozen different pre-season running tests that have been used in recent years. Forget the boots. It's time to get your trainers on… 'Go all in,' Arne Slot says. 'I'm expecting you to win.' Liverpool's head coach was looking at Jarell Quansah, who was taking part in a pre-season run alongside Conor Bradley and Sepp van den Berg last summer that signalled a shift in approach at the club. The lactate test that had been such a key feature of Jurgen Klopp's reign was replaced with a straightforward (to explain, at least) exercise that required players to run as far as possible in six minutes. Interesting to see Liverpool switching from the Lactate Test to a 6-Minute Race Test (6MRT) to obtain the players' max aerobic speed. – 6 minutes around a 400m race track – as fast as possible – distance covered is the marker Generally looking for somewhere between 1.5-2km. — STATSports (@statsports) July 6, 2024 Gareth Sandford, an Olympic, college and professional sport scientist who has recently acted as a consultant for Manchester City and the England Football Association, believes the '6MRT' has a lot of benefits, starting with the fact that six minutes is, roughly, the duration you can maintain VO2 max, the highest rate at which your body can use oxygen. 'If you run shorter than that, you place greater emphasis on the anaerobic physiology, which makes the training pace much harder than you want it to be when you do your conditioning session,' he explains. To illustrate his point, Sandford compares the anaerobic energy reserve (for sustained high-intensity effort) to a flame flickering and burning down a matchstick. 'With a six-minute run, you can't just rely on the anaerobic matchstick; you have to have the aerobic side, too, which the six-minute run reveals.' Advertisement With a run this long, there is always a danger that players will go off too quickly or even too slowly, distorting the results – something Sandford says can be avoided by 'clamping' the first two minutes (he highlights how Brentford used a pacemaker on their recent two-kilometre running test to solve this issue). 'Another advantage of this six-minute test is that you can also estimate something called your critical speed, which is this five or six out of 10 effort when you're not burning the match,' Sandford adds. 'The faster the speed you can go without burning the match, the fitter aerobically you are. You can calculate that from the six-minute run, and it's those two bits together that can help you improve your aerobic condition over time and over the season.' For the record, Bradley beat Quansah. Thomas Frank is a big fan, as the Tottenham Hotspur players just discovered. 'I don't know if I'm a modern coach or not sometimes, but we started running today,' the new Spurs head coach said on his first day of pre-season training. 'Old school is still good school.' By running, Frank means covering the best part of 10 lengths of the pitch and back — 1,000 metres in total — as quickly as possible. 'If they did it well enough, they're below three minutes 15 seconds,' he said. Some people will look at that distance and time and think it should be fairly comfortable for a professional footballer. But all the turns, including decelerating and then accelerating away, make it much more challenging. 'To go 10 times around the pole is just an annoying part of this game,' the Brentford midfielder Vitaly Janelt said when he did the test under Frank three years ago. 'That's the hardest part.' Janelt said he struggled to sleep the day before the test because he was so worried about it. Mads Bidstrup presumably had no such worries. A natural runner, Bidstrup came out on top more than once during his time at Brentford. In fact, two years ago, shortly before he moved to Red Bull Salzburg, Bidstrup finished the test in an outstanding time of two minutes and 57 seconds. Watching the 1k test is a lot better than doing the 1k test — Brentford FC (@BrentfordFC) July 6, 2023 Watching the footage of the 1km test at Spurs last week and listening to the encouragement given to 19-year-old midfielder George Abbott, Djed Spence, and the rest of the squad served as a reminder that the coaches' rhetoric never changes. 'Come on, stay with it!' 'Keep pushing, Djed!' 'Dig in, mate!' Traditionally associated with rugby, where it has long been a staple of the All Blacks' fitness testing, the Bronco started to make its way into the football world over the past couple of years. Bristol City set up the test at pre-season training both this summer and last summer, and other clubs have followed suit. Advertisement 'As a reminder, you're going red and back, yellow and back, orange and back, five times continuously,' Andy Kavanagh, Bristol City's head of performance, tells the players in the footage that the Championship club released in 2024. 'Give everything that you can, get back as quickly as you can. Boys resting, give as much encouragement as you can.' The red cone is 20m away, the yellow 40m and the orange 60m, which means each set of three shuttles is 240m in total. Five times through equals 1,200m. Essentially, the players are completing 15 'doggies', which is mentally draining because of the repetitive nature of the runs, not to mention the physical demands of constantly turning. 'I use the Bronco for a couple of reasons, one being that it's easy for the lads to understand,' Kavanagh says. 'But the main one for me is that from the score they get, I can predict their max aerobic speed, and that is something we will then use throughout pre-season to prescribe different types of runs that are more specific to individuals.' Kavanagh set the Bristol City players a target to be inside four minutes and 30 seconds. To put that into some wider context, last year Cam Roigard recorded the joint-quickest time of any New Zealand rugby player, equalling the 4:12 that Beauden Barrett set in 2020. Anis Mehmeti, Bristol City's Albania international, ran that exact time last summer and went four seconds quicker this year. This is an intermittent running test designed by Paul Balsom, who spent more than 25 years working as performance manager for Sweden's men's national team. The SDS takes about 18 minutes to complete and requires you to switch on while running (as well as while reading now!) to understand what it entails. The SDS running test 😮💨🏃 — Swansea City AFC (@SwansOfficial) June 30, 2025 With the help of an audio track that controls the pace with beeps at every marker, each individual rep consists of three runs: a 12-second 60m single run to start (A to B in the graphic below) followed by a three-second rest; a 16-second 72m double run (B to C to B) followed by another three-second rest; and finally a 12-second 60m single run back to the start (B to A). The players then have a 12-second rest before repeating the rep. Repeating it a lot, actually. Swansea did 16 reps in total: three reps for the warm-up at a more gentle pace and then two blocks of five reps following the times above, with a 72-second rest between the two blocks. To finish – and this is where it gets brutal – the players did two continuous reps at the same pace as before, but this time, without the three-second rest between the three runs. Instead, there was just a 10-second rest between the two reps. After the second of those 'continuous' runs, the players had a six-second rest before completing a final SDS one-rep time trial – 192m in total – flat out, with no pacing. The best times for that last segment were around the 30-second mark. Advertisement Patrick Orme, Swansea's head of performance, explains: 'Because there are different blocks of work, you can look at how quickly players recover in between the two blocks, you can look at how their heart rate responds to the different reps that they're doing, and then at the end of the test there is this time trial, so you get a score and that helps to get the lads to engage with it.' This is a test that is synonymous with Mauricio Pochettino, the head coach of the U.S. men's national team. Invented by Georges Gacon, a French fitness coach who started in athletics and worked with middle-distance runners before moving into football with Paris Saint-Germain initially, this test is also built around shuttle runs. 'To start with, the players have 45 seconds to cover 150 metres, with 15 seconds to rest,' Pochettino, who signed for PSG as a player after Gacon departed, explained in his book. 'In each subsequent 45-second rep, they have to run 6.25 metres further, with the intensity steadily increasing.' Requiring mental strength as well as aerobic power, the Gacon is a gruelling test to take part in as well as a nightmare for a fitness coach to set up because of all the incremental disc markers, which require a measuring tape and the patience of a saint. The players can run until failure or, depending on the coach's mood, complete a designated number of shuttles. 'We did the Gacon one day and we were meant to do 10 runs, but we got to the eighth and the manager — I still don't know if he was doing a mental trick on us — said we could stop if we wanted,' Chelsea's Ben Chilwell told The Athletic in 2023. 'Everyone was on their knees after the eighth one and he (Pochettino) said, 'If everyone completes the next two, I'll take you all out for dinner'.' The Chelsea players chose to complete those last two runs, but at the time of Chilwell's interview, they were still waiting for their meal ticket. 'A lot of the tests you mention, they are supposed to bring players to exhaustion,' Martin Buchheit, who invented the 30-15 IFT, says. 'But the problem is you need to be able to pace yourself and that's very difficult. The 30-15 gives you the pace when you're running – you just have to let yourself be guided by the audio, by the beeps.' Advertisement In contrast to the dreaded bleep test from yesteryear, the distance gets progressively longer in the 30-15 IFT, rather than staying the same. That's because as well as the speed increasing by 0.5 kilometres per hour at each stage (8km/h is usually the starting pace), every run is 30 seconds. Another key difference is that at the end of each run, there is a 15-second recovery period before walking towards the next starting point, which is identified by the audio. The area is 40 metres in length (the width of the penalty area), which means players are regularly turning, with the beeps that sound at either end, as well as in the middle, providing benchmarks to meet the requisite speed. Fail to hit three beeps in succession (there is a 3m zone next to each line marker) and the test is over. 'The 30-15 is meant to replicate those intermittent efforts (in sport),' Buchheit says. 'You can have players with the same engine at the start, but one has a better recovery than another, so he will do better on the 30-15.' Carlos Baleba is a star pupil. While at Lille, the Brighton & Hove Albion midfielder reached a speed of 22.5km/h, by which time he had run the best part of 3km. 'The final speed is an overall product of many variables that are not just oxygen intake but also your ability to recover, your ability to turn and change direction,' Buchheit adds. He smiles. 'You're writing about football, of course, but it's worth highlighting that the beasts, and all the record holders, are from Australian rules football.' (Illustration: Kelsea Petersen; Tom Goyvaerts / BELGA MAG / Belga via AFP; Graphics: Drew Jordan)
