Although South’s recent improvement in results has been relieving, its parallel improvement in playing style has given fans a reason to be excited. Games are more enjoyable and morale around the club is up. I now find I’m in good spirits after losses, which is in stark contrast to last year, where I would leave games frustrated even after a win. Experiencing this change has been illuminating. It has underlined the importance of entertaining football and demonstrated the need for the club to prioritise an attractive playing style going forward.
The impact of entertaining football is enormous. Fans are more engaged with games and their moods are improved. All in all, it results in a vastly improved matchday experience. Watching a game of the old direct style was a tedious experience that was fraught with stressful turnovers and focused on a narrow range of infrequent events centred on set plays and key players. The new style is more possession based which helps ease anxiety and the attacking is more varied. This demands more attention throughout the game as goals can come from any player and at any time from open play. This has resulted in fans actually watching more of the game, being more entertained, and enjoying a better mood whilst doing so.
The improved engagement with the on-filed product has a number of indirect benefits for the club. Spectators become more familiar with more of the squad and their varied skillsets but also, as more of their attention is focused constructively on-field, their ability to manage off-field inconveniences improves. Spectators are more able to withstand poor weather and complain less about long canteen wait times when their matchday experience is being fulfilled by entertaining play.
Entertaining play can also compensate for poor results, which is incredibly important for attendance retention and organic growth. For example, the recent loss against Dandenong Thunder was disappointing but the performance gave me hope and gave me more reason to look forward to next week. In past seasons even when we were winning, I would find it harder to justify attending to matches when the playing style was so tedious. The current system allowed me to enjoy every moment, the old system had me counting down the clock.
This effect was disastrous for organic growth and in selling the club to new fans, sponsors or even neutrals. Whereas last year I would struggle to convince people to come to South owing to the poor on field product (even Grand Finals) recent weeks have been far easier to bring people to games, even in the middle on winter. Instead of attending with one or two friends as I did last year, in recent weeks I’ve been going to games with four or five people, some of which are first timers or are returning to Lakeside after an extended break. Multiply this effect over the 400 or so regulars at games… over the past three years… and you can see the impact it can have.
The need to play entertaining football is increased when considering structural changes to the football environment and South’s unique operating context. For one, many legacy South fans have come to expect positive attacking football. I think this is in part due to the aspirational nature of a largely migrant fan base, but also due to South’s relative size in its historical competition environments. Attractive football is easier to provide for a team when it is capable of funding it relative to others in the competition. South has historically been one of the better financially backed teams in its competition and as a result it has a track record of success not just in terms of trophies but in terms of coaching staff, marquee players and even facilities. When existing fans are brought up with entertaining football historically, they come to expect more of it.
The ease of South’s ability to provide entertaining football though has changed due to structural changes in the ecosystem. Firstly, South now plays in a League with relegation, so there is increased pressure to balance entertainment with results. Secondly, South is no longer the financial goliath in its competition environment with Avondale and even Oakleigh alleged to enjoy larger player budgets. These joint pressures of potential relegation and heightened competition were exacerbated by a period of coaching instability and COVID, so when a ‘shortcut’ to achieving these goals came at the cost of entertaining football, it is understandable to see why South pursued it for as long as it did.
However another more macro structural change is necessitating a return to entertaining football. The competition for attention has never been higher whilst the battle for community has never been tougher. Melbourne itself now has three additional professional football teams, fans have easier access to broadcasts of international leagues and non-football entertainment is abundant. It comes in the form of gaming, AI-slop, doom-scrolling and streaming. Every new form of entertainment lure potential fans away from Lakeside on a cold Friday night, heck it even lures them away from the YouTube stream! The unstoppable proliferation of entertainment options means South must do all it can to make its match-day experience as entertaining as possible. And the heart of the match-day experience is the on-field product.
Even understanding the scope of macro challenges though, the big picture tells us that we only need a fraction of the market to engage with the club. Even an average crowd of 5,000 people is less than 0.1 per cent of the Melbourne population (that’s a crazy sentence on at least two levels). Choosing to improve the playing style may help here but it is worth noting that this isn’t the only way to foster a football club community. Some clubs focus on bringing up youth players, some clubs focus on representation of particular ethnicities, some clubs focus just on results. All of these approaches are justified and when we’re talking about attracting less than 0.1 per cent of a population, and the truth is they could all be sustainable solutions. However, the shift in playing style over the past 12 months has revealed something unique about South which the Board should be cognisant of for the future – the fans want entertaining football from the senior men’s team.
