Let’s stop pretending the A-League’s decline is complicated. It isn’t. Crowds haven’t fallen because the football suddenly got worse, or because Australians “don’t like football”, or because of the weather, or the timeslots, or the cost of living. The A-League is fading because it never built a football culture strong enough to survive the inevitable bumps in the road. It is a crisis of identity, not quality.
If you were around the league in the early 2010s, you know exactly what has been lost. The derbies were events. The active ends were loud, colourful, and intimidating. The 2014/15 Melbourne Derby semi-final remains one of the most electric atmospheres Australian sport has ever produced. It felt like the whole city was watching. It felt important.
Today, the derby still draws a respectable crowd, but the cultural relevance has evaporated. The build-up barely registers. The atmosphere is a shadow of what it once was. And the reason is obvious. The league’s football culture was built on active support, and active supporters eventually walked away.
They didn’t leave because they were fickle. They left because they were pushed. Years of over-policing, tifo restrictions, opaque bans, and decisions like the Sydney Grand Final sale created an adversarial relationship between the league and its most passionate fans. When active supporters left, the noise left with them. And without noise, the league lost its soul.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth. Even if every active supporter returned tomorrow, the A-League would still have a problem. Because the deeper issue is that the league never embedded itself into the community in the first place. The AFL did. The national teams did. The A-League didn’t.
The Socceroos and Matildas don’t need ultras to fill stadiums. The AFL doesn’t need tifos or choreographed marches to dominate the sporting landscape. They succeed because they are woven into the fabric of Australian life. AFL clubs are civic institutions. Walk through Footscray and you’ll see Bulldogs murals everywhere. Kids grow up wearing club colours because players visit their schools, run clinics, and build lifelong loyalty.
Growing up in Adelaide, the Crows came to my primary school. They ran a clinic, handed out membership forms, and I signed up. Adelaide United never did that. And that’s the point. The A-League has never built that kind of generational connection. It has marketed itself as a product, not a community. And products can be ignored. Communities can’t.
This cultural disconnect is now being compounded by something even more alarming. The players themselves have lost confidence in the league’s direction. The PFA has been openly and repeatedly dissatisfied with APL management, criticising the lack of transparency, the instability, and the failure to invest in the fundamentals that make a league sustainable. When your most important stakeholders, the players, are publicly questioning the competence of the league’s leadership, you have a structural problem, not a PR problem.
If the A-League wants to survive, it needs to stop acting like a franchise competition and start acting like a civic institution. That starts with owning the suburbs. Every club should be deeply embedded in a handful of local government areas, not just through posters or billboards, but through people. Weekly school visits, free clinics, school futsal competitions, academy pathways tied to local schools, and genuine partnerships with local clubs and councils. This is how the AFL does it. This is how the J-League does it. This is how the A-League must do it. If you want generational fans, you have to meet them when they’re eight years old, not when they’re 28.
Sydney FC A-League player Rhyan Grant (Photo by Texi Smith).
It also means embracing multicultural Australia properly. Football is the most multicultural sport in the country, yet the A-League barely taps into the communities that already live and breathe the game. Every club should be hosting or partnering with cultural tournaments, community festivals, and local futsal competitions. Events like South Australia’s African Nations Cup shouldn’t be outliers. They should be the norm. These aren’t “nice extras”. They are the beating heart of football culture in Australia. If the A-League can’t connect with multicultural communities, it doesn’t deserve to survive.
And then there’s active support, the league’s greatest asset and the area where it has done the most damage. Active supporters aren’t the problem. They’re the solution. The relationship between clubs and active groups has always been one-way. Clubs dictate, fans react, and everyone loses. The Fan Representative Group is a start, but it needs real authority. Every club needs a Supporter Liaison Officer, a model used in the J-League and MLS, to create genuine partnership. That means clear, fair rules for active support, transparent ban processes, club advocacy when policing is excessive, and consistent collaboration on tifos, safe-standing, and matchday atmosphere. Atmosphere doesn’t happen by accident. It’s built through trust. And right now, trust is the one thing the A-League doesn’t have.
Fixing the matchday experience is the final piece of the puzzle, and yes, Mark Cuban is the blueprint. When he bought the Dallas Mavericks in 2000, they were a joke. He turned them into a powerhouse by investing in the product, better facilities, better coaching, better players, and by transforming the fan experience so that every game felt like an event. The A-League can’t copy everything, nor should it, but the philosophy applies. The league must invest in better coaching, better youth pathways, better player welfare, better storytelling, and better atmosphere. It must make matchdays feel like events again.
One simple, powerful idea is a club-sponsored walk to the stadium. Imagine this. Local bars near the ground become pre-match hubs, promoted through schools and community events. Fans gather, meet ambassadors, receive scarves and chant sheets, and then walk together to the stadium. It’s low-cost, high-impact, and instantly visible. It boosts attendance, builds atmosphere, and gives newcomers a way into the culture. And this is where the league should introduce a low-cost “Welcome to Football” ticket, a deliberately cheap, entry-level offer designed to hook new fans the same way Mark Cuban did when he told Dallas locals, “The first game is on me.” You get people in the door, you give them a great experience, and they come back because they want to, not because they’re begged to.
The A-League’s future depends on one thing, becoming a civic institution. If the league wants long-term relevance, it must stop chasing short-term sugar hits, washed-up marquees, marketing gimmicks, or national team halo effects. The formula is simple. Community first, culture first, football first. Build clubs that matter to their suburbs. Rebuild trust with active supporters. Invest in the players and listen to the PFA. Create matchdays that feel alive. Do that, and the crowds will come back, not because they’re told to, but because the A-League will finally feel like it belongs to them.
Luke Karapetsashttps://https://ift.tt/41VviWp A‑League’s problem isn’t football, it’s culture. Unless that changes, nothing else will
Post a Comment