“Coming to a screen near you!” used to be the tagline of every major movie blockbuster – now it’s the perfect summation of the future of sports broadcasting.
This is the landscape the Australian Professional Leagues are surveying in detail, preparing for a future where every fan can choose when and how to consume a game of football: whether watching on big screen or mobile phone, via seconds of highlights or the full 90 minutes.
It’s why the first two key appointments this week in a new executive team for the APL come from a background of broadcasting innovation in sport, but it only tells part of the story of where Australian football is heading.
One of those appointees, chief commercial officer Ant Hearne, describes it as “the winds of change” blowing through sport, and catalysed by the effects of a global pandemic. Across the world sports consumption is moving into the digital space, and the pace is only quickened with a younger audience.
That is one of the major drawcards for the Australian Professional Leagues as it plots a future under its own control. Research into the game’s appeal reveals that a majority of the audience for Australian football is under 33 years old. Across the country, some 5 million people deem themselves to be passionate about the sport, and 2 million play it.
For decades the professional game has sought to turn that passion and participation into active engagement with the national league. The A-League clubs argued for several years that they needed to be separated from the control of Football Australia to be able to maximise their commercial opportunities, invest in the sport and in turn bring more fans to their games.
That’s why one of the biggest priorities will be a digital home for the Leagues, a one-stop-shop to engage with Australian professional football. The engagement that is needed to unlock that latent commercial power will come through that platform, and APL believes it now has internal and external resources to draw upon that have deep and global expertise in what it takes to get the relationship right between a sport and its fan base.
Nor is this some long-term dream. Work has been underway for months on the infrastructure that is needed to meet that level of ambition. It has to be ambitious, to match the needs of a digitally-engaged audience and turn that potential into practice.
