News Corp and Telstra will sell Foxtel in a US$2.2bn (A$3.4bn) deal, the companies announced on Monday.

[Bjo187]

Does a third team in an already full market actually add any viewers?

I never went out of my way to watch a Crows game when I lived in Adelaide.

When you consider what's left of Perth after West Coast and Freo, then WA3 and Canberra have pretty similarly sized markets.

You'd also hope in a place like Canberra they'd get their games on 7 main if they got their own team, instead of the current situation of getting the 7 Sydney feed.

Although in saying that, 7 don't even put half west coast and Freo games on 7 main in Perth, it's pathetic, they aren't helpful at all in trying to grow the game, ch 10 was so much better and that was back 15 years ago.

 

[sherb]

So they should, soccer is a lame yankee name for it

The term soccer originated in England.

 

[sherb]

Pays to read the post more carefully it seams, didn't take in the "Australian" part.

My point is it should be called football, not soccer.

Aussie rules is obviously the only Australian Football. I really only ever call it footy anyway, maybe the AFL should lean into that.

Football is a generic term that refers to any of a number of sports involving kicking/handling a ball.

And there are quite a few of them - Association Football (Soccer), Australian Rules Football, Gaelic Football, American Football, Rugby League Football, Rugby Union Football, Rugby League Football, Canadian Football, Touch Football and probably more.

No one of these sports exclusively owns the term "football" - although at a supporter level the term is used locally to describe people's preferred code. Eg to me, football is Australian Rules, to other people in Sydney it would be Rugby League. To yet others it would be soccer. And so on.

Australian Soccer trying to co-opt the term was basically a marketing ploy to try to lift the game's profile here, because the soccer types simply can't understand why it isn't the major football code in the country. So they want to pretend and promote that it is, via terminology.

Mind you, they can't mind the "soccer" designation too much, given the national team is still called the "Socceroos". They are having a bit each way there.

 

[GC2015]

Does a third team in an already full market actually add any viewers?

I never went out of my way to watch a Crows game when I lived in Adelaide.

When you consider what's left of Perth after West Coast and Freo, then WA3 and Canberra have pretty similarly sized markets.

You think Perth is full with two teams?

I think there's definitely room for a third AFL team in Perth. It's not like every single person in their 2m+ population is either a West Coast or Freo fan and even if they were, there will naturally be some that drift away from the Dockers/Eagles if a third WA team is established, like we saw when the Suns entered the AFL and Brisbane's membership went down. Look at what happened when the Dolphins entered the NRL in a time where people were saying it was a market completely dominated by the Broncos and no one would switch to the Phins. Two years in and the Dolphins have a pretty good supporter base averaging the 6th highest crowds in the league and that was while the Broncos were also recording record membership levels. I think you'd see something similar happen again if the NRL decided to base a third team in Brisbane. Plenty of room for another NRL team in Brisbane and for a third AFL team in Perth IMO.