Diamond_Jim

North have done that almost and they are still going backwards or at best treading water. It's not easy. Brisbane had 3-5 years of success when it was a hot ticket in town but end of 2019 aside it barely draws a crowd.

It is in the Pentitude if that helps.

you're right of course but what does the "winning bit" mean (ten years.. twenty years) and is it a realistic goal for a club such as ours. Sure we will have our brief time in the sun (I hope) but sustained success ... that's a tough ask. Do we need to embrace mediocrity and work on the football experience (whatever that means) so as to keep and perhaps grow our support base.

Revenue from the Anzac eve game in 2020 will be vital. We have 2 horror games to start the season followed by three games that while winnable are far from certainties. Lose the first two and one other and the impact on Anzac eve revenue will be substantial. The AFL did us no favours with the "unbalanced start" for the 17th ranked team.

it looks bleak for the bottom 4 Melbourne clubs. The next round of TV money will not see a great increase unless the AFL allows the Optus cherry picking model with Friday night games being exclusive to one streaming entity or similar. Even then most of that money will go straight to player salary increases. Pokies aren't the answer. The likes of Hawthorn and Essendon will be forced to ditch them in the longer term due to community backlash. Sponsorship money growing perhaps but given the increasing diversity of the advertising spend is there much reason to think that it will grow by much more than CPI? If it does the two team cities and the power cubs will benefit far more than us anyway. So that leaves only two sources of revenue... corporate networking money and attendance receipts. Would need a decade of winning for this to turn around substantially and our presence at the oversized MCG (for our needs) means that the task of building attendance receipts is a difficult one. The 2019 revenue impact shows how hard it can be to grow the bottom line if you depend on attendance receipts alone. Of course we could just accept that we are not a power club and will never be one again and concentrate on being a boutique club whatever that means. Dare I say that we would be better served by a 50,000 seat stadium.

FWIW add the Bombers of 2000 They looked to be unbeatable but their post 2000 record wasn't that great given their abolute dominance in 2000

hard to see the kiwis winning it but if they are 2-150 when the night session commences with a target of say 450 it will be interesting Back on the world teams... India to me is more like West Coast or Adelaide Crows... disgustingly wealthy and growing more powerful each year.Mind you the world players have been quick to take the money... Bangladesh are perhaps the Freo or St Kilda of world cricket... you know they will never get to the top but we have a soft spot for the Tigers.. Not sure about South Africa...........

Good point. I had thought Hawthorn perhaps..........boringly successful (from a non Hawthorn/Aussie perspective.)

Watching the cricket last evening I could not help thinking about the similarities between the New Zealand cricket team and the North Melbourne football club. Both have small membership base and a financial struggle but they punch way above their weight and always give you a good run for your money. That got me to thinking about other cricket teams around the world and who were their counterparts in the AFL. England was easy.... it is of course Collingwood.. the team everyone else hates. Other similarities came to mind but I am interested to see what we all think. Took me awhile to come up with a cricket team that resembled the MFC and then like a bolt from the blue I knew the answer. It is of course the West Indies. A once great team living on past glories beset by financial woes as the rest of the competition leaves the Calypso cricketers in their wake. Interested in what other "matches" people come up with.... Sri Lanka and Brisbane Lions perhaps (world beaters for a few years based on some out of the box players)

I can understand the nostalgic desire for a gathering place/social club but I cannot see how in this day and age you could ever make such a thing pay. Gone are the days of a keg out the back of the stand. Mind you it's probably an easier problem to solve than that of getting a decent training facility near the MCG.

Hi KC do you know if they have redone the drainage at the oval. It was seriously bad in recent years. Thanks

Wonder if the 20 minute half time break was related to the Tea break in cricket of 20 minutes. For soccer it's generally 15, rugby 10 and for an NFL game it's 12 minutes so there seems to be no uniformity

25% of the list... sounds normal for the MFC

not to mention the famous pre-season training thread for 2012.

Has anyone noticed a growth in independent youtube commentary for the world's mega teams. If you have a channel with around 1M followers which is not hard to imagine for the mega soccer/NBA/NFL teams you can earn (as I understand the complicated algorithm) around US$400k a year. Of course the footage would be highly controlled but commentary and fair usage is free in most countries. Hard to see how one could make it work financially for an AFL team but for cricket (especially with an Indian spin) it could be a goer.

I see it requires paid membership to read the full articles but there are certainly some interesting topics. Not sure whether the fees on the membership page are monthly or annual $6-$25 PS.. they are monthly fees

We all know that the best site for following the mighty Dees is Demonland but I would be interested to hear about other sources including developing media. I'm a big traveller and one of my go to places for research is Youtube. The product by some vloggers rivals if not exceeds anything you see on the mainstream media. But what about sport. There's the Roar which is great but are there any other quirky sites for following particular sports. Cheers

mediocrity would probably be described by most as a dramatic improvement on our present status

Geelong review prelim loss............ https://www.afl.com.au/news/267612/tomahawk-cats-revisit-preliminary-final-heartache Not much info but review it they did.

one could extend that to "dimidium saeculum horribilis"

Assuming the odds in any one year are one in two of being positive or negative, the odds of 17 years positive are around one in 65,000 (I think)

there's four players at least that could go either way during 2020.. Best 22 or delisted/traded for low value Hunt, Hannan, J Smith, O MacDonald Cusp players also in that group are Spargo and J. Wagner

The mind blowing stat in that table is what in the hell happened with GWS in 2019. It is an outlier that blows the bell curve wide open. You would also expect teams to go positive and negative on a year by year basis. The ones that don't are the ones you need look at. Other than North and West Coast (both positive) and GWS (negative) the rest on a quick look appear unremarkable.

Makes you wonder where we would be without Casey radio. Sure the club can't cover everything but it needs to think about how it features itself in a crowded market. With this game. Perhaps Livestream a quarter with a short background video. Not rocket science. Done on YouTube all the time.

well he did write his own history which helped a lot but then again so have a few others, Napoleon included