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The FFA has a dilemma on its hands. No, it’s nothing to do with the expansion of the A-League. And no, it’s nothing to do with the salary cap either. It’s to do with one solitary match this year, one match out of the 135 matches that will make up the 2011-12 A-League season.

On December 14 this year, the Wellington Phoenix will play reigning champions Brisbane Roar, in one of the league’s ‘regional matches’, at a venue to be decided. And that’s the kicker. Because no stadium has been allocated to this fixture as yet, and because neither club has rights to the match as a home game, two towns (one in New Zealand, and one in Queensland) have put their hands up to host it.

Let’s meet the contestants…

Contestant number one is Dunedin, New Zealand. A South Island city with a population of roughly 125,000 people, Dunedin has the distinction of … Continue Reading

Well, 12:30pm has come and gone and the 2011-12 A-League draw has been released. A midweek bonanza, with 5 games back-to-back on Wednesday 4th January, and a rivalry round in week 3 are two of the big changes this year. As well as that, there will only be 10 midweek games this season, all of which fall in the December/January holiday period. Compared to the 30 midweek games in 2010-11, this has to be a big positive for the new season.

At Ultimate A-League, we too have been working our behinds off for the last few hours to get ALL the fixtures for the new season into our system, so that you can view them, browse them, analyse them, download them or do whatever you want with them.

Note: Unfortunately, many of the midweek and regional games are yet to have a kickoff time or even a stadium allocated to them. Not to worry! As soon as those … Continue Reading

What has been a long held of gripe of mine is how the A-League fixturing each year seems to get worse and worse. Back in the 2006-07 season (or version 2, if you really want to call it that), it was quite easy to work out which team your club was playing this week, as it was the same team your club had played seven weeks earlier! So when did it become so difficult to do this properly?

Yes, there are now three more teams in the competition than there were in 2006-07. But a few extra teams, and a weekend break for one given the odd number of teams in this year’s competition, shouldn’t make it as difficult to accomplish as the FFA have made it look. So, in the efforts of getting this process fixed when it comes time for the FFA to sit down and schedule the 2011-12 season, I present this list of … Continue Reading

“Monday morning feels so bad,
Ev’rybody seems to nag me
Coming tuesday I feel better,
Even my old man looks good,
Wednesday just don’t go,
Thursday goes too slow,
I’ve got Friday on my mind”.

Even when the song “Friday on my mind” by The Easybeats was written in 1966, Wednesday “just don’t go”. Nothing is truer of the results of the midweek fixture experiment that the FFA have undertaken with the A-League so far this season.

As you can see below, the attendance figures for the three midweek games that have been played so far don’t tell a great story. A total of 20,642 across three games with an average attendance of just 6,881 is a particularly poor return. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that figures from three games isn’t exactly a glut of data, and it would be particularly presumptuous to draw conclusions from such a small sample size. However, two of those … Continue Reading