For a variety of reasons, club produced match programs have never really been one of Australian soccer's strong points. To be fair, this is not just a soccer thing - Australian sporting culture as a whole tends to not produce club specific programs, instead preffering official league propaganda in the form of things like the AFL's Footy Record.
I reckon that a club-produced match program has to perform at least one
of two functions. One is to engender a sense of community around a club,
especially its senior team(s). This will probably mean that the content
is probably more informal, and materially cheaper. This works (or
worked) better at lower level clubs, where a dedicated volunteer was
responsible for doing most of the work, which they would see as a hobby;
such program production mostly lives and dies on how long that
volunteer can keep doing that job.
The other option is to project a sense of professionalism, as an
extension of the broader match day experience. Thus you get a glossy
program, one that, apart from being much obviously an official news
organ of a particular club rather than an individual, is also tasked
with promoting sponsors and the club's image as a professionally run
organisation.
Australian soccer club produced match programs were at their peak during the NSL years, albeit not at all times (1990s were strongest), and certainly not at all clubs (the 1984-1986 split division era was not great). Since the dissolution of the NSL, things have gone downhill. That's understandable on a number of fronts. In the A-League, the uniformity (and conformity) of purpose meant that match programs took on the guise of league endorsed programs. Below the A-League, clubs decided that finite money and volunteer efforts were better spent on other things. This coincided with arrival of the full-blown internet. No longer did you need to wait a week (or a fortnight) for news and write-ups on your team. It was all there on a website, and eventually even that became subservient to social media, at least at those clubs that bothered to update them.
Having said that, 2025 was still a poor year on the Victorian top tier front so far as match program production was concerned. Already an endangered species, with only two clubs regularly producing programs from 2019 onward, this year we got down to just one; that being Green Gully and its cheap (free) and cheerful production, as Melbourne Knights all but ceased producing its long running glossy ($5 in 2025) product. Knights produced a program for their well-attended home match against Preston, but otherwise it seems like that was the last hurrah, for whatever reason - cost, lack of volunteers, lack of interest, or even just being a victim of the internal strife that club went through in 2025.
Football Victoria also managed to produce match programs for the Dockerty and Nike FC Cup finals this year, albeit not available in print form; which is nevertheless an expansion on their efforts in 2024 (NPL and NPLW grand finals), and the years before that (nothing that I'm aware of). That's all a slightly long-winded way of saying that I have uploaded the three match programs related to South Melbourne that I'm aware of this year - Gully away, and the Dockerty and Nike FC Cup final programs.
It's a tough space but undervalued by clubs. A big reason I think has been the inability to capture data on readership. A website collects numbers for clicks which can be sold to sponsors and give produces a little dopamine hit. Programs on the other hand go out to the ether.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I think paid programs don't work (at NPL level for sure). Not just for the fact that there is not enough demand for them, but the cost barrier reduces readership and therefore impact. There is also a supply issue where payment processing is tough for independents (I'm not gonna carry an ATM machine), and clubs (gross margins are low and operationally it required a merch stand which not all clubs can staff).
That doesn't even touch on the grind of producing and editing content! The trust is the internet is faster and better bang for buck at face value for clubs.
HOWEVER the internet has massive failings. People don't read full articles, many clicks are meaningless, often constrained to home pages, and the platform (phones mostly) mean content is in competition with more engaging content. Readers simply won't read a club website when they can watch tiktoks instead.
The advantages of a program are - people who have one typically actually read the content, and it creates a physical momento/connection to the games.
Programs can work when they are either sponsored (unlikely) or seen as part of the marketing budget and distributed for free. Costs need to be low, glossies don't make sense anymore but lower quality print jobs can be economically efficient - plus with a bit of creativity can still pack a punch via design, colour and paper type.
Content can also be planned and generated ahead of time. You can even side step match specific content in issues (as people can see updates on phones) and simply provide a team list and fixture to satiate readers (which is half of what I did this year).
My experience this year has been enjoyable but towards the end of the year it became clear how much work it actually took. Operationally getting to grounds early and managing distribution is often the toughest and most stressful part.
Manny