With the new Super Netball season starting this weekend, Australia’s best netballers are gearing up for another year of competition.
After a difficult few seasons leading into last year, netball has been branded as anything from experiencing a ‘crisis’ to a ‘dying’ sport.
The rise of female sister leagues to the traditionally male-dominated football codes of rugby league, Australian rules and soccer has seen netball face competition for talent, supporters and media attention in a way that it hasn’t before.
However, in the face of a changing landscape that dismantled its largely unchallenged dominance of the women’s sports market in Australia, Netball Australia has pivoted to new strategies in an attempt to maintain their market leadership.
Increased social media promotion of matches has led to a massive uptick in match attendance, with figures in 2024 well up on both 2023 and pre-pandemic numbers, according to Super Netball.
In 2024, an average of 6,097 people attended Super Netball games, a record for the sport, while the Grand Final sold out with 9,694 people packing into the Adelaide Entertainment Centre.
Perth franchise West Coast Fever alone drew a total of 67,080 fans through the turnstiles at RAC Arena over the course of the season, for an average of 9,583 per game, with a league-record 11,841 fans attending their round 14 clash against the Melbourne Mavericks.
Super Netball average crowd trends 2019-2024 (Note: attendance data nor released for COVID-19 Pandemic affected seasons in 2020 and 2021)
However, alongside the massive attendance growth, Netball Australia signed a controversial television rights deal in 2022 which saw the Super Netball competition move from free-to-air coverage on the Nine Network to Fox Sports and Kayo.
Although the move secured the financial future of the game at a time of uncertainty following the COVID-19 Pandemic, and gave dedicated fans a new platform to access games both live and on-demand, the shift to subscription television locked out the growing casual audience that had driven massive ratings growth in previous years, especially for the competition’s Grand Finals.
Super Netball Grand Final TV ratings 2019-2022 (Note: data not provided by Foxtel or OzTam for 2023-24 matches)
After peaking at 930,000 viewers in 2020, television ratings for the Super Netball Grand Final went into freefall after the Fox/Kayo deal, with only 170,000 tuning in for the 2022 decider, with Foxtel subsequently deciding to no longer publish ratings figures for the past two seasons.
However, there is a plan in place to arrest the decline in television viewership, with Foxtel agreeing to add games to its BINGE platform in addition to Foxtel and Kayo, with a view to market the sport to its 1.5 million subscribers.
Two games per week will again also be shown for free on the Kayo Freebies model run by Kayo, which allows viewers to access the games by creating a free account with their email address.
With regard to these successes and plans to tackle the challenges, there is an overall sense of optimism amongst players at both Super Netball level and in feeder systems.
Redlands Coast Eagles in Queensland’s HART Premier League for the Queensland Firebirds, Chloe Arnold said that players have noticed an increase in public interest in the game in recent years.
“With my competition, the home games have really been upped on social media, especially when they’re in the Sunshine Coast or the Gold Coast, they’ve booked out all the tickets which has been really good to see,” she said.
“Leading into [Premier League] finals as well at Nissan Arena in Brisbane they’ve booked out a lot of stands as well, which is where the Firebirds play.
“I think for Suncorp [Super Netball also], the crowds have come alive in the last year or so.”
Total season attendance for the competition has been trending upward long term (Note: attendance data not published during the COVID-19 Pandemic affected seasons of 2020 and 2021)
With the game facing challenges with decreased ticket sales during the COVID-19 Pandemic and the loss of a $15 million sponsorship deal with Hancock Prospecting in 2022, commentators surrounding the sport were predicting its downfall could be near.
However, with the sport on the rise once again in many key metrics, Arnold said that there is a greater sense of stability amongst the playing ranks regarding the sport as a career and income security.
“Around that time, I think it [morale] was a bit dead because of the COVID stance to start with and then [a major] sponsor pulling out,” she said.
“Netball doesn’t [generate] that much money obviously compared to other sports that are growing more, have more time to grow, and have men playing as well.
“It should be interesting [over] the next few years, I think the girls are feeling a bit more secure.
“I haven’t heard too [many] about worrying about the pay and stuff like that.”
The dawn of a new Super Netball season offers another chance for growth for the sport, one that broke attendance records in 2024, just two years after some sounded the death knell for a game in ‘crisis’.
