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Perth Scorchers emerged as winners of BBL06, along with Australian fans of the entertaining series.
By HAYDEN WAUGH
After a stellar 2016/17 summer of cricket and in just its sixth season, Australia’s Big Bash League (BBL) has become the fifth-most attended sports league in the world.
The league has risen from seventh position, overtaking Japan’s baseball league (NBP Japan) and the USA’s Major League Baseball (MLB).
The Australia-based Twenty20 competition still trails such competitions as the National Football League (NFL) and Germany’s premier football division, the Bundesliga.
Cricket Australia CEO James Sutherland said, in addition to the strong TV ratings and digital engagement, the increase in attendance showed the continued and growing support of the various forms of cricket in Australia.
“The interest in the elite level of our game, is also translating to our grassroots, where we are already seeing an increase in our preliminary participation figures compared to last season,” he said.
“The BBL and Women’s Big Bash League (WBBL) players in particular are helping to inspire the next generation through their ongoing fan engagement and brilliant action on the field.”
Not only were 20 of the 35 matches in the 2016/17 Big Bash League sold out, membership numbers also grew by nearly a third. This accounted for a staggering increase of over 48,000 new members across all BBL clubs.
Based on average attendance provided by SportingIntelligence.com, 30,114 people came through the gates to each match of the BBL's sixth season. This fell marginally short of the AFL’s 2016 figures, currently the fourth-most attended sports code, sitting at an average of 31,878 people per game.
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Young families were attracted to BBL games.
Teams based in Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Hobart, and eventual champions the Perth Scorchers, all recorded capacity crowds during the season.
Cricket Australia senior communications manager Tim Whittaker said a consistently steady entry fee and diverse entertainment, in addition to “big hits, big stars and a lot of action”, showed this brand of cricket was here to stay.
“There were a couple of innovations [last season], like at Etihad Stadium where they had jumbo Trolls hanging from the roof, and the Crusty Demons were a big hit as well,” he said.
“We’re really trying to target a new audience with this kind of cricket and we’re finding that we’re getting a lot of younger families coming in now.”
The Twenty20 format has added a new dimension to cricket at a time when popularity for more traditional forms of the game, like One Day Internationals, is dwindling. Twenty20 Cricket has introduced a faster pace to a traditional game, demanding more effort from its players with bowling and batting Power Plays.
Twenty20 Cricket has encouraged other sports to tweak traditional formulas. Fast4 Tennis has introduced four-game sets and deuce game points, Fast5 Netball has reduced team numbers and double score power plays, and Nitro Athletics has presented a team-based competition. These innovations have kept sport fresh and filled the stands.
Overall attendance for BBL06 surged by 8 per cent compared to the previous season, and played host to an average TV audience of 1.04 million people.
Exposure for the WBBL has also showed improvement. Its second season saw more than 121,000 cricket fans pass through the turnstiles across all games, averaging 239,000 viewers for all 12 matches – an increase of nearly 60 per cent, according to the ABC.