Of course, much of the apparent spectator apathy is relative. New Zealanders have never before enjoyed such rich access to live sport through a combination of flat screen and decoder.
There is less need to be at the ground when you can enjoy the sport in your living room where you don't pay through the nose for bad food and flat beer.
It doesn't help the cause when television bosses insist on night sport and sporting organisation chief execs obsequiously fall into line (at times even ludicrously suggesting that punters in winter prefer night sport).
So this has become very much the modern sporting dilemma: how do you cosy up to the broadcasters yet convince punters to come to the grounds?
We went to three crowd-challenged organisations for answers.
- Dylan Cleaver
Cricket
Competition:
Georgie Pie Super Smash
Average crowd size:
Official figures not yet known, but small
Ticket prices:
Yesterday's game at Hagley Oval was $10 for adults, free for kids, $3 for a parking pass
Pie Super Smash T20 series has drawn crowds numbering in the hundreds to grounds designed to hold ten of thousands of paying customers. Photo / Getty Images
Domestic cricket - now there are two words that rarely set the pulse racing.
Unfair? Probably, but there's no getting around the fact that domestic cricket is a hard sell. The Plunket Shield's popularity, in terms of bums on seats, was probably in the years immediately after World War II, while the one-day competition - the Ford Trophy in its current form - had some golden years in the 80s, but has become unloved and largely ignored.
Most worryingly, New Zealand Cricket's latest version of a T20 competition - the gastronomically inclined Georgie Pie Super Smash - seems as popular as nits.
In the first year of a ramped-up sponsorship deal, the competition has attracted television audiences in line with previous years and a bunch of good games, but the crowds have been conspicuous by their absence. At venues like Eden Park and Wellington's Cake Tin, it has been a desolate scene, with hundreds of humans strategically placed in stadiums built for tens of thousands.
Part of it has been blamed on the format, with a number of double-headers scheduled, meaning one of the two games will have no local interest. Countering that, tickets have been dirt cheap - depending on the venue $10-$15 for the two games.
"We think it's a good proposition," David Cooper, general manger of domestic cricket, said before the competition started. "We've been quite open this format is designed around TV.
"We think it's a time we can maximise our TV audience. At the moment 100,000-plus people are watching at home around the country, so we are conscious this is our new fan around T20. It's a balancing act around what we do at grounds."
Twenty-eight games will be screened live, a big jump on previous years, so mission partly accomplished but, close to a month into the competition, how do Cooper and his stakeholders feel about the concept, given that the shots beamed around the country serve to highlight masses of empty seats? "We'll never shy away from the fact that remains our biggest challenge," he said of getting people into the grounds.
New Zealand Cricket sets up what you could describe as an over-arching campaign, then it is up to the major associations to market the games to the local market. It is the major associations who are the beneficiaries of ground receipts.
Cooper said he had no definitive crowd figures yet, but his feeling was they might have improved slightly on where they were last year.
"I guess you could say we were at the point where we had to stop the decline, to staunch the bleeding, now we have to get people back.
"Part of that is working with the MAs [major associations] to make sure they're getting themselves out into the community."
It has to be said that New Zealand are not the only ones struggling to make cricket attractive to paying punters, although the fact they are struggling for crowds in T20, the most family friendly of the formats, is perhaps highlighting the issue.
Across the Tasman, there is plenty of navel-gazing in the corridors of Cricket Australia after a high-profile one-day series between long-time rivals and World Cup favourites Australia and South Africa attracted appalling crowds. Only 19,309 turned up to the cavernous Melbourne Cricket Ground, 11,495 to Sydney and the final dead-rubber fixture drew just 9037 in cricket-mad Brisbane.
While CA and NZC might be able to look at the rich broadcast rewards as a way of mitigating crowd angst, it is not as if the networks are thrilled by scenes of empty seats.
Said broadcaster Tim Lane in Melbourne's the Age: "We don't want the soulless look of big cricket games in empty stadiums here that we see in too many other cricket nations ... Crowds must be encouraged at any cost."
Cooper agrees with the sentiment and acknowledges that as a televisual spectacle, rows upon rows of empty seats at Eden Park and Westpac Stadium in particular present not only a challenge, but a dilemma.
"The stadiums may look terrible, but they actually attract more than would otherwise go. Would we get 4000 to Eden Park Outer Oval? I doubt it. So while it looks bad, it's possibly better than the alternative."
This is, in case you weren't aware, a World Cup season. In line with 50-over fever, NZC is throwing a lot of its marketing clout into the Ford Trophy, which will be played in holiday venues across the holiday season. It will be intriguing to see if this approach pays dividends. In that respect, the Georgie Pie Super Smash probably warrants a free pass this season.
Come 2015-16 however, nobody is in any doubt that they have to find a way of getting the turnstiles clicking.
- Dylan Cleaver
Phoenix
Competition:
A-League
Average home crowd size:
7526
Ticket prices:
$23 for an adult and $5 for a child for Sunday's game against Melbourne City at Westpac Stadium
Ben Sigmund of the Phoenix, gets the jump on a Western Sydney Wanderers player. Photo / Getty Images
The Wellington Phoenix are an easy target when it comes to crowds.
New Zealand's only A-League team play in the desolate-looking Westpac Stadium, where empty yellow seats are far too easy to spot.
They're averaging a league-low 7526 through the turnstiles at their home fixtures this season, which on the surface looks terrible - and arguably it is.
But perspective needs to be employed when you look at the numbers and crunch them a bit further.
The Phoenix play in a city that has a population of just under 400,000, whereas the Melbourne Victory, who lead the league for crowd average with 30,345, are based in a city with a population of four million.
"We would be getting 50,000 to 60,000 people going to Westpac Stadium if we got the same percentage of the population that [the] Sydney and Melbourne [teams] have got going to games," Phoenix general manager David Dome said.
Obviously Westpac Stadium has a capacity of only 34,500, but you can get the idea of where Dome is heading, while there is also one other factor to consider: the lack of travelling fans.
Some days you can count the opposition fans on your hand at Westpac Stadium, while a good turnout would be measured by the dozen. But in Australia, travelling fans can attend an interstate A-League game with relative ease.
Without making too many excuses for the Phoenix, they're aware that they need to improve their off-field performance.
During the club's best season in 2009-2010, when Paul Ifill was untouchable and former coach Ricki Herbert had the side humming, they averaged 11,576 for their home games, although that figure was bumped by a couple of well-attended playoff games.
For a code like football, the Phoenix know their win-loss record dictates who turns up or not, which is tough on the club given their administrators can't determine their results.
"There's nothing like a successful team, there's no doubt about it," Dome said. "But we can't bank on that so we've got to find other things that are going to interest them."
Those things might range from halftime entertainment to the match-day experience itself and Wellington will wear their alternate third strip for the only time this season on Sunday when they host Melbourne City.
A few of the shirts worn by the players will later be auctioned off, which Dome said would help generate discussion about the kit.
Since the Phoenix launched their pie-in-the-sky idea of building a boutique stadium in Petone - the idea was later shut down - some of their fans have wondered if part of their crowd woes problem is Westpac Stadium itself.
The Phoenix will be able to test that theory when they take three home games to a revamped Hutt Recreation Ground in Lower Hutt early next year because the Cake Tin is unavailable due to the Cricket World Cup.
The Hutt Rec will require temporary seating and have a capacity of about 9000 but that could change depending on demand.
- Daniel Richardson
Breakers
Competition:
Australian NBL
Average crowd size:
In the 4600-5000 bracket
Ticket prices:
Tonight's game against Sydney sees an adult ticket range between $16-$60
The Breakers have been in great form but that hasn't attracted the fans. Photo / Getty Images
They're winning again, their roster is filled with fan favourites and they're playing an exciting brand of basketball. So where are the crowds?
That's the questions the Breakers have been asking after their first five home games of the new Australian NBL campaign, with numbers down on both expectations and last year's uninspiring season.
Those five games have brought four wins and featured outstanding performances from the likes of Cedric Jackson, Corey Webster and Mika Vukona - but they've also seen large swathes of empty seats at Vector Arena.
The club have played four times at the downtown venue, with the other fixture coming at the smaller North Shore Events Centre, and it's important to note that every Vector crowd would have easily filled the smaller stadium across the Harbour Bridge.
Indeed, during the dark days at the Trusts Stadium in Waitakere and in Manukau's Events Centre, the idea of the Breakers averaging more than 4000 fans would have seemed unimaginable.
But crowd numbers have been significantly lower than the championship years, when the club set records by playing in front of almost twice as many spectators during the regular season.
"They've been a bit lower than we would've liked," said general manager Richard Clarke. "But we have noticed, across the board, that everyone is really battling to get numbers to live sport.
"There's a lot on and only so much money that families and people have to spend. It is a challenge but it's one that we keep working on."
Working in their favour - in addition to a winning team - is a game-night experience that rivals any in New Zealand sport, a family-friendly environment for both the basketball tragic and, importantly, the novice.
The Breakers have been proactive in appealing to as many people as possible, hoping to continue a trend from previous seasons when crowd numbers spiked after the festive season. Databases have been mined, schools have been frequented and communities have been contacted, all in the aim of attracting repeat business.
"It's making sure that we put on a great event and it's something that people, once they get exposed to once, do want to come back," Clarke said. "We don't get much, if any, feedback from people who say they didn't enjoy coming to a game, even if we don't win. So it's a matter then of how many times they come back."
Those who were unfortunate enough to catch one of the listless displays towards the end of last season, when the Breakers slumped to a second-from-bottom finish, may be harder to entice back. That hangover was one potential factor in fewer fans showing up - Clarke acknowledged that the team needed to win back the public's trust - but the Breakers have also been victims of unforeseen circumstances.
Shortly after announcing in the offseason that they would take an unprecedented 10 of 14 home games to Vector Arena, the league confirmed a new compressed schedule that left the Breakers with just 20 weeks in which to sell those regular season tickets.
"Because there's so many games now in a compressed period, there's the luxury of saying, 'I'm not going to go to this one but I'll go next week'," Clarke said. "So that frequency has been a bit of an issue for us.
"We're continuing to evaluate [the 10-4 Vector split].
"Obviously the compressed season will give us some questions on that, but also we'll see what happens over the back end of the season. There's still a lot of the season to go so we'll just see how things run."
- Kris Shannon
