A-League aims to KEEPUP with rival codes in $30 million digital push

After years of feeling threatened by football’s more popular overseas competitions and struggling with its identity in the local sports landscape, the A-League is changing tack.

The Australian Professional Leagues, which owns the A-League men’s, women’s and youth competitions, last week launched KEEPUP, a digital app and website that it hopes will convert the 8 million football fans in Australia into advocates for Australia’s domestic tournaments. It is the centrepiece of the APL’s ambitious plans to grow the A-League, having secured legal and operational independence from the sport’s governing body, Football Australia, at the start of the year.

KEEPUP is financially risky move – the league says a staggering $30 million has been invested in its creation. But if successful, it could be transformational for a sport which has struggled for years to build a strong local fan base in comparison with bigger, richer codes like the AFL and NRL.

“This is a conversion play,” A-Leagues chief commercial officer Ant Hearne said. “There’s over 8 million people who identify as football fans in Australia. Our challenge is that only about half of them put up their hand and say they’re interested in A-Leagues and only about 1.5 million of them are avid fans.

“In the past we’ve seen the global games as a bit of a threat to us because we don’t control the EPL, we don’t control Bundesliga. We’ve said that if they’re fans of that, then they’re not fans of us. We got caught into this hole where we didn’t give a strong enough identity to A-Leagues. And when you leave a gap, people fill it. In our case, they’re filling it with the incomparable – the European leagues.”

The KEEPUP website and app will provide breaking news, expert columns, in-depth features and analysis, not just on the A-League but also the EPL, La Liga, Serie A and UEFA’s club competitions. The aim is to encourage Australian fans of those leagues to also begin following the men’s and women’s editions of the A-League.

It’s also an e-commerce platform, allowing people to buy tickets to games, jerseys from their favourite teams or club memberships. The KEEPUP team, which will grow to 50 across editorial, production and social media, is led by Richard Bayliss, Optus’ former director of sport.

A-Leagues managing director Danny Townsend said that Bayliss would ensure the hub kept editorial independence.

“Day one of the launch we had two A-League CEOs complaining about criticism on our platform. This is all about being authentic and you can’t have a propaganda site,” he says. “Football fans are extremely discerning and the minute they see something that is not authentic … they’ll call that out.”