Nine drops AFL Footy Show after eight rounds of 2019 season
Nine has announced it has ceased production on The Footy Show.
The news comes just eight episodes into the show’s 2019 season and twenty five years after it debuted on Nine.
The show first aired in 1994 and was Australia’s longest-running sports entertainment program with 735 shows. At the beginning of 2019 it went through a dramatic overhaul, with new hosts Neroli Meadows, Anthony Lehmann and wheelchair tennis star Dylan Alcott joining as Eddie McGuire and Sam Newman left the program.
The show slumped to 53,000 viewers in Melbourne last week, the lowest in its history, and just 97,000 metro viewers overall.
Comparatively, Seven’s The Front Bar pulled 278,000 viewers in Melbourne and 427,000 metro on the same evening. It also had its strongest national performance of the season last night, with 462,000 metro viewers and 606,000 nationally.
Nine’s Melbourne managing director Matt Scriven paid tribute to the hosts and crew on Thursday evening.
“I want to thank the current hosts, Anthony Lehmann, Neroli Meadows, Dylan Alcott, Brendan Fevola and Shane Crawford, the former hosts of The Footy Show, and the hard working crew for their great contribution,” said Scriven.
“It is with regret that The Footy Show will no longer be produced. It has been a tough decision to end the program that has been such a trailblazer, but sadly the new show has not captured audiences in the way we had hoped.
“Over the past three decades Nine has led the way with AFL entertainment and news programs and we will continue to do so, with the production of the award-winning Footy Classified and the Sunday Footy Show.
“We remain committed to the AFL and creating great AFL content, and we will continue to focus on new ways to engage audiences who love the code.”
Nine axed its NRL Footy Show in October 2018 as the show dropped to 78,000 and 51,000 viewers in Sydney and Brisbane respectively.
rude, crude, and often nude. the show had no place on TV in modern australia
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Rude, crude & nude is what delivered the ratings, consistently. As soon as that was curbed, in response to the perpetually outraged PC brigade, so was the enthusiasm from the viewing audience. This audience naturally migrated to The Front Bar with it’s no frills and no bullshit approach, just three humorous footy fans with authentic chemistry taking the piss out of everything including each other – eureka!
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I remember The Footy Show used to be first with the teams for the weekend. I tuned in for the team information and stayed for the interviews.
Today; without information, interviews or insight – I have a lot of other places to go (including The Front Bar) to get this. This was the demise of the show. Readers of The Oz have a different view though…(as evidenced by the comments under the story on The Oz website)
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Back in the day of running through the games, they always used to cover the Non-Melbourne based teams games last in the running order. Wonder if that caused a long term hit to national ratings.
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100% correct.
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Let’s not forget… 9 made an award winning AFL show, without having access to AFL match content, other than that covered in their Limited News content sharing agreements.
This bugged the heck out of Seven, who for decades, had unlimited access to AFL content, yet only until recently, could kick a goal with their AFL show.
True testament to the creative ability of TV producers and management who also listened to what viewers wanted to see as ‘entertainment’ in their program content.
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Good that this has been taken off air. No place for it on Australian channels.
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