I have no idea if this is the case for Canberra, but many people only actively support one or two clubs. Toulouse is one of the largest cities in France, yet it can't fill its football stadium on weekends because people there are more interested in rugby. LA doesn't field an NFL team because the attendance wasn't enough the last time they tried (people prefer baseball and basketball there). Maybe most people in Canberra already have their n°1 sports team ?
Missed this earlier - Australia's got a completely regionally fragmented football landscape. You'd be familiar with that given the way France is split between a soccer-predominant north and rugby being strong mostly in the south.
The difference however is that soccer isn't the major sport anywhere here (you may have noticed we're
not good at soccer the way we are at say, rugby). Australia is split into two. In
the book I helped write we drew the line like this:
The north/east is the predominantly Rugby League half (with rugby union as a much smaller niche sport mostly for the upper class) centred on Sydney and Brisbane, then the southern states ie Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth and Tasmania, are all dominated by Australian Rules Football (the AFL). The north/east has about 5% more of the national population.
There's 9 AFL teams in Melbourne and 8 Rugby League teams in Sydney, because both national competitions originated as local competitions and expanded from those cities, adding teams from elsewhere. Crossing that dividing line is hard - there's four AFL teams in the northeast, but two are very new and speculative expansions. In the southwest there is only one Rugby League and Rugby Union team in in Melbourne and currently nothing anywhere else.
Now. Canberra sits more or less in the transition area between the two zones, but has tilted more towards the Rugby codes since it got a League team in the 1980s and a Union team in the 1990s. It's still got a big AFL presence, and is best described as a "mixed" city due to the continuous influx of workers from both Sydney and Melbourne. However we don't have an AFL team. Instead, Canberra hosts some home games played by the new Sydney club.
What about soccer? So soccer is a niche sport
everywhere, historically especially associated with migrant communities, and competing against bigger established clubs everywhere. While it's more popular in New South Wales (in Sydney and the satellite cities spreading north of there to Newcastle especially) and has great youth participation figures, as an elite spectator sport it's not the predominant or most popular sport anywhere in Australia.
The entire elite tier of soccer was only established in 1977, collapsed completely in 2004 after pretty much constant turmoil and turnover in participants, and was reconstituted 18 months later in its tightly organised and highly centralised current form, with an explicit goal of purging Australian soccer of its previous ethnic character by excluding clubs with ethnic origins and encouraging lower tier clubs to shed their identity markers while banning new ones (I count clubs in the current second tier in different states with Italian, Greek, Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian, Albanian, Turkish, Cypriot, Dutch, Polish, Ukrainian and Jewish roots and I'm also aware of Spanish, Maltese, German and Hungarian clubs at lower tiers). Collapse and centralised total overhaul is not something you see happen with the major sports.
Compared to the big Rugby League and AFL comps, soccer is far smaller. The broadcast deal is maybe 1/10th the revenue, about $60m vs $600m and $400m per year, and the salary cap is $2.6m vs the AFL's $12m and Rugby League's $9m. Attendances are low, for the AFL they are about 35k per game, for Rugby League about 15k per game (but with some much bigger ones and a big TV audience) while for the A-League they're about 10k with the majority of clubs being below that average.
These comparatively low operating costs, the stability gained by the absence of relegation, and especially
playing mostly in summer when there's no other football are the key to why elite soccer clubs are able to sustain themselves even in very crowded and contested markets. Until the last 6 or 8 weeks of the A-League season the only thing soccer really competes with is cricket which for a few reasons isn't really a direct competitor to the A-League.
