Remember those NAB “Footy-fying Australia” ads from a few years ago?
Everyone was passing on footy knowledge to new people, before it went full circle and a taxi driver explained how the boundary line works to a smirking Joel Selwood.
They were part of the sonic campaign to try to grow the game, as the heads of the sport like to put it.
The game needed growing, the country needed to be footified. Certainly some parts of it did: the heartland of rugby league, for instance.
Where better to put a new team than the untapped market of Greater Western Sydney? What better opportunity was there to convert such a large swath of fans?
It stuck in Andrew Demetriou’s guts, and many more guts I’m sure, what an NRL hive it was.
After all, it is AFL against the world when it comes to other sports.
In the numbers game, the AFL enjoyed a 130,000-point victory in Grand Final ratings last year, passing the 3.5 million mark while the NRL fell short of 3.4 million.
It was a truly grand victory for the AFL, with champagne no doubt delivered to AFL House by the vat, while Sydney and Brisbane newspapers sulked it was a victory for Channel 7 over Channel 9 rather than AFL over NRL.
Juvenile cries of “at least our entertainment was better!” could be heard echoing from Cairns to Wagga Wagga (Macklemore trumped The Killers for ratings by 1.37 million to 1.04 million), but only prompted AFL-ites to query if that meant people only liked NRL for the additional, surrounding hoopla.
Operation New South Wales has been going okay.
Despite a current form slump, local interest in the Giants has gone from minimal to tepid, and as Dylan Shiel, Callan Ward and Stephen Coniglio continue to run and gun GWS all the way to a maiden premiership, there is no reason why their popularity can’t go from tepid to lukewarm, or even moderate.
Meanwhile the Swans are keeping people interested, what with their being perennial top-8 fixtures in the last 15 or so years.
Cricket used to be a friend of AFL, sharing grounds, and even players sometimes. Football clubs were actually invented in the first place as a way of keeping cricketers fit in the winter.
Now they’re bickering over the playing surfaces – such as the ‘Gabba, which the inaugural AFLW Grand Final would have been played at but for a “rogue curator”.
They’re bickering over the services of young teenagers who should just be enjoying sport (see James Sutherland, Alex Keith, Alex Carey for starters).
They’re bickering over the month of February, as their respective grotesque monstrosities, Big Bash League and AFLX, both apparently demand centre stage, by dint of their sheer existence, not to mention the far more worthwhile AFLW.
I’ve made my point then: sports are competing feverishly for popularity. My question is simply this: why?
It’s hardly a new complaint to level at Gillon McLachlan, but there are dyed-in-the-wool AFL communities that appear to be, on the whole, neglected.
Tasmania has always been a footy state, but when the AFL schedule matches there, the games served are generally unappealing, with this year's clash between North Melbourne and Carlton one of the most unwatchable games of the season after the Roos comfortably dispatched the Blues by 86 points.
They don’t have their own side because it isn’t “financially viable” - the hundreds of millions of dollars the AFL found to build Gold Coast with must have all been spent by now.
18 teams seems like too many now anyway, so maybe a Tasmanian side may not even work.
But with participation numbers down at junior level, and less player representation in the AFL than ever, it is a state in actual needed of footifying.
So why are we trying to grow the game in China and India?
Why is it so important to worm our way into Queensland and New South Wales and try to pick off NRL supporters one by one?
I wouldn’t qualify as an ardent rugby fan, but I don’t want to be at war with an entire sporting code, and we don’t need to be.
We have this amazingly unique, quirky little sport.
In Victoria we devour it, while most other places in the world wouldn’t know Dustin Martin from Dustin Fletcher. I don’t necessarily see anything wrong with that.
The AFL industry is a multi-billion dollar enterprise, and it’s hardly in a bad place right now.
We have unprecedented access to players, and certain marquee players such as Patrick Dangerfield take it upon themselves to give as much of themselves to the football public as they can.
Even the enigma, Dustin Martin, has come out of his shell recently.
The game is booming.
The last two premierships have been fairy tales surpassing the most fantastical dreams of tragic supporters, and struggling teams entered 2018 thinking “why not us this year?’ This was admittedly foolish in some cases, but it speaks to the health of the game.
I wonder what the endgame is for the AFL.
Most people expect that when the dust settles, the China experiment will be viewed as a failure, but what if it isn’t?
Suppose that AFL actually takes off in India and China. Do Gillon and his team have ambitions to rival soccer in decades’ time, and steal their self-appointed title of the world game?
However fantastical premierships to the Bulldogs and Tigers may have seemed, this is another level of a dream, surpassing ambition and reaching delusional.
Global domination seems an obscene thing to suggest, but it really is the only motivation I can see for the CEO trying to reach out to the world – particularly India, as China was in large part the brainchild of Port Adelaide.
The AFL does not need India. It has enough money, enough of a following already.
It doesn’t need AFLX, which has been dubbed the Big Bash of footy. Look how well cricket is doing right now!
The AFL trying to copy cricket would be like Lance Franklin asking Callum Sinclair for advice on playing in the forward line.
What the AFL needs right now is not to grow.
As a sport, it’s already fully grown, an adult, with as much history as any competition on the planet.
The game has won: it has a huge, passionate following, and it’s here to stay.
The AFL train is roaring. It just needs to be kept on the tracks.
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