On every measure – crowds, financial strength, TV rights money, and sponsorship – the AFL is winning the battle of the Australian football codes and pulling further away from its rivals. In 2015, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Sports, teaming with Seven West Media and Telstra, secured the rights to broadcast the AFL.
At a press conference announcing the six-year, record $2.5bn deal, the media magnate made his feelings clear about the appeal of league compared with Australian rules football. “We’ve always preferred Aussie rules and we’ve always believed this is the premium code in Australia.”
Our indigenous football code had come a long way in just three decades. Until the early 1980s, the nation’s premier Aussie rules competition – the Victorian Football League, based in Melbourne – had made little effort to stretch its boundaries any further than nearby Geelong. For almost a century the 12-team competition had limited itself to Melbourne teams based in the inner suburbs.
In 1981, though, the VFL made its first tentative steps interstate, when South Melbourne proposed to play 11 home games in Sydney the following season. The Swans had been in trouble for years. They’d reached the finals only twice since World War II, in 1970 and 1977, and were heavily in debt in the face of shrinking crowds and declining membership. South’s board of directors said the Sydney option was the club’s “only chance of survival and revival as a force in the VFL”, but there was widespread opposition to the move from among the club’s supporters.
Despite the protests, the 11 home games in Sydney went ahead. The club then moved permanently to the harbour city in 1983, changing its name to Sydney Swans. The early years proved challenging, though, with the new club struggling to carve out a niche for itself, as crowds at the Sydney Cricket Ground regularly dipped below 10,000.
In the mid-1980s, the travails of the Sydneysiders had been far from the only problem facing the VFL. The league was in financial dire straits, with eight of the 12 clubs technically bankrupt. But in spite of the Swans’ difficulties in attracting fans in the rugby league heartland, the VFL had decided it needed to become more national in focus.
Transformation began in earnest in 1987. Two years earlier, a poll had been conducted in Melbourne that indicated just 40% support for the addition of teams from Western Australia and Queensland to the Victorian league. The general sporting public were warming to the idea, though, and in 1987 support was up to 67%.
Two new teams, the Brisbane Bears and the West Coast Eagles – from Perth – were added to the competition for the 1987 season. There was considerable opposition from other clubs in the league about the addition of the two interstate teams, but the astute VFL Commission was able to placate much of the protest by sharing the substantial registration fee from the new clubs with the cash-strapped Melbourne clubs.
The introduction of the interstate clubs to the VFL – which was renamed the AFL in 1990 – helped re-energise the sport. From the start of 1991 the AFL approved the admission of the Adelaide Crows to the league, making Aussie rules the first of the Australian football leagues to have clubs from all five mainland capital cities.
The ongoing expansion of the league didn’t meet with universal approval, and the hostility from traditional Melbourne-based supporters reached a peak in 1992 when the West Coast Eagles became the first interstate team to win the flag. University professor and Collingwood diehard Ross Fitzgerald claimed the “dilution of the VFL” was a “sad day”. “Australian football is a tribal sport,” he said, “and tribalism cannot traverse state boundaries.”
The Victorian traditionalists were further saddened by the slow demise of the Fitzroy Football Club. Eight-time premiers – although the last was as long ago as 1944 – by the mid-1990s the Lions were on their last legs. A merger with near neighbours North Melbourne was on the cards in June 1996. To the disappointment of many Fitzroy and North supporters, the deal fell through and the only option left for the once-proud Fitzroy was to become the junior partner in a merger – AFL chief executive Ross Oakley undiplomatically described it as a corporate takeover – with Brisbane Bears.
The merger would work out well for the Queenslanders. In 2001, the renamed Brisbane Lions won their first premiership, and in 2003 became the first team in the national league to win the flag in three consecutive years. On each occasion, Brisbane celebrated its triumph the following morning at the Brunswick Street Oval, the traditional home of the Fitzroy Football Club. Some old-time Lions supporters had got on board with the merged club, while for others it was impossible to feel an emotional connection with the Queensland-based team.
The expansion of the AFL has continued apace since the Fitzroy merger, with teams from Fremantle, Port Adelaide, the Gold Coast and Western Sydney admitted to the competition in the past two decades. Club mergers and interstate expansion were still in their infancy in the mid-1990s, but these days the AFL need only point to the balance sheet to make its case. The continued commercial success of the sport and the league is its most potent weapon to its detractors and the ever-increasing value of the television deals struck by the AFL are solid evidence.
But it isn’t just on TV screens that Australian rules football flexes its muscles. AFL games now regularly attract twice the number of spectators of an NRL game, and almost three times more than an A-League or a Super Rugby match. The average attendance at an AFL game in 2016 was almost 32,000, making it the fourth-highest attended domestic sports league in the world.
Crowds of more than 50,000 regularly attend matches in Melbourne and Adelaide. By comparison rugby league is lucky to attract crowds of greater than 20,000 – except for Brisbane, where there is only one NRL team, and the Broncos’ average crowd is in excess of 30,000.
The AFL’s greater prowess in maintaining female interest is the key reason the sport is more successful than the NRL in attracting fans. Surveys show that 19% of women between the age of 15 and 24 had attended an AFL match in the preceding year, more than 50% higher than the 12% who said they’d watched a game of rugby league. The difference is even greater among older women. Fourteen per cent of females between the age of 55 and 64 said they’d watched an AFL match, more than four times more than the 3% who’d been to a rugby league game.
The success of the Australian rules women’s league is a further indicator of the sport’s appeal for the female half of the population. The eight-team AFLW was launched at the beginning of 2017, and in the opening round a massive 24,500 crowd attended the inaugural women’s match between traditional AFL foes Collingwood and Carlton. The AFLW made a huge splash in its first season, gaining massive media coverage, and the overall crowd average of 6,828 was impressive for the AFLW’s debut campaign.
Its success is further evidence, if it was required, that Australian rules football will be difficult to knock from its perch as the No1 football code in this country.
- This is an edited extract from The Fair and the Foul by David Hill, published by Penguin Random House Australia, RRP $34.99.
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