If I tell you AFL will never, ever be the Number 1 sport in Australia will you inject me with horse peptides?
Ok, that's a bit unfair, I'm not an AFL team looking to circumvent the notion of fair play and the sporting ethic this country is built on in order to win a competition viewed, played and populated largely from, by and in Victoria, but my sentiment doesn't change. Trust me, I haven't tried much at all to alter it.
I haven't bothered watching a game of AFL in person, even with free tickets to pretty much any game in Sydney being available to anyone with even the slightest interest (or disinterest to be honest) in AFL. I have seen a few games on TV (where AFL doesn't measure up in any way as a television sport compared to Rugby League let alone Football), and once tried playing it in school (although I must admit that since everyone got bored after 10 minutes and switched to playing football or league it wasn't the best introduction).
Yes, AFL is (probably) the most popular team sport in Victoria.
Yes, AFL is played in over 2.5 states of Australia.
But show me someone who hasn't found it dead boring at some stage and I'll show you someone who thinks the AFL was telling the truth about their dodgy Auskick numbers in NSW a few years back.
There's a reason that out of the major sporting codes in Australia, it is the AFL with the lowest international reach. The reasons are clear to me.
You might be guaranteed a score if you watch a game of AFL, but only because the goals are so wide and infinitely high. Anyone with even mediocre talent can score. However, even the supposed "elite" of the AFL can
I understand suggesting the Victorian game will never beat Football anywhere in Australia but some areas of Melbourne will be upsetting to those who live in Melbourne, but let's look at the facts.
AFL is a game built on people who if they want to be any good, must set their sights on leaving the outer suburbs of Melbourne to make their way to the big smoke of the inner suburbs of Melbourne. There is only one top flight professional level of AFL across the entire planet, which to me begs the following question: If the AFL is the only top flight league, is it actually a 'top flight' or just the equal worst professional league? Just what is the reward for this gruelling and epic journey along the Melbourne equivalent of the M4? An average yearly salary of $251,559.
No matter the talent an AFL player has, they spend the majority of their time traipsing around Melbourne, with a handful of trips to AFL's far flung global outposts to play against GWS or the Brisbane Bears. Occasionally a 'big name' will make a move to Sydney or Brisbane, but this is generally so the player can live their life in complete and total obscurity to the general population of their new home. The level of athleticism required for AFL is so minor that people who haven't ever played AFL at a high level can switch from another sport and still make millions while being immediately deposited into the 'top flight' of AFL.
Of course, Victorian white guy #1, Victorian white guy #2, Adam Goodes & Victorian white guy #3 show kids everywhere that they too can aspire to be an "All Australian" and lose to a team of amateur (unpaid) Irishmen in a mutant abomination of Gaelic Football and Modified Victorian Gaelic Handegg.
Match attendance is the AFL fan's immediate counter to the notion their sport is unpopular, doomed to fail or simply boring, but crowd averages are on the wane, having fallen by 6,000 over the last few years. Even in the so called 'top flight' of the AFL, GWS, the newest team, launched with a $200 million warchest, have 8 official crowds of under 7000 in only three years. Considering the thousands of free tickets available, their actual paid attendance would be lucky to hit 2000.
Football has grown massively according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics latest research, with participation rates for males aged 5-14 growing from 265,500 in 2006, to 277,800 in 2009 and all the way up to 309,700 in 2012. Compare this to AFL, which includes dodgy Auskick figures in their tallies, and still fell from 2009 with 223,700 down to 212,700 in 2012. Clearly the sports mad young men of Australia are choosing with their feet to play football. Participation among females aged 5-14 is an astounding success for Football, with 87,800 participators in 2012 compared to AFL's 13,800 (which once again includes dodgy Auskick figures).
While the biggest AFL teams will always be the same teams, playing against the exact same other teams year in and year out, Football provides opportunities to see global superstars play in Australia as well as to see our best challenged by the best of countries like Japan, Korea, China & Saudi Arabia, and for Australia as a nation to play in global tournaments such as the Asian Cup & World Cup.
Attendance and global reach isn't the only reason why Football is the better sport. AFL culture runs counter to the Australian ethos of fair play and this includes the private lives of AFL players, with the so called "God" of AFL, Gary Ablett Senior, being responsible for giving heroin, ecstasy & amphetamines to a 19 year old woman named Alicia Horan, who subsequently died of a drug overdose in his hotel room.
The idea of taking dives, king hitting opponents, using performance enhancing peptides, match fixing, or giving starstruck teenagers illegal drugs is just too unpalatable for many bought up on the sense of fair play that Football provides, but that we see time and time again in AFL.
While I'm not a parent, I completely understand those who avoid the disgraceful un-Australian ethos of the sport of AFL and those who play it and instead jump at the chance to play the World Game, the Beautiful Game, the true Australian game of Football.
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