It’s been a pretty crappy offseason for AFL commissioner Andrew Demetriou. First, he tried to move the Kangaroos from North Melbourne to the Gold Coast and was summarily rebuffed and called mean names by nice old ladies. Then he announced plans to expand the AFL to 18 clubs with new additions on the Gold Coast and Western Sydney. Not only did he get AFL club presidents questioning the speed of this move, but he’s gotten the rugger buggers really, really pissed off.
Gold Coast Titans boss Michael Searle has attacked the Australian Football League’s expansion plans, labelling the AFL “cannibals” and vowing to fight to protect his team’s turf. …
He said the AFL’s aggressive attempt to make its presence felt in the region was the greatest challenge facing his (National Rugby League) club and he intended to be pro-active in repelling its advances.
“The AFL is aggressively trying to expand into traditional rugby league markets and we have to be equally aggressive in defending and growing our game,” Searle said. “The AFL has shown itself as a sport that wants to cannibalise. It doesn’t want to co-exist.
“I have great respect for what the Brisbane Lions have achieved in the past 10 years and feel for them in the predicament this will put them in, having to share revenue in a finite market. This battle has just begun, but we must have a plan that will counteract what the AFL is trying to achieve.”
To understand why this is a big deal, you have to understand the concept of club membership, which appears to be very unique to Aussie sports. These clubs don’t just want fans to buy tickets, walk in, cheer and leave like most American sports owners do. They want these supporters to feel like they’re involved in the success of the club itself — and with their financial support, they often are. Membership gets you special ticketing privileges, voting rights within the club, lots of free and discount gear, and the general feeling of being part of a very large family.
(This explains why the Sydney Swans supporter I spoke with at the Grand Final party in Raleigh would kiss the Swans logo on his cap in the middle of every other sentence. The membership system makes the Swans really feel like his club.)
Of course, the catch is that membership costs money, and Aussie sports fans only have so much of that. As Ando points out over at the AFL Footy Blog, lots of sports radio callers in Melbourne have said they can only afford one club membership, and they find themselves having to choose between the Melbourne Victory and their AFL club. So while the A-League and AFL schedules don’t compete with each other, the clubs themselves do.
Thus, the NRL is pissed off that the AFL is trying to encroach on their territory, because suddenly, they have to compete with them for members in markets that were exclusively theirs. That might be the main reason these football codes keep sparring with each other. It’s not enough to say that your code is superior — you have to convince your members to put the other code down so that they can help you sell more memberships.
As all these football leagues seek to expand, the battle for members will only grow more fierce every year, and old ladies will find even more entertaining words to describe Andrew Demetriou. References to roosters and lollipops grow more likely every day.
5 responses so far ↓
1 Will // Feb 28, 2008 at 2:07 pm
Dave,
I don’t follow AFL very closely, but stories like this are exactly why I come to this blog. It’s just so interesting to see how entities in different countries that, in the BIIIG picture, do almost exactly the same thing can do it so many different ways.
I wonder (though not for too long, knowing how the business of sports usually works) if AFL honchos ever considered approaching the Rugby League owners to see if they would be interested in expanding their clubs’ offerings to include an Aussie rules side, a la the Basketball and other teams run by clubs like Real Madrid, Panathinaikos, Barcelona, etc.
2 Dave // Feb 28, 2008 at 2:45 pm
Thanks, Will.
I suspect you won’t see much interaction between the AFL and NRL clubs for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that the two seasons run simultaneously, they require different types of stadiums, and there’s plenty of deep-seated resentment between the two codes.
However, this would seem much more possible with the AFL and the A-League, because their seasons are in different times of the year, and they could share resources and members much more easily. It’s a delicate balance, though, because half the AFL is based in or near Melbourne, which has only one A-League club, and fans of the Perth Glory might be split between the Eagles and Dockers on the AFL side.
So while combining two codes into one club seems possible, it’s really, really unlikely to happen anytime soon.
3 Ando // Feb 28, 2008 at 8:36 pm
Once again Dave, Great Post.
The AFL are certainly not making any friends in the other footballing codes in Australia. Club Memberships are definately the number 1 priority for most AFL Clubs and are a huge indicator of where the clubs are at finacially and bring in a lot of revenue.
Placing more footballing codes in certain areas in Australia will definately cause the general public to make a choice between which clubs they are going to buy a membership for, meaning someone may struggle to gain the membership numbers they require.
4 Sean // Feb 28, 2008 at 10:42 pm
Dave, you would have been right about soccer and AFL 10 years ago.
Back then Collingwood and Carlton, with big Italian and Greek supporter bases, experimented with entering sides in the old National Soccer League, called the “Collingwood Warriors” and “Carlton SC” (Soccer club because Carlton FC is the name of the Aussie Rules club). These clubs lasted a few seasons in the old NSL back when it drew small crowds and support.
But these days, even with the comps run in different seasons, the AFL and NRL both see soccer as a direct threat. Since the NSL became A-League “new football”, pushed heavily for soccer to be officially called football (the majority of Australians call it soccer) and shed its ethnic rivalries for a franchise based national competition, and following the Socceroos World Cup performance its crowds have increased by over 100%, such that it now draws similar attendances to the National Rugby League.
The AFL a couple of years back controversially refused to publish an advertisement paid for by Football Federation Australia announcing the A-League Grand Final in the AFL Record (the official gameday publication read by many AFL supporters). I think this is the point when it became obvious that the AFL and its clubs would no longer co-operate in any way shape or form with FFA.
Having said that, while I don’t think it makes sense for a club like the Titans who have been around for only a couple of years to back a bid for an AFL franchise, it could be really interesting to see a more established, heavily supported NRL club like the Penrith Panthers or Parramatta Eels to back an AFL club in Western Sydney. In fact, the Campbelltown Football Club in the Sydney Football League (Aussie Rules comp) was actually aligned with the Penrith Panthers for a few years back in 2000 and played as the Campbelltown Panthers. There were also two Balmain Tigers, one rugby league and one Aussie Rules until recently. The fact that this new franchise is to be backed aggressively by the AFL makes it highly unlikely that anything like this would ever happen again.
5 Lossy // Mar 1, 2008 at 2:00 am
Hi Dave, all. Nice site. Love the mix.
Here in NZ there aren’t memberships like in Aussie, just season tickets, but the factionalism is still there. Being a small country there’s also only so much sports sponsorship, and so many patrons to go around, so you compete with all forms of entertainment for discretionary spend.
The Warriors’ (NRL team) former CEO and parent company Cullen Sports once were looking at taking a Pasifika rugby team into the then Super 12 and possibly Tri-Nations. The team would likely have been based at the Warriors home ground and discussions were at IRB level.
All sides pretty much spat the dummy due to the possible rugby/rugby league conflict. Warriors fans in particular were furious at the owner dabbling in the other code. Parramatta CEO Dennis Fitzgerald also looked at a super 12 franchise in Aussie and met a similar death.
The history of the codes – as your FAQ’s say is part of that, but further, rugby is dominant in NZ and there are still current players who got expelled from school for choosing club league over their school’s First IV.
However, the Melbourne Storm has an amicable relationship with their nearest AFL clubs, because they are propped up by News Limited and aren’t seen as a commercial threat… yet. The Auckland Blues and the Warriors NRL team have cross-trained together over previous pre-season schedules, and the Counties-Manukau provincial rugby team shares the Warriors’ home ground for the national competition.
So it’s not all tooth and nail.