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Globalisation, it has often been stated, will negatively affect national and lower businesses and sports such as football, and more specifically the AFL. It has been said that national businesses such as the AFL will lose support because there are more choices for entertainment for people to choose from.
It has also been thought that because Australia has a small population, that it will eventually get caught up in the travelling of people between countries and that its culture, being insignificant, will be absorbed into the masses, never to be differentiated again.
The Australian government’s strong reaction to the racist White Australia Policy, the multiculturalism policy, has sped up the process of absorbing the Australian culture into the masses. But does Australia’s own very unique version of football have to go with it?
Globalisation is not automatically required to have a negative effect on AFL.
It is a tool for leverage, and if the AFL, and football, in general can use this leverage to their advantage, globalization may just turn out to be the one ingredient needed for the sport to go truly international.
There are many positives to gained for AFL from globalisation.
Experts are predicting that with high speed internet being rolled out over the world, television signals transmitted across the atmosphere air may be a thing of the past, and instead televisions will be hooked up to the internet.
These experts say that this will most likely mean that television networks such as BBC, CNN, and CBS will go global (this is already happening in some form on pay-tv).
This means that the AFL would have access to every internet television in the world, rather than every television with signal from a station showing the AFL. While they would probably be on a CNN-8 channel and be in direct competition with other television shows, it would provide exposure for the game unprecedented with today’s world.
Globalisation also sees increased travel between different countries. And when people visit countries, they usually wish to seek out attractions and cultural aspects unique to that country, or different from their own.
We have already seen in the last few years several people who have travelled to Australia, start-up their own football clubs on arrival back in their homelands.
As the world links up everything seems smaller. Companies are looking further ashore to lower their costs (ie Telephone marketers from India). Synthetic footballs are already made in India. The cost of gear for AFL is one of the current inhibitors for international growth.
With more competition for labour, the costs of goal posts (or ship masts) will be lowered, as will the production of footy boots, footballs and jumpers. While the costs of the game may decrease, an increasingly international sport would require more administration and hence increase costs. But not to worry, more participants means more money coming into the sport.
A globalised world would enhance the sport itself as well. The main attraction of soccer is the many countries playing the sport.
If this were a part of AFL, the game would most likely be better off. While there are some people who feel the game should remain uniquely Australian, this writer feels the need to share our great game with the rest of the world and add some more colour to world’s greatest game.
I hope I’m not seen as un-Australian for saying this, but I hope that one day Australia will be beaten in a game of professional representative AFL.
Overall it is still difficult to tell whether globalization will assist AFL more than negatively affect it.
In the end time will tell.
Hopefully, as is shown time and time again, football will evolve with globalisation and be better off for it.
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