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A message to Andrew Demetriou, Come Play! The football World Cup is your great opportunity. The World Cup is the biggest sporting event on the planet. The eyes of the sporting world would be on us. What better opportunity to showcase AFL football games to a global market?
The World Cup has an international audience which encompasses hundreds of millions of people who love their sport and love their footy (albeit the one with a hands-off approach). Surely this is the opportunity to sell AFL to the world.
Football fans don’t just love football.
Look at the Australian sporting landscape: how many of us follow one code and keep an eye on the others? If Australia were successful in their bid to host the World Cup, we would have the complete attention of the sporting world for a month.
AFL needs a more proactive approach, and Demetriou needs to embrace the World Cup for all that it is worth.
Is Demetriou’s fear that football could challenge the AFL in popularity?
It appears he is reluctant to support the World Cup bid because it would draw even more attention away from the AFL. Or is it that the World Cup would disrupt the AFL season.
These fears limit the AFL’s approach in a time that it should be opening its arms. Why Demetriou and the AFL are dragging their heels on this issue is beyond me.
Why are they not working hand in hand to show that we as a nation have football and footy?
For the thousands of fans that would come to Australia to watch the World Cup, perhaps the AFL could work an agreement to link tickets to World Cup games with AFL games. What better way to engage a new sporting audience than a first hand experience of an AFL game in all its glory.
TV stations from around the world will be looking to put together packages on Australia for their football-centric viewing audience, why not provide them with the AFL experience so the world can take it all in.
The AFL has been trying to open up the game to international markets for as long as I can remember. And for as long as I can remember, the impact has been marginal at best.
Significant effort has gone into opening the AFL borders.
Gaelic football has provided some players from Ireland. PNG and South Africa are identified markets, however, these markets have yielded only random results and the flood of overseas players has been nothing more than a disappointing trickle.
The AFL has plans to search for talent in the United States, South America and China. A reality TV program, ‘American Footy Star’ has been backed by the AFL. If we’re lucky, there may be a player or two that emerges from this search, but it’s unlikely to blow the international market wide open.
The significant football codes of Australia such as the AFL, NRL and the ARU signed a memorandum of understanding with FFA and the federal government last week. There is funding up for grabs and it is anticipated that much of this is likely to be spent on stadiums in Geelong, Adelaide, Perth and Carrara.
If the AFL only uses the World Cup bid to cover itself and fix up a few stadiums, then I’m afraid they have wasted their biggest opportunity.
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