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The AFL is stealing the best and brightest from the NRL; the AFL isn’t an international sport; football fans are hooligans; rugby union is better than league; and football will become the number one sport in this country one day. Do these sound like familiar arguments?
Every code believes the other codes are a threat to its existence, and this is a good thing. Instead of whingeing and taking the Gerry Harvey approach to economics, each code should knuckle down and come up with policy to counteract the other code and improve their own.
Competition is healthy; it forces you to practice, it forces you to improve, it forces you to evolve. A monopoly over the population causes inefficiencies, it makes you lazy and creates poor policy and administration decisions.
In sport, nothing worth having is easy to attain.
If the Collingwood Football Club were all of a sudden moved to a suburban football league in Melbourne, they would win all the time and the bar for success would be lower. That’s bad for the club and fans and it’s a lack of competition that allows mediocrity to creep in.
Within a code, when a team finishes anything short of winning a flag, they try to trade in players to strengthen weak positions, they try to recruit the best young talent, the best coaches, the best fitness guys, the best nutritionists, the best administrators, anything that will give them an added edge.
If the AFL is threatened by the world game, they should identify the ethnic groups that have settled in Australia and continue to encourage participation in Aussie Rules – maybe open up AFL scholarships to the best athletes from those groups and introduce them to the game. Teach them how to play footy and the game might capture the imagination of an ethnic community and create ties to that country.
If the NRL are threatened by the prospect of the Gold Coast Suns and Greater Western Sydney Giants eating into their market share, why don’t they open up their lists to create a rookie list position on each NRL team to a player from a non-league state?
The game is much more likely to take hold in Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth or Hobart if a native of one of those cities is on an NRL list. It would be a huge coup for the NRL if the Melbourne Storm had a Victorian born and bred in the starting team.
If football is threatened by not making big enough inroads into the Australian sporting psyche, it has to continue to put resources and money into grassroots. Make sure every country town has a football field, sponsor Aboriginal communities in the NT and WA and give them an organised football league and football coaching.
The AFL manages to find some very handy footballers from remote NT. Imagine if the Socceroos had a world-class Aboriginal striker plying his trade for Australia and Manchester United.
These are simplistic answers thought up on the go. The point is that competition between codes is healthy and if every code keeps trying to find a way to out-do the other, sport in Australia will be the real winner.
If the NRL and the ARU find players in Victoria, the AFL find players with international backgrounds and football can make the same inroads in rural areas as they’ve made in the capital cities, the pool of sporting talent in Australia will be far deeper, and that creates a higher standard of play.
If you want to stay ahead of the game in the footy wars in Australia you have to concede that you have several codes to compete with. The sooner you accept this and create policy to further develop your own code in a competitive environment, the more you’ll thrive.
Each code believes their product is vastly superior than the next. If they truly believe this, they’ll put in the work and let the paying public decide what they want to see.
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