Bored with all the whinging down the club about footy holding football back, I headed bush at the weekend and ended up in a pub in Tom Wills’ territory where I was warned beforehand that mentioning football was akin to turning one’s glass upside down on the bar. I mentioned it anyway.
I’m still here but some florid faces did tell me in chilling detail that governments were chucking money at football to kill off Aussie Rules.
They had the facts, too.
Football was living high on the hog courtesy of government handouts; fifteen million dollars here, 9.5 there, 45.6 there, another seven over there …
Have a look at their club’s rundown facilities and potholed oval, they said. Their footy club, an Australian football club no less, over one hundred years old no less, and it hasn’t a brass razoo because all the money has gone to football.
Yes, I know. Australian rules gets negligible funding through the Australian Sports Commission but it benefits enormously from taxpayers’ largesse in capital works and community development grants.
Their not acknowledging that was a little bit infuriating, to be honest.
I’m used to it though. When it comes to the relevant and the irrelevant, my football-tragic mates can be pretty selective too.
Anyway, both codes can’t be losing in the handout stakes; at least one half of the argument must be mentally tanking it and diving for sympathy.
Or, alternatively, there is no objective truth, no conclusive winners or losers, and getting all upset about another sports’ funding is the sign of a drama queen making stuff up.
Because you’re busy, I’ve crunched the numbers and we ended up with a lot of apples to footy because that’s what it asked for and heaps of oranges to football because that’s what it asked for.
There is no comparison. No matter which way you crunch the numbers the scoreboard always ends up somewhere between a draw and a stalemate. Whichever way you look at it, you can’t tell.
It’s a free country though and if one chooses to upset oneself about the known unknowns of sports funding, go ahead; a persecution complex is nothing to be ashamed of.
I can tell you still reckon your code is getting ripped off. Try another angle.
You have conclusively demonstrated that there is a significant disparity in sports funding and your sport, football say, is getting short-changed.
The federal government apologises and slings FFA an incredible $100 million to be equitably distributed among the game’s participants – 1.7 million of them according to the Smith Review. Every red cent trickles down and the participants find themselves subsidised to the tune of nearly sixty bucks each.
Ask around. It costs a more than sixty dollars a year for a kid to play football. City kids pay many hundreds and in some cases thousands of dollars a year for club football. They cough up hundreds more for representative football and thousands to turn out for a state team.
If sixty bucks each is a $100 million nationally, what about six hundred bucks each?
What about a couple of thousand dollars each plus the small change from a couple of thousand clubs’ sponsorships, sausage sizzles, raffles, gate-takings and stubby holders?
And futsal and private and federation academies too; they all charge money.
Before the A-League even enters into it, federations and clubs and the privateers between them already have revenues of several billion dollars annually, year after year.
Next to the thousands of millions of dollars a year its citizens are pumping into the world game – and likewise Australian rules – a government’s ten or twenty barely registers on their big-picture calculators.
You probably wouldn’t want to be too focused on government assistance or you could easily drift into a welfare state and find yourself making lame excuses for being mediocre.
Alas, my eggballing friends have withheld certain key facts about why their footy club is struggling, but not – and this needs to be emphasised – for the sake of sticking it up me or football. They don’t even want their club’s supporters to know.
I’m not even supposed to know. I only reveal it here because some football folk might get a snigger out of these eggballers idiocy and learn from it.
It started in the late 1970s, luring the reigning premiership coach over from another club with a disgusting orange vinyl lounge suite, which I helped load onto the old man’s ute.
They didn’t win the next flag; the coach said they needed players from his old club; the club paid them to come over. Shelling out money on coaches and players has been the norm ever since.
This season the coach reached under the table and found a new big-six Falcon; the B&F got tickets to Hawaii.
Over about thirty years, Flopsville footy club as somehow rustled up a couple of million black dollars to spend on some very ordinary football services; it’s won two flags since the war.
It’s against all the rules. No bush league of sane mind would sanction payments to coaches and players to run around on its potholed ovals. Heavy penalties apply, although the club president being on the league’s board of directors helps there.
The club siphons the money out bit by bit. Its actual turnover is far in excess of what its official books say.
It said in the paper recently that its league is in huge trouble and the hand has gone out for AFL money, because that would be right and proper, and for state and local government money, for helping fight obesity and diabetes.
The shire council is playing hardball – it’s loaded up with ex-footballers who know the story: yes, they just want a little bit of money to paint the rooms and top-dress the oval … and then they can get in this full-forward and they’ll be rolling in money next season and they’ll use that money to paint the rooms and top-dress the oval.
Perhaps.
I think I’ll mention that to the eggballers next time I go bush.
I will rub it in too, by pointing out that for all their crumby deceits and disregard for Aussie Rules, they are still decades behind the average Z-division amateur football club which has been paying coaches, players and hangers-on under the table since the 1950s, hasn’t resurfaced its pitch since and has succeeded in convincing the gullible that an under-the-table dollar makes no difference but a taxpayers’ cent does.
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