Footy players vs. Olympians: who has it better?

Australia better than the rest? Nothing like a bit of nationalist chest beating to make me want to just puke. I pray for the day the rest of the world takes up AFL - just so we can get our arses kicked in our own game by the chinese. Then the bogans would be screaming - "oh all our good athletes are off at the olympics and these second rate plodding tattooed AFL guys are getting creamed by the asian hordes........"

I apologise if you took offence to my comments and their tone. You have to understand the environment we football fans exist in down here. It’s almost like a culture war. Unlike in England, the very right of football to be taken seriously and treated with respect in this country is what many of us feel is at stake. The football-illiterate fans of the bigger football codes are constantly sniping at our game and suggesting ‘improvements’ that would likely destroy the fabric of the game such as bigger goals, because obviously more goals = more entertainment *groan* I’ve lost track of the amount of times I’ve heard: ”Soccer would be so much better if…*insert eggball-like rule here*” One of their favourite targets is offside because so many refuse to take the time to understand the game and how offside works to prevent goal hanging. I personally love the perfect defence splitting slide-rule pass that unlocks a parked bus. Once again I apologise for my overly defensive tone in replying to you. I haven’t watched a lot of field hockey and couldn’t even tell you how many players are on the pitch at one time.

Where is this information from? I'd be reallly surprised if the big nations like the US and China' broadcasting money is based around the footie. Can you give me some idea where I can find out this info? I'm interested in the money chains that make up the IOC and associates. Having been to the Olympic Park and seeing how controlled the sponsorship is got me interested in it.

Kasey, you said that you had genuine interest in my answer then proceeded to patronise the hell out of me. I wasn't talking about soccer/football in my answer so why get so defensive? If any game that was faster and more attacking than soccer needed to be that to suddenly become hugely popular, basket ball would be a top spectator driven sport in Aust and the rest of the world. Football has all the money, all the media coverage, all the spectator fan base in a very large part of the world I am well aware of that .I live in the UK. Very few sports have a chance against the monolith that is footie in the world of ours. All I'm saying is that getting rid of the offisde rule is not the heinous 'come from the devll' idea that people above are making it. It is a great addition to a sport.

It's easy ... the Olympics has three main forms of revenue... Broadcast rights .... just over 50% of the total paid to th IOC comes from Broadcast of the football matches... Sponsors .... no direct figures but I have read that about 60 % of total revenue from sponsors is because of football... Crowds ... Over the last few Olympics the football matches draw on average 48% of the total crowd numbers... Hope that answers your questions...

Well it has obviously worked in making hockey a more spectator friendly sport, because the Australian National Field Hockey League has such a big profile, maybe one day the teensy niche A-League could possibly pass it in terms of popularity. Football is a perfectly marketable and popular sport as it is(even the yanks got rid of their little 'tweaks' in 1999) but thank you kindly for your feedback though.

Yeah, none of that bullshit with defenders hanging around on the 25 yard line and waving arms at the umpire. They also seem to have ditched obstruction - though I'm sure it's still there in a third person form - so the game has changed a lot. It's made it a damn sight faster and most teams are or appear to be far more attacking minded now.

lolly, did Hockey get rid of the offside rule? Serious question. I (like thousands of other Aussies) have never watched a game.

Do you mean FIFA football? Do you want to explain how that pays for the Olympics? I'm curious about that as I thought it was sponsorship and broadcast money that paid for the Olympics.

There's also that kid running around for the GC Suns at the moment from Townsville who is a former high jump champion

The Hockey federations certainly thought so, that's why they got rid of it. And how wonderful that they did. It's been a game changer.

Jamal Idris was a world youth champs rep in the discus.

God, it sounds bizarre when fans of different footie codes try and claim the skill prize. All passing games need skill, speed and a shit pile of physical co-ordination. Pretending that one or the other of them doesn't sounds so childish I don't know where to start with it.

Of you champ.... and doing a non preferred side sherrin kick of 60m...

But you cant illustrate skill levels greater than these from another football code its just not acheivable. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_J-XvzCm2g) Thats why its big bucks ,not beacause of he's teeth. Whats harder to run with a ball in your hand or feet !

We are top of the world believe it or not: "The envy of the world Peter Hartcher Saturday, 12th November 2011 For so many different reasons, Australia is the most successful country on earth It used to be said that when America sneezed, Australia caught a cold. Instead, Australia has proved to be the rich country most immune to the economic ailments of the US and, indeed, everywhere else. Australia sailed through the Asian economic crisis of 1997–98, prospered through the US stock market bust and recession of 2001 and continued to grow through the savage global financial crisis of 2008–09. Going into 2011, Australia’s unemployment rate of five per cent was half that of Europe or America. ‘Australia astonishes,’ was the 2010 summary by France’s Le Monde newspaper, which carried a front-page cartoon of smiling kangaroos standing next to the Sydney Opera House and flashing V-for-victory signs as a chart showed Australia’s exceptionally resilient rate of growth. Australia has a higher average income per head of population than Germany, Japan, Singapore or France, a figure one and half times greater than that of its ‘mother country’, Britain. And in 2008, Australia passed a major milestone. For the first time since the first world war, its income per head surpassed America’s. A decade ago, Australia lagged 40 per cent behind the US. By 2010, it was well ahead — by about $15,000 per head, or almost a third, in fact. If this achievement were a sporting triumph, Australians would have erupted in a frenzy of celebration. If the Aussies had beaten the Yanks in the medal tally at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the country would have gone wild with ticker-taped self-congratulation. In the event, Australia’s athletes won half as many medals as did the US in Beijing, but the country was still thoroughly pleased with itself. Yet surpassing the country regarded as the benchmark of prosperity in the key measure of income was not even noted in the mainstream media. Winning sporting gold is a national triumph. Winning real gold, the gold of high incomes and high living standards, is, apparently, trivial. Perhaps we needed a medal ceremony to get people’s attention? History shows that Australians developed their outsized pride and enthusiasm for sport partly as a national consolation prize. The country might not have been able to compete with its colonial master, Britain, for wealth or artistic accomplishment, or with its great and powerful friend, America, for prosperity or power, but it could always walk tall on the sporting field. For most of the last century, the Aussies could reliably thrash the Poms at cricket or rugby and make the Americans sweat for their prizes in tennis or swimming. Perhaps it’s too new, or too incredible, for Australians to absorb, but the country has now become such a prosperous modern power that it can afford to take a little credit for winning the real prizes of international life, rather than just the consolation ones. It’s about more than income. In its annual ranking of all the countries on earth, the United Nations combines measures of income, education and health to create the Human Development Index. The UN describes it as a way of measuring how well ‘people can develop their full potential and lead productive, creative lives in accord with their needs and interests’. In its 2010 assessment of 194 countries, Australia scored second only to Norway in enjoying the best living conditions available to the human species. The two countries scored near-identical tallies of 93.7 for Australia and 93.8 for Norway. If the index incorporated climate, of course, Norway would have to vacate the dais. This was the highest ranking Australia had achieved since the Human Development Index was first published in 1990. In that year, Australia was placed seventh. Also in that year, Australia’s per capita income was 15th in the world. Today it’s sixth according to 2010 figures from the International Monetary Fund, behind Luxembourg, Qatar, Denmark, Switzerland and Norway. The long list of 176 countries that follows after Australia begins with Sweden, the US, the Netherlands, Canada, Ireland, Austria, Finland and Singapore. But then Australia, ranked second in the world in the Human Development Index, went one better. In late 2010, and even without an adjustment for the weather, the UN published an updated tally which ranked Australia ahead of Norway and, indeed, every other country on earth. In an improved measurement that it called its ‘hybrid’ Human Development Index, combining its traditional items with new data measurements, Australia was awarded a score of 93.82 and Norway 92.89. Australians, in short, enjoy the benefits of living in the world’s superpower of living standards. Want a second opinion? In 2011, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development published a new index measuring living conditions in the world’s 34 developed countries. It was called the Better Life Index. This survey covered a much broader set of measurements including not only health, education and income but also personal security, working hours and community connections. It found that Australia’s overall living conditions were the best. This was not a back office, after-lunch hands-up for a tabloid magazine but an objective study painstakingly prepared in Paris by expert staff of all nationalities, reporting to 34 governments. So both the UN and the OECD found that the country offering the best living conditions in the world was Australia. It seems that two decades of unbroken expansion have created the sense that this is situation normal, and that no one should get any special credit. Yet both in Australia’s own history and in world experience, such a long run of prosperity is unique. Nor was it accomplished by digging gold and other resources out of the ground. Australia reformed and renovated and emerged as a successful new model before the latest resources boom arrived. By the time the commodities boom of the 2000s began its first phase in 2004–05, Australia had already developed a flexible, high-performance economy that was consistently outstripping US growth. The Nobel Prize-winning American economist Paul Krugman said as early as 1998 that Australia’s impressive new resilience made it ‘the miracle economy of the world financial crisis’. By 2005, the OECD reported that ‘in the last decade of the 20th century, Australia became a model for other OECD countries’. Australia was a model in two ways. First, in the sense that it had crafted a unique set of conditions. These settings made it distinct from the two models that had dominated 20th-century policy choices for democratic countries — the American model and the European. Australia combined the best elements of each: American freedom with European fairness. And it adopted the worst elements of neither, avoiding America’s inequality and the oppressive cost of the European welfare state. Australia was not only different, but also highly successful. This is the second way that Australia is now considered a good lead for others to follow. One of the distinctive characteristics of the Australian model was that it achieved all this — sound growth, high living standards and the protections of a social security net — while living within its means. The Australian government was running consistent budget surpluses, not deficits, for the ten years from 1998. This set Australia apart from the main economies of the developed world: the US, Europe and Japan. And it was happening years before the mining boom was even a glint on the horizon. The federal government paid off the last dollar of national debt in 2006. But surely Australia is now so dependent on mining that it must owe everything to the commodities boom? Not at all. Ask yourself this: how big a part of the economy is Australia’s mining sector? Based on the rhetoric of our politicians and commentators, Australians formed the impression that it accounts for about a third, according to a survey by the Australia Institute. In fact, even at the peak of the boom, Australia’s entire energy and mining sectors together constituted only 8.4 per cent of the national economy in 2010. That’s not a misprint. Only one dollar in every 12 generated by the Australian economy in 2010 came from the combined industries of oil, gas, coal, iron ore, gold and other minerals. The finance industry is bigger, accounting for 10.6 per cent of the total economy. So is manufacturing at 9.3 per cent. And mining is one of the smallest jobs generators. Of the 19 industry categories counted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, mining is the second-smallest employer, employing just 1.5 per cent of working Australians. Even the ‘arts and recreation services’ industry hires more. Mining’s strength is its contribution to exports: a little over half the national export earnings comes from energy and mining. But you can’t build a successful modern nation on an industry that accounts for only eight per cent of the present-day economy and employs just 1.5 per cent of the workforce. If the country depended on mining and energy, it’d be a Third World nation. Australia’s accomplishment is far greater than generating wealth and services for an elite. The rich can live well in any country. That is no achievement. The wider picture is that Australia is one of the world’s fairest countries, one of the most tolerant, and one of the safest. This will jar with the image that many Australians have of their country. We have been told again and again that inequality has grown worse, that the rich get richer while the poor get poorer, that racial and religious intolerance has sharpened, and that the crime rate is on the rise: in short, that society is in decline. And while you can always find anecdotes to support any argument, the hard and comprehensive evidence is that none of these claims is true. Against the tide of events elsewhere in the world, Australian income inequality has become less unequal. The rich have got richer, but the poor have not got poorer, and the gap between them has actually narrowed. This has not been constant or unequivocal, but it did occur in the eight years to 2008. As the international experts at the OECD reported in a major 2008 study of 30 rich countries: ‘Income inequality in Australia has fallen quite sharply since 2000. It is now below the OECD average for the first time.’ As Australians have become wealthier, they have not become more selfish. The proportion of private incomes that is given to charitable purposes has doubled in the past decade, according to the Giving Australia report. After the Irish, Australians are the most generous donors in the world, on the OECD’s count. And the rate of giving of time and energy — volunteering — has also been rising. The crime rate has been falling fairly consistently for 20 years now. This, too, is hard for many to accept. The rate of murder, a proxy for crime more generally, doubled between the 1950s and the late 1980s. But since then it has fallen, almost to the level of the 1950s. In international rankings, Australian crime rates are about average for a developed country. Australia is one of the most ethnically diverse societies on Earth. No country has been more successful in building a harmonious national pool from so many diverse streams. Riots at Cronulla Beach in 2005 raised hard questions about whether Muslim immigrants could live peacefully in Australia. The conviction in 2010 of five Muslim men for plotting terrorism raised yet more. While anxiety still surrounds the Islamic integration challenge, 2011 began with a promising portent. A young immigrant from Pakistan, Usman Khawaja, became the first Muslim to represent Australia in cricket. He won his place on the national team with his brilliant batsmanship, but he has been embraced for his character — he’s the most popular member of the NSW squad, according to its captain. His father remarked: ‘It shows that it’s a fair system and whoever puts in effort can achieve anything in this country.’ So Australia has managed to become one of the richest countries in its financial wealth, perhaps the richest of all in its living conditions, and also rich in its spirit of fairness and cohesion. Australians are long accustomed to assuming they are second-rate at anything but selected sporting events. The truth is Australia has become one of the most successful countries on earth. Indeed, by some of the most important measures, it is the most successful of all. Peter Hartcher is political editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. This article is extracted from his new book The Sweet Spot: How Australia Made Its Own Luck — and Could Now Throw It All Away (Black Inc), which is out now.

Bondy, until you put up a video proving it I guess we will just have to take your bravado at face value. BTW did I mention that I could pass a steeden on my non preferred side into a washing hamper at 40m. I've never even done it, but I totally could because I can shoot a basketball.

Seriously, Who says Oi? Safe assumption. I'm a country Victorian who didn't end up playing soccer, so Mum and Dad are pretty happy. Ill be sure to pass on your warmest regards. Titus, It would be a hell of a lot better than those nail biting nil all draws that leave you with blue b*lls.

Your holiness, haven't you been reading the Participation Numbers? Football doesn't target players(gee unlike a certain other sport of limited catchment), the players come to football. So many in fact that our junior clubs are running out of room and are having to turn kids away.