- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
What is it about Adelaide? This so-called pissant town seems to have global ambitions.
Back in 2011, I shared a few beers with in Tokyo with Adelaide United chairman Greg Griffin who had already established plenty of contacts in Asia, especially China. And now Adelaide Port, an AFL team, are going further, with a Chinese strategy and Asian ambitions and well, who knows what else?
It is easy to laugh off such attempts. The comment from IG Markets analyst Angus Nicholson that “There isn’t a great awareness of AFL in China at the moment,” is polite. Virtually zero would be more accurate.
I spent the last three weeks travelling around the country by train. You can avoid football too, if you wanted to, even with the Chinese Super League this season averaging 30,000 fans a game.
Can AFL make inroads into the Middle Kingdom? The numbers there are always beguiling for any sporting institution or business.
The logic often goes like this: ‘there are 1.3 billion people in China. If we can attract just 1% of that, we have 13 million followers or customers. Even 0.1% equals 1.3 million and that must surely be within reach.’
But it does not work like that. Moving into China is a long and complex process even for brands that are already familiar to locals.
The first thing for the AFL is to simply increase awareness. If it is true that there is a documentary to be shown on CCTV, that is a great start. Foreign brands dream of access to CCTV though there are plenty of channels of varying prestige that are part of the network.
Having a few Chinese players in the league would help and at least give Chinese journalists something to write about from time to time.
There would be interest in documenting the adventures of young Chinese athletes plucked from the Middle Kingdom to go and play this strange sport.
Moving it beyond novelty would be the challenge and the same goes for the games that will be played there from 2017.
Getting the Chinese to play it in China is going to be really tough. Kids don’t even play football and that is the country’s most popular sport. In my recent trip, the only sport I saw being played non-professionally was table-tennis.
The space needed for AFL and the physicality of the game also counts against it. Perhaps moving into Hong Kong first, a friendlier market for such sports, would be the way forward.
Witnessing code wars on The Roar, one barb often sent the way of AFL fans is that it can never be an international game compared to football.
But this could be the AFL joining an international trend. Chinese companies and businessmen have been busy investing in football around the world. Atletico Madrid and Manchester City, to name just two, are big clubs that have been on the receiving end of funds from the east.
In the middle of the Chinese Super League spending spree of January and February, the biggest signing of all was the arrival of Jackson Martinez at Guangzhou Evergrande for around $50 million. It almost went unnoticed that this was the Chinese champion signing a world famous star from a major European club that was part-Chinese owned.
Some of the spending in China is political. It is a way for businessmen and companies to curry favour with local, regional and national politicians and officials.
The Port Adelaide deal could be something similar. It could be a way from Shanghai investors looking to cultivate political relationships in Australia to further future deals. It could be a way of increasing Chinese ‘soft power’ overseas, something the country has woken up to in recent years.
There are riches in China but the streets are not paved with gold. If there is any chance of success, however that is defined, it will take years of patience, determination and hard work. Even then, the chances are incredibly low.
But that doesn’t mean it should not be tried. It will be fascinating to see how it plays out.
Who’s in your ultimate team? Pick the best team and compete with other fans for daily prizes on Draftstars. For the best odds on the game try out Aussie bookmaker PlayUp. Think. Is this a bet you really want to place? Set a deposit limit.