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Everyone knows that the AFL has long coveted expansion into rugby league territory.
While it can be argued that the growth of the AFL in New South Wales and Queensland has been far greater than the NRL’s in Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia, the Victorian-born code is still an extremely long way behind in the eastern states, especially in New South Wales.
Sure, the AFL have done well over the past 40 years to ensure that the Swans were successful, and in doing so they have outgrown each rugby league club in the city individually in terms of attendance, something the Storm haven’t achieved in Melbourne, despite having every league supporter in the city behind them.
Yet when sat next to the entirety of rugby league, it becomes abundantly clear that the Swans are not much more than a secondary sporting franchise that has only garnered such figures due to a small core following. The Swans are novelty for Sydney’s primary NRL fans, looking for a night out or a bandwagon to jump on.
Sure, there are some core AFL fans in Sydney, just like there are people who primarily follow rugby league in Melbourne. However on face value, at a two-code preferred level, both cities would produce around the same ratio of support, with Melbourne 95:5 AFL and Sydney probably closer to 90:10 NRL.
So let’s take a look at the facts and figures surrounding the NRL and the AFL in Sydney.
Misguided and one-eyed AFL fans often claim that the Swans being arguably the biggest individual sporting club in Sydney, must make Australian rules the biggest sport in the city. However, what they fail to grasp in saying that is the concept of market share, and the fact that the Swans were in a one-club AFL city for thirty years.
They already had an established fan base in South Melbourne, whose supporters continue to prop up their attendance and membership numbers. This dominance of the limited Sydney AFL market is shown in the failure of GWS to draw within even half of the average NRL club attendance in Sydney.
The NRL has nine clubs competing for the same audience in Sydney, just as the AFL has nine clubs in Melbourne. Now the Storm, who have a lot of secondary support from primary AFL fans spread out across many clubs, have surpassed North Melbourne and are closing in on St Kilda and the Western Bulldogs in terms of attendance.
It took some time for the Swans to become a big deal in Sydney. (Photo by Matt King/AFL Photos/via Getty Images)
But if everyone were forced to choose their favourite club, the secondary support would dry up and the Storm would be left with their core support, which would most likely see them fall below the Kangaroos in this scenario. The same goes for the Swans in Sydney.
In terms of raw figures, the best way to solve any debate involving unequal fractions is to compare them with the same denominator. In this case, if we were to add all of the average attendances of every Sydney NRL club from last season, we would get a figure of around 137,000. In Sydney, the AFL would be 35,000 in total.
If rugby league, like the AFL, had two clubs in Sydney, they would theoretically each average 68,500 people through the turnstiles each game. That makes the Swans’ average home crowd of 29,424 look a little smaller. And when the combined figure is averaged and dragged down by their cross-town counterparts GWS, the true AFL figure is a measly 17,000, the same as the leading NRL clubs, and less than the Storm’s 18,000 in Melbourne.
The AFL averages less in Sydney across its two clubs than the NRL does in Melbourne. In putting the Swans’ 29,424 average back into the context of the Melbourne clubs, Carlton, Collingwood and Richmond each average in the high 40,000’s, with Essendon and Melbourne around 39,000 each.
Rugby league is the nation’s premier television sport, so much so that when nationwide ratings and attendance figures are combined for a total of 140.78 million, it still kicks well clear of the AFL at 133.28 million. Yes, the NRL, excluding State of Origin, has a bigger national combined audience than the AFL. Shock, horror!
Television ratings in Sydney last season were one sided. Take for instance the AFL decider, in which everyone in Sydney would at least nominally have backed the Swans. The game averaged a viewership of 375,000 people, clearly boosted by the participation of the Sydney club.
However, later that night, the NRL’s preliminary final between Souths and Penrith, rated 414,000, whilst also drawing a crowd of 50,034 to Accor Stadium. For reference, the grand final a week later rated a whopping 837,000, and drew a capacity crowd of 82,415, despite being a one-sided contest from the start.
Again, in television ratings, rugby league is king!
Rugby League dominates the Sydney media. From the news, to the papers and the radio, rugby league gets far more coverage than the AFL can even dream of.
Every night, the first three or four sports stories on the news are NRL related, no matter which network you manage to land on. The AFL might get a quick wrap after that, if lucky. The same goes with the papers, where the NRL usually gets seven or eight pages of the sports section, while the AFL usually gets one or two. Radio is very much the same.
As a starting note on memberships in Sydney, we’d be better off not wasting our time. Rugby league’s model of membership to the licensed league club’s means that football club membership is a largely recent innovation, and the numbers are basically meaningless. For example, the Sydney Roosters had 18,000 members last season, while their league club, Easts Leagues, had 41,000 members, for a combined total of 59,000.
Rugby league membership has taken on a new form in recent years. (Photo by Brett Hemmings/Getty Images)
This cultural difference between the two sports explains why GWS have a higher membership than all the NRL clubs in the city, despite drawing less than half of the average NRL club attendance at 6,013 fans last year. Just like a second NRL team would be in Melbourne, the Giants are without even a semi-decent following due to every supporter of the minor code in the city already following the established Swans.
Rugby league fans seem to be cottoning on to membership in the last few seasons, with Parramatta, Souths and Brisbane each reaching 30,000 members, while again, as further proof of the cultural differences, Melbourne hit the 40,000 mark last year. Watch this space over the next decade.
Sydney loves the NRL, and each of its nine clubs individually, as well as the Swans. They blend in as an equal to each NRL club, again indicative of that 90:10 ratio in favour of rugby league. The Giants don’t even look like entering the equation.
Thus, it is clear that although the AFL probably holds a slightly larger market share in Sydney than the NRL does in Melbourne, it does not mean the AFL has any real significance, relative to the NRL in Sydney. Sydney loves its version of footy, just as much as Melbourne loves theirs.
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