I pride myself on my shtposting abilities, but I’m about ready to admit defeat here.
Ummmm how about when the designated player is able to chase down the golden Toyota Yaris on Harbour Esplanade then their team gets 150 points and the game is declared over.
Well yeah, because the fanbases of sports much much bigger than AFL are so geographically dispersed from club home bases due to the sheer population size of USA/Europe that regularly attending games in person is an impossible pipedream, so fans of those sports identify more with teams from those comps as brands they follow moreso than an organisation they are a part of, and the sheer strength of commercial endorsements (again due in part to enormously populated markets) inevitably giving players the vehicle to promote themselves better than leagues and clubs ever could, leading to the perceived brand value of individuals outstripping that of clubs by a lot, particularly in sports where team sizes are small enough that a talented player can dramatically impact the outcome of a game through tangible actions, or in sports where specialised roles are predisposed to being directly responsible for scoring more than their teammates.
The US’s population is 13 times that of Australia’s.
I wish Australian sports would stop looking over there for inspiration because they end up wasting bulk resources chasing market shares that DO NOT FKNG EXIST.
That’s such a painful reminder of just how fucken thick, and disrespectful, the AFL executive are.
It’s the best attended sporting league in the world by capita. A handful of the clubs are amongst the oldest established sporting clubs in the world, with some of the oldest strips in the world.
And the AFL’s mindset is… “other codes in other places do something different, so we should do that, because… reasons”.
They just absolutely hate the concept of diehard, welded-on footy fans. We’re an inconvenience to them. History is an inconvenience to them. Having historically big clubs and historically small clubs is an inconvenience to them.
I’m convinced they secretly think F/S is an inconvenience, because the Suns et al don’t have them yet. They’re such bell-ends.
In another twenty years, after throwing hundreds of millions down the drain, Gold Coast still won’t have anyone* who’s played 100 games before leaving them.
*Not intended to be a factual statement… but pretty close.
Soon the AwFulL head honchos will be trying to sign up NFL 1/2 time show entertainers Moron 5 they were pathetic.
(My bad Maroon 5) . No Aussie talent good enough for them…
Hocking is even more stupid than that.
Name a Liverpool fan who suddenly started following Real or Barca instead when a player transferred.
Or swap from Rangers to Celtic?
Or vice versa?
Even in the States team allegiances are pretty much rusted on.
Are you a Red Sox, a Cheesehead, a Laker?
Too much hanging out with “bright young things” from marketing who don’t actually follow sport, just make money from it.
And next time some conspiracy theorist claims the Awful wants to abolish all the clubs, and run the whole competition as interchangeable franchises I won’t be able to argue.
Don’t see why they don’t put this money and time into the women’s league. Get that right and they’ll have a heap of sponsors, participants and viewers.
It’s embarrassing. But if a player is offered $50K for a days work, how could they not take it…
They’ll probably add a Tassie team, somewhere like Burnie, play a game vs NSW/QLD at midnight in Broome or Shenzen, and when they don’t get a crowd, use this to justify no Tassie AFL team.
The population following Aussie Rules would be about 1% of some of its competitors. Yet our sport is in every list here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sports_attendance_figures except the international comps. Surely FIFA, NFL etc should be following us (like rugby league did with SoO)?
There are many things we look back on such as corny stuff from the 80s and think O M G what were we thinking. I must commend the AFL for achieving this result in record time.