Exactly. Neither are suitable for an AFL team because demographics matter.
Obviously Darwin is demographically stronger than either, but still much weaker than Canberra or a third Perth team.
20th AFL Team
- Thread starter lionshine
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Exactly. Neither are suitable for an AFL team because demographics matter.
Obviously Darwin is demographically stronger than either, but still much weaker than Canberra or a third Perth team.
Interestingly, a Kalgoorlie WAFL team had some good features despite a population catchment area of 40k.
Kalgoorlie is serviced by the Prospector train and it's quite popular and thus the WAFL could see away team fans travelling to Kalgoorlie to make a day of it.
This has implications for Canberra, Riverina, N.M. etc
People will travel from Perth to Kalgoorlie, Melbourne to the border, Brisbane to the Gold Coast, from anywhere to the Gather Round but nothing will make Sydney-siders cross the Harbour Bridge.
Darwin would require 10% of the population to attend to achieve an attendance of 15k
which is OK for one-offs but unrealistic for the long-term.
Driving across the Nullabor you can only pick up the ABC radio consistently.
For hours (literally) we listened to the ABC report on the Whyalla Football League teams - North, South and Centrals. Then they moved onto the possibility of a Port Lincoln team rejoining the WFL Then they moved onto the possibility of a Whyalla team entering the SANFL.
Canberra is objectively a better option than the NT by pretty much every metric. Not having a dig at the NT, it just is what it is.
Canberra has a long history of Aussie Rules and a proven culture of attendance at this point. The ACT and Capital region already has the money and population to support an AFL side, and we're still growing at an exponential rate. The talent pool in ACT and Southern NSW is already bigger than the NT, and will also continue to grow. We can rely on strong government and institutional support without being totally reliant on it like the NT would be, and I think the support base for a local team would shock more than a few people.
On the other hand the NT has good PR with a fanciful feel good story. But the unfortunate reality is that you can't pay the bills with good vibes.
The Raiders get healthy contingents of traveling supporters against the Sydney sides. I see no reason why the Swans and Giants wouldn't travel in similar numbers, If anything I'd expect the Swans to have a larger traveling fanbase than most of the NRL sides.
Canberra doesn't really need the Sydneysiders to draw decent away support anyway. People from all over Southern NSW travel to Canberra to see their favourite team play.
So people in the Riverina support the Raiders and travel hours to Canberra to watch them play home games? I wasn't aware of that. Would it be fair to say Aussie rules fans from southern NSW areas like Wagga Wagga would adopt Canberra as their team and travel mutliple hours to watch them play home games at Manuka?
- Apr 2, 2013
- 11,874
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- Collingwood
No one can pay bills in Australia anymore.
We've lost the plot. So the old school look for numbers and safety first simply doesn't cut it anymore.
Even the traditional economy is dying.
Put simply adapt or die.
AFL needs to pivot to the north.
The people want it they have made an enormous contribution to the game and will support it. It's really a no brainer
No there isn't a large contingent of Raiders fans in the Riverina that travel to Canberra to watch the Raiders regularly. That's not what I'm claiming.
Though there are Raiders fans who travel from as far as Sydney in the North (Most famously Simon Tayoun and his family. Look him up, bloke's a legend), as far as Griffith in the West, and from the Coast, for every Raiders game, the vast majority of traveling fans are supporters of the away team making their yearly pilgrimage to watch their favourite team play at Bruce.
So no, on the whole people from places like the Riverina aren't likely to adopt Canberra as their team, but over the course of a season they'll travel to Canberra in their thousands to watch Collingwood, Carlton, Geelong, etc, play.
Though in saying that, the Riverina isn't the be-all and end-all of Southern NSW.
Canberra doesn't have particularly strong cultural connections to (most of) the Riverina. It does however have much stronger cultural links to the Southern Tablelands, Snowy Mountains, and southern half of the South Coast, and over time a not insignificant portion of the population of those regions probably would adopt Canberra as their favourite team, and a portion of those fans would regularly travel to watch them play in Canberra like they do the Raiders.
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Shifting away from the population and economic centers would be commercial suicide.
There's no foreseeable future where the NT will be a better commercial prospect for the AFL than Canberra, or any of the other expansion prospects, outside of a vain of unobtanium being discovered under Darwin
Your arguments for it and against Canberra are at best cope and uninformed stereotypes.
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Yeah, no one can pay bills anymore, so let’s put a team in a region where they really can’t pay bills. It just makes the case for Canberra stronger, ironically.
threenewpadlocks
Brownlow Medallist
Can you please answer the obvious questions about revenue generation, stadium size, population, etc?
