AFL Rules in Sydney Football Crowds

[mianfei]

For what it's worth, I've always believed that Rugby League would be the ultimate amateur sport. Union reflects much better as a professional code, particularly given the spectacle that the RWC provides. The codes got it wrong.

Interesting point, deeman12.

I must say that by any logic, Australian Football ought to be the ultimate amateur sport: it not only plays poorly on TV despite the efforts of the AFL to change the game to eliminate the wide-angle kicks that constitute the chief cause of this problem, but it also requires such a supply of land in a mild climate as is not available except in the southern and western states of Australia. When we see this logic, it is obvious that Australian Football (in the form it was before Waverley’s demise, by when it had already changed a lot) is unlikely to have the support necessary to become a major professional sport, but that it could have been played by many people (it takes more to make a team than in any other significant sport if we discount the huge substitutions in gridiron) at a lower level.

The trouble is that the outer suburbs of Melbourne and presumably Adelaide and Perth are just so noncompetitive that the very idea of competitive sport is viewed as a short-term waste of time. As Hans Hoppe once said to me, the much lower time preference of these extremely conservative outer suburbanites means they are more concerned about their and their family’s long-term future and believe competitive sport provides very short-term gain or pleasure at best. For this reason, no sport of even the suburban and amateur or semiprofessional type has been able to establish itself in the mortgage belts of Melbourne, Adelaide or Perth.

The result is that Australian Football become concentrated in the small, less conservative, working class enclaves and among businessmen who saw its potential owing to the low ticket prices (40¢ per game in 1970 I recall) as mass entertainment not found anywhere else in the world. The troubles Australian Football faces now can be traced to the emptying of the inner cities for the ultraconservative suburbs mentioned above where the culture is so noncompetitive and its ability to fulfil the role one guesses it could disappears.

The AFL is now faced with a dilemma that is unpromising to say the least: it fears losing an increasingly limited talent pool (because roofed stadiums create height requirements not found beforehand) to established, telegenic sports like basketball. Though the AFL has done better than it feared, it must still envy those sports (as well as union and league) for their international scope alone.

 

[cos789]

plays poorly on TV

$1.25 billion says your wrong

The AFL is now faced with a dilemma .

Where to expand to next .
Accept which code hoppers .
Invest in which overseas areas .

 

[the distributer]

Interesting point, deeman12.

I must say that by any logic, Australian Football ought to be the ultimate amateur sport: it not only plays poorly on TV despite the efforts of the AFL to change the game to eliminate the wide-angle kicks that constitute the chief cause of this problem, but it also requires such a supply of land in a mild climate as is not available except in the southern and western states of Australia. When we see this logic, it is obvious that Australian Football (in the form it was before Waverley’s demise, by when it had already changed a lot) is unlikely to have the support necessary to become a major professional sport, but that it could have been played by many people (it takes more to make a team than in any other significant sport if we discount the huge substitutions in gridiron) at a lower level.

The trouble is that the outer suburbs of Melbourne and presumably Adelaide and Perth are just so noncompetitive that the very idea of competitive sport is viewed as a short-term waste of time. As Hans Hoppe once said to me, the much lower time preference of these extremely conservative outer suburbanites means they are more concerned about their and their family’s long-term future and believe competitive sport provides very short-term gain or pleasure at best. For this reason, no sport of even the suburban and amateur or semiprofessional type has been able to establish itself in the mortgage belts of Melbourne, Adelaide or Perth.

The result is that Australian Football become concentrated in the small, less conservative, working class enclaves and among businessmen who saw its potential owing to the low ticket prices (40¢ per game in 1970 I recall) as mass entertainment not found anywhere else in the world. The troubles Australian Football faces now can be traced to the emptying of the inner cities for the ultraconservative suburbs mentioned above where the culture is so noncompetitive and its ability to fulfil the role one guesses it could disappears.

The AFL is now faced with a dilemma that is unpromising to say the least: it fears losing an increasingly limited talent pool (because roofed stadiums create height requirements not found beforehand) to established, telegenic sports like basketball. Though the AFL has done better than it feared, it must still envy those sports (as well as union and league) for their international scope alone.

The AFL is a multy billion dollar business, the NRL/ARU are not, doesn't matter how many pieces of shit you have, they'll never compare to a single diamond, i also disagree on your "plays poorly on TV" opinion, because the game plays very well on TV, 1.25 billion dollars proves that.

 

[Redb#]

I just spat my coffee out laughing.

accurately reported as 21,485

Serious LOL.

Lions crowd stats have ben fudged this year too.

I guess the truth hurts. The AFL has no reason to fudge crowd figures. You can cough, splutter and feign superior knowledge all you like.

 

[Football Tragic]

Interesting point, deeman12.

I must say that by any logic, Australian Football ought to be the ultimate amateur sport: it not only plays poorly on TV despite the efforts of the AFL to change the game to eliminate the wide-angle kicks that constitute the chief cause of this problem, but it also requires such a supply of land in a mild climate as is not available except in the southern and western states of Australia. When we see this logic, it is obvious that Australian Football (in the form it was before Waverley’s demise, by when it had already changed a lot) is unlikely to have the support necessary to become a major professional sport, but that it could have been played by many people (it takes more to make a team than in any other significant sport if we discount the huge substitutions in gridiron) at a lower level.

The trouble is that the outer suburbs of Melbourne and presumably Adelaide and Perth are just so noncompetitive that the very idea of competitive sport is viewed as a short-term waste of time. As Hans Hoppe once said to me, the much lower time preference of these extremely conservative outer suburbanites means they are more concerned about their and their family’s long-term future and believe competitive sport provides very short-term gain or pleasure at best. For this reason, no sport of even the suburban and amateur or semiprofessional type has been able to establish itself in the mortgage belts of Melbourne, Adelaide or Perth.

The result is that Australian Football become concentrated in the small, less conservative, working class enclaves and among businessmen who saw its potential owing to the low ticket prices (40¢ per game in 1970 I recall) as mass entertainment not found anywhere else in the world. The troubles Australian Football faces now can be traced to the emptying of the inner cities for the ultraconservative suburbs mentioned above where the culture is so noncompetitive and its ability to fulfil the role one guesses it could disappears.

The AFL is now faced with a dilemma that is unpromising to say the least: it fears losing an increasingly limited talent pool (because roofed stadiums create height requirements not found beforehand) to established, telegenic sports like basketball. Though the AFL has done better than it feared, it must still envy those sports (as well as union and league) for their international scope alone.

Doubtful. This sounds like a nice compulation of intellectual babble intending to justify the authors assertion that based on historical melbourne cultural communities, AFL shouldn't be in a superior position to either of the Rugby codes. Rediculous.

The reality remains with Australian Rules football, is that it transcends culture, socio-ecconomical backgrounds, geographical and suburban origins and gender. In other words, unlike any of the other Australian football codes, Aussie Rules is FOR EVERYONE. This is why it is the largest and most popular code in the country.

League could well fit into the Amateur category due to its historical emergence as a 'working-class' sport while Union was (and still remains predominatley) a sport for the affluent, private schools of Sydney and would therefore lend itself to be more suited as a professional sport.

So while the idea of international contests is appealing it pales into insignificance compared to a contest to the passion you feel for a domestic team you follow week in, week out, every season, every year. In any international team you rarely have a close affliation with more than a handful of players unless you watch them play multiple times over a brief period. So International games, to me are not something to be envied, but rather a curiousity or passing interest which can not hope to match the emotive passion I feel for my local team.

 

[zero]

I just spat my coffee out laughing.

accurately reported as 21,485

Serious LOL.

Lions crowd stats have ben fudged this year too.

ahh yes, because the NRL lies about their crowds, that means everyone does

many times i have wondered what the ACTUAL NRL crowd average is.

i would bet that its actually under 14000k, maybe even 13k

and even then its actually only the broncos that are genuinely popular, they drag up the averages up a great deal

the rest of the NRL clubs have shocking crowds, even their heavily inflated "official" figures are pathetic.

 

[SwampCreature]

Interesting point, deeman12.

I must say that by any logic, Australian Football ought to be the ultimate amateur sport: it not only plays poorly on TV despite the efforts of the AFL to change the game to eliminate the wide-angle kicks that constitute the chief cause of this problem, but it also requires such a supply of land in a mild climate as is not available except in the southern and western states of Australia. When we see this logic, it is obvious that Australian Football (in the form it was before Waverley’s demise, by when it had already changed a lot) is unlikely to have the support necessary to become a major professional sport, but that it could have been played by many people (it takes more to make a team than in any other significant sport if we discount the huge substitutions in gridiron) at a lower level.

The trouble is that the outer suburbs of Melbourne and presumably Adelaide and Perth are just so noncompetitive that the very idea of competitive sport is viewed as a short-term waste of time. As Hans Hoppe once said to me, the much lower time preference of these extremely conservative outer suburbanites means they are more concerned about their and their family’s long-term future and believe competitive sport provides very short-term gain or pleasure at best. For this reason, no sport of even the suburban and amateur or semiprofessional type has been able to establish itself in the mortgage belts of Melbourne, Adelaide or Perth.

The result is that Australian Football become concentrated in the small, less conservative, working class enclaves and among businessmen who saw its potential owing to the low ticket prices (40¢ per game in 1970 I recall) as mass entertainment not found anywhere else in the world. The troubles Australian Football faces now can be traced to the emptying of the inner cities for the ultraconservative suburbs mentioned above where the culture is so noncompetitive and its ability to fulfil the role one guesses it could disappears.

The AFL is now faced with a dilemma that is unpromising to say the least: it fears losing an increasingly limited talent pool (because roofed stadiums create height requirements not found beforehand) to established, telegenic sports like basketball. Though the AFL has done better than it feared, it must still envy those sports (as well as union and league) for their international scope alone.

This is the biggest load of bollocks I have ever red.

Rediculous.

Lolz

 

[Hank93]

It is hard to argue about the One team town concept when Melbourne Storm never seem to get as big a crowds as the Swans do in Sydney. Melbourne Storm in 2011 get crowds between 9,000 and 12,000. A one off crowd of 22,000 went to see the Storm play the Warriors.

Sydney's NRL crowds are truly dreadful. The games that are played at local grounds seem to get reasonable crowds, but games at the SFS, ANZ are between the 10,000-20,000 mark. 30,000 is a great crowd for NRL.

The largest crowd in Sydney for a NRL game this season is 34,000. The average for the entire season is 17,474. 7 clubs in Melbourne in the AFL average more than 34,000 to each home game. The average attendance for the Swans this season is 27,064.

It is funny how here in Adelaide a crowd of 23,000 for Port is pretty poor when in the NRL that would be considered a good crowd.

 

[Monty of the Shire]

Every season these threads make my brain hurt as the same blatantly obvious observations are repeated (AFL get better crowds than league blah blah blah), i have never read one of these threads and learnt anything other than which posters on here are the most boring repetitive c**ts.
Melbs is AFL, Syd is RL/RU, Melbs get the best crowds in the country, AFL is 'a superior product' etc etc yawn zzzzzz Its like a cyber circle jerk.

 

[Roddy]

Every season these threads make my brain hurt as the same blatantly obvious observations are repeated (AFL get better crowds than league blah blah blah), i have never read one of these threads and learnt anything other than which posters on here are the most boring repetitive c**ts.
Melbs is AFL, Syd is RL/RU, Melbs get the best crowds in the country, AFL is 'a superior product' etc etc yawn zzzzzz Its like a cyber circle jerk.

And yet you apparently continue to take the time to come into the threads, read them, and make a boring, predictable post. Go figure...

 

[Redb#]

And yet you apparently continue to take the time to come into the threads, read them, and make a boring, predictable post. Go figure...

Was hoping for at least a merkin.

 

[THRILLHO]

Every season these threads make my brain hurt as the same blatantly obvious observations are repeated (AFL get better crowds than league blah blah blah), i have never read one of these threads and learnt anything other than which posters on here are the most boring repetitive c**ts.
Melbs is AFL, Syd is RL/RU, Melbs get the best crowds in the country, AFL is 'a superior product' etc etc yawn zzzzzz Its like a cyber circle jerk.

Melbs?

Surely you mean Victardia?

 

[cos789]

Every season these threads make my brain hurt as the same blatantly obvious observations are repeated (AFL get better crowds than league blah blah blah).

It's an unfortunate painful side effect of people not accepting the truth .

 

[Roddy]

Melbs?

Surely you mean Victardia?

He meant Mexico...

 

[mustapha]

Every season these threads make my brain hurt as the same blatantly obvious observations are repeated (AFL get better crowds than league blah blah blah), i have never read one of these threads and learnt anything other than which posters on here are the most boring repetitive c**ts.
Melbs is AFL, Syd is RL/RU, Melbs get the best crowds in the country, AFL is 'a superior product' etc etc yawn zzzzzz Its like a cyber circle jerk.

These threads keep the nuff nuffs off the streets. If they weren't writing here they would be shouting through a megaphone on a street corner somewhere.

 

[Roddy]

These threads keep the nuff nuffs off the streets. If they weren't writing here they would be shouting through a megaphone on a street corner somewhere.

The irony is just oozing from this post...

 

[tonk]

These threads keep the nuff nuffs off the streets. If they weren't writing here they would be shouting through a megaphone on a street corner somewhere.

Oh dear.

 

[mustapha]

The irony is just oozing from this post...

Yes because my odd mocking post in these type of threads is equivalent to the hours upon hours of time that the usual suspects devote to defending "our great game" against the heathen codes.

 

[mianfei]

The AFL is a multy billion dollar business, the NRL/ARU are not, doesn't matter how many pieces of (expletive) you have, they'll never compare to a single diamond, i also disagree on your "plays poorly on TV" opinion, because the game plays very well on TV, 1.25 billion dollars proves that.

I’m really sorry that people are offended by my recent reply to you.

You do have some reasonable points about hoe the AFL has become big business, but I will give my thoughts here:

1. It is impossible for me to think the NRL is not big business with its large pay-for-view TV contracts (you’re overstating the lack of money in the NRL, I admit it probably never was as big business as the AFL)
2. The AFL, with its use of roofed stadiums and elimination of suburban grounds, is today effectively competing with sports like basketball and volleyball for a small population of tall people, rather than with the NRL or ARU
3. The AFL has been, to be totally fair, greatly more successful at this task that it feared
   • witness the decline of the NBL since Docklands was announced in the middle 1990s, which more than anything concerning the NRL is proof of the AFL’s success
4. The AFL beleives crowd figures are of minor importance compared to television revenue and that if the sport is modified sufficiently to play better on TV, small crowds are of no concern (hence replacing 77,000 Waverley with 52,000 Docklands which helped the game’s television ratings)
   • I admit my experience here may not be telling: being able to replay footage many times on DVD ought to allow people to appreciate older games better than possible from one-off watching on television
5. The changes to the game the AFL has made are much greater than most other sports have had to make and may not help attract the virtually unique “community culture” market of suburban Australia
   • This suburban culture is not likely to be attracted to other competing sports like basket codes, rugby or soccer

I am terribly sorry if I have misunderstood anything - or if you have misunderstood what

 

[Roddy]

Yes because my odd mocking post in these type of threads is equivalent to the hours upon hours of time that the usual suspects devote to defending "our great game" against the heathen codes.

'Odd mocking post'? More irony.

Mustapha, posts: 1978. Almost 2000 posts on a board of a sport you dislike. The very definition of what you are mocking. And of nuff nuff-dom.

 

[Redb#]

'Odd mocking post'? More irony.

Mustapha, posts: 1978. Almost 2000 posts on a board of a sport you dislike. The very definition of what you are mocking. And of nuff nuff-dom.

Yep Mustapha is still hurting from all the bitch slappings he received when defending 'soccah'. He is now an unabashed NRL fan too.

AFL: Someone think of the children!

 

[mustapha]

'Odd mocking post'? More irony.

Mustapha, posts: 1978. Almost 2000 posts on a board of a sport you dislike. The very definition of what you are mocking. And of nuff nuff-dom.

I know that this may be a foreign concept, but some people like several sports. Some people actually support and have an interest in several football codes. I don't like or hate Rugby League but I don't devote my life to writing crap about it.

My Essendon membership does not prevent me from enjoying the work of some of the better AFL only posters in threads like these.

Apologies. I have diverted this important discussion.

I heard that the NRL like to fudge their crowd figures. Bloody thugby!

 

[flylikeaneagle]

BTW - The only problem with Sydney is that when they have a really good crowd, the Swans generally stink. I should know - I usually travel up each year for the Collingwood game. Crowds are always great - but the Swans always terrible. Why do they always seem to choke in front of a big home crowd?

The term "choke" is probably the most overused and misused term in worldwide sport.

The Swans never squandered significant dominance due to nerves or pressure in any of these games.

Being outplayed and choking are two different things.

 

[Arwib]

We usually play badly against Collingwood. That's a bit different to choking.

 

[Roddy]

I know that this may be a foreign concept, but some people like several sports. Some people actually support and have an interest in several football codes. I don't like or hate Rugby League but I don't devote my life to writing crap about it.

My Essendon membership does not prevent me from enjoying the work of some of the better AFL only posters in threads like these.

Apologies. I have diverted this important discussion.

I heard that the NRL like to fudge their crowd figures. Bloody thugby!

News flash dude. I like more than one sport too. I go to the cricket and the Aussie Open every year. I have seen basketball at Madison Square Gardens, soccer at Anfield, Baseball at Dodgers Stadium, cricket at Lords, Ice hockey in calgary, Canada, and more. Know who and what you're dealing with before you mouth off, yeah?.

I find your 'don't devote my life' comment interesting too. You've been on this forum for ten years. TEN YEARS! 90% of your posts are about soccer, on a football forum, for the last DECADE OF YOUR LIFE??? I'm an intelligent and educated person, but I actually can't get my head around that concept. Are there not about 10,000 soccer forums on the web you can post on? What exactly is wrong with your life?