You’ve never seen netball?
We want different things in life.
He has done pretty well with the Nrl. Got them a decent tv deal and had them playing before every other code.
I’ve seen him in action in the Racing industry. He gets what he wants, but somehow manages to not put everyone offside in the process. An amazing ability to put forth his opinion succinctly and with passion. Probably wouldn’t work in football, too straight forward I reckon, but perfect for the knuckle dragging league types…
RUGBA LEEG
Exactly. Hes a master of the great unwashed.
Well they do have blanket media coverage every day with a massive FTA and pay tv deal behind them including live prime time matches on network tv. They might be “unwashed” but they are doing a million times better than football even with out way larger participation rate
At least he’s not suggesting the Murderer…
You want me to bore you with the historical relationship of RL with media, Unions and the ALP and the marginalization of soccer?
Or should we just assume that there’s over a 100 years of reason for thus?
you wogs are all the same…
Actually feel free to bore away it sounds like a pretty intresting topic. Doesn’t alter the fact we don’t have our house in order and they do. Football has been going over 100 years in this country. There’s no reason we can’t foster the same relationships that League has but for whatever reason we haven’t. Anyway I’ve gone off on a tangent
Don’t disagree with you, but football was set back decades by a mixture of a very poorly run national league, general racism towards wogs and active approaches by FTA networks trying to undermine football to ensure it didn’t take over.
Even now, you can see how much more money NRL and AFL are getting from government sources in comparison to A-League, despite the fact that participation numbers are greater for football than eggball. In saying that, I do view it, with a sense of pride, that NRL and AFL were all claiming they needed huge government handouts to survive, while the A-League generally weathered the storm and took it in their stride.
Fucking unbelievable the 3 Vic teams didn’t make it out in time. Fuck em. the rest of the league can start up on schedule and they can catch up after.
It only takes 3 hours to drive from Melbourne to the border. As soon as that 1st flight was grounded they should have gotten straight onto a few Greyhounds and driven to Albury. They’d have made it the same night.
The Vic teams should get to NSW asap, quarantine for 2 weeks then play their games on a catchup schedule. Who cares if they are underdone and not match fit. Its their own fault for being late or dare we say… tardy.
Well, there are a lot of vested interests in media organisations that have already sunk money into League and AFL, so makes sense that they only promote the game that means more dollars to them. Eg Channel 9 NRL, Channel 7 AFL, Channel 10 Rugby in the past… and they also split the cricket in the summer, which they actively promote to the exclusion of football.
The mainstream then have newspaper ‘stablemates’, so other than SMH, they entrench the status quo.
Eg, the do cross-promotion in current affairs and news, etc. soccer doesn’t get a look-in.
Yes, it doesn’t help that we’ve got polarising media personalities (Lucy, Fozz, etc), but without mainstream media helping, it’s hard to make a dent on NRL/AFL
Fuck. Now I have to remember.
By the time Soccer starts here in 1880, Rugby is already established in Sydney and shit ball in Melbourne.
The splitting of Rugby into Union and League comes with a strong working class tie in with the Labor Party who championed this working man’s game. So the Labor papers and working class papers get into it as well. (More than two papers back then.)
Victorian Stupid Rules uses patriotism and parochialism to jump all over “British” football. Some of the media work in Perth is pure savagery.
League, Union and Fumble Rubbish always controlled the narrative in the press as Association Football is always, always the immigrants sport. It’s what you played there, but now you are here you have to play our sport. So successive waves of immigrants eventually assimilate and play the local sport. (A similar thing also happened in the USA and Canada.)
So you have media and political interest in Union, League and Vic Rules. And a culture of assimilating new immigrants into those three codes.
Now you also have another problem. Football gets run by enthusiasts, not power brokers with political and media links. And each new wave of immigration comes in, reckons the established football organisers are rubbish and overthrow it. So soccer has been reorganised 5 or so times over the last 140 years. Lowry is probably the first example of someone getting a second burl at it. Our current regime overthrow SA in 2004. SA overthrow the Federation in 1957. The Federation overthrow someone else in the … 20s I think. (Sorry, this is 15 year old knowledge in my head and fucked if I know where my notes are.) And there was probably another one before that.
What we end up with is an institutionalised inferiority complex, run by 2nd rate grifters that aren’t even good enough to grift for the LNP in the current environment. And this inwardness that fears outward expansion.
And a media that apparently supports it (SBS) that spend 30 odd years poking wholes in it whilst run by a so called champion (Les Murray) who appeared surprised when Mikey (if you remember him from when he used to post), who is of a Latvian ancestry and whose father, I believe, worked at SBS attended a Sydney Olympic state league game in about 2006(?) cause he wasn’t Greek. (On that, Olympic was always welcoming to us Skips attending and I have many, many found memories of supporting that fine club.)
There’s also issues and theories around the early professionalism of football in Britain and not having touring teams to help cement the sports place like Union and Cricket.
And we constantly, constantly find ways to shoot ourselves in the foot. Not getting the three Victorian teams in to NSW on Friday or Saturday is just another example. You didn’t the AFL’s inside tip to see that coming.
I’ma have a lie down and a Bex. I daresay it’s been years since I wrote that much in one post.
That was brilliant mate. Thanks for going to all the effort to post all that. I really appreciate it. You really should think about putting a book out about all the history
Thank you.
I think the other point that is relevant in today’s climate (now that the AFL and NRL are well established, thanks to the historical reasons that you’ve described) is that the A League will never be one of the top football leagues in the world; therefore, even avid football fans seem to dismiss it as “poor quality” when they compare it to the big top 5 leagues (which, in reality, they have little true connection with).
In contrast, AFL is the only “Aussie Rules” competition in the world, with the only closest thing to compare it to being Gaelic Football. So AFL fans know that they are watching the best that the sport has to offer. NRL is also well within the top 5 leagues around the world, and is arguably one of the best. You won’t get any NRL fans watching the English Super League at early hours of the morning because it’s “better quality” than the NRL.
Football may have the most participation for team sports in Australia, but the reality is that unfortunately that enthusiasm in the sport will never translate to massive followings in the local competition, unless there is a massive investment from the government and sponsors to “improve the quality”; and there within lies the paradox. The truth is, even with a massive investment, it will still be compared with the big leagues and will never get close enough in the eyes of the broader football fans.
Australia, like US, Canada are those places where there are other big sports that take attention away. In many countries in South America (other than Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay), half the teams in their league will be at a standard comparable to A-league … and their national teams would be not too far ahead of socceroos. The difference is the at it is THE game over there… people live, bleed, breathe it… it is ingrained from when kids are born, kids play it, adults play it, organised, street, five-a-side, whatever… it is THE only game… maybe once the world becomes gentrified and kids in other countries can play games like tennis, golf, gymnastics, swimming, athletics, skiing, etc at a world class level, we will catch up. But until then, soccer can’t compete with world standards.
Us fans have to be realistic and play the long game - I used to whinge about Aussie football, but when A-league started up, I said I would put my money where my mouth is - getting a membership puts money in the game and maybe my son will grow up to see a less Mickey Mouse league.