AFL v soccer: A pitch battle for numbers

It wasnt a difficult decision.

Essendons shock and awe opening quarter had opened up a lead of better than six goals. The Eagles had moments when they threatened, but were not capable of scoring much without Josh Kennedy and Jack Darling. The Dons were home.

At 10pm, eastern standard time, I grabbed the remote and changed the channel to SBS to hear Craig Moore make the K-Rock call of Geelong games sound like a study in neutrality.

In the patriotic Moore call, we are Australia. The Socceroos, naturally, have trounced footy – and everything else that moves on a screen – in the ratings of their two World Cup games. The not-quite-heroic 1-2 loss to France pulled an average of 2.132 million viewers, while their draw with the melancholy Danes (sad about our penalty) attracted 2.064 million.

The AFL, for all its might and power, cant compete with the national team playing the global game in the biggest sporting event on the planet. Even Gillon McLachlan might have watched the second half of the Socceroos on Thursday night. The AFL privately acknowledges that it cant expect to outrate the Socceroos in the World Cup. The margin will be greater, too, when the match is one sided, as the dull Hawthorn v Adelaide was last weekend during the Socceroos v Les Bleus.

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Each sport has its own turf and knows where it can and cant compete. The Socceroos at the World Cup are impregnable. If they make footy seem smaller and parochial, they also tap into the fabled cultural cringe, our desire to be relevant on the global stage.

In the long haul, the global game has always been viewed as the greatest threat and most serious competitor for the AFL, even though the A-League has Buckleys hope of eclipsing the AFL commercially.

I think the AFLs one of the best run sports in Australia, but I think they see football as their biggest threat in terms of other competitors, said Peter Filopoulos, the chief executive of Football Federation Victoria, who worked at North Melbourne and Hawthorn years ago before running Perth Glory and then FFV.

But what exactly does the round ball threaten? The A-League cant compete with the AFL, and the AFL plays second fiddle to the Socceroos every four years. Its long been asserted that the major competition for hearts and boots is at the local grassroots level, where soccer has been a juggernaut for 15 years.

The AFL isnt the sum of the game. Without a vibrant grassroots, the top level will wither or, in the worse case, slowly become the preserve of an athletic gladiator class – a game that recruits talented athletes for the top level but doesnt have anything of substance at community level underpinning the mass TV entertainment.

The battleground has shifted, though, over the past two years. Today, the theatre of conflict is in womens football.

Up until 2016, the AFL was being routed in the competition for female participation. It is hard to know what impact this would have had on the local game over a long period had the AFL not created the AFL womens competition.

AFLW has its detractors and its true that congestion around the ball – an issue in the mens game – is worse in the developing womens league. The standard isnt yet sufficient for AFLW to be commercially strong and there will be wrinkles as the league expands from an initially shallow talent pool.

But a glance at the local grounds and schoolyards in the suburbs demonstrates why the AFLW was absolutely essential and how successful it has been in winning converts at community level. Without it, the grassroots participation in Australian football would be considerably weaker even now.

In December 2016, the Australian Sports Commissions survey found that soccer had about 1.14 million participants, compared to Australian footballs (just under) 497,000. The Ausplay survey did not rank footy in the top 10 for regular sporting activity, which admittedly counted swimming, going to the gym, golf and other solitary activities.

In December of last year, the AFL produced its own figures claiming 1,547,915 participants, boasting growth of 10 per cent. Now, this number counted 170,744 international players as well as Auskick (200,000 plus), school footy, umpires and coaches. There were 850,000 participants in programs and another 697,000 playing in competitions.

Whatever you make of these numbers – and the apparent disparity with the ASCs one year earlier – there was a massive change between December of 2016 and 2017 that really was a game-changer: the birth of AFLW. The AFLs higher participation was largely on the back of women: a 30 per cent increase overall in womens involvement (to 463,364), with 1690 teams established (+76%). The Victorian amateurs – where McLachlan often spends his Saturday afternoons – went from zero to more than 30 teams overnight.

Soccer had a 10-0 lead in recruiting females. As Filopoulos noted, his sports W-League kicked off a decade before AFLW and, like the mens game, it has the advantage of a potent national team, the Matildas, who play in World Cups and unlike the Socceroos, regularly win matches. In Samantha Kerr, whom the AFL sought to recruit, it showcases one of the best players in the world.

Yet soccer, surprisingly, claims only 19 per cent of players are female, compared to the AFLs 30 per cent.

The local chapter of the global game is counting on females to provide the next growth phase.
FFA has set a target of a 50-50 gender split for participation by 2028. In Victoria, FFV projects growth of up to 5per cent each year and reckons it will need to find another 432 pitches.

Soccer is a bottom-up sport, its prosperity driven by masses playing the game underneath and is weak at the national level, despite the Socceroos and Sam Kerr.

The AFLs power is founded upon its mass tribal following of a club competition, which drives the dollars that allow expansion into the northern states and the womens game. Their advantage is that the money from TV rights means they can make their grassroots game more affordable. One commercially strong and funded from the top-down, the other drawing strength from the bottom-up.

The local fields for females are increasingly where they will converge and compete.

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