AFL - A tribal game no more?
By Dr David Nadel
When Collingwood plays Geelong in the Australian Football League (AFL) Grand Final this Saturday afternoon it will be the first time that these teams have met in a Grand Final for nearly sixty years. In 1953, 89,060 people watched Collingwood defeat Geelong at the Melbourne Cricket Ground.
In the 1950s the Victorian Football League (VFL) Grand Final was the climax of a tribal competition that occupied the city all winter and was as central to the soul of Melbourne as the Shrine of Remembrance, St Paul’s Cathedral, Flinders St Station, the Yarra River and the annual Melbourne Cup holiday. Almost everybody barracked for a football team and almost everybody knew at least one local footballer and/or his family.
In 1953 the VFL was the top Australian rules competition in Australia (and therefore the world) but it was confined to Port Phillip Bay, with eleven teams in Melbourne and one in Geelong. All twelve teams played on Saturday afternoons on their own individual grounds and represented local suburbs (and one provincial city). While some exceptional players came from the country or interstate, the majority were local boys and had probably barracked since childhood for the clubs they represented. The players received the equivalent of about $10 a match and all players and even the club coach had another full-time job.
Modern players are professional sportsmen on individual contracts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. For the very best players, advertising and sponsorship options can raise their pre-tax income to over $1 million dollars annually. The players are drafted from all over the country and very few are playing for the teams they grew up supporting. They are remote celebrities, admired but rarely known by their fans.
The competition, now called the AFL, includes 17 teams, spans all mainland states, and features matches played across the weekend. The television broadcasters, who have poured millions into the game, prefer that the most exciting and popular matches are held at night. In Victoria, the nine teams remaining in Melbourne share two large stadiums. The tenth Victorian team, Geelong, is allowed to play six games at its provincial home ground.
Australian football is the most watched team sport in the country, both in terms of attendance at matches and viewer ratings on television. Because the players are professionals and train six days a week and at least ten months each year, the game is played at a higher standard than ever before.
The fact that the all the matches are held at a handful of stadiums, all of which are regularly renovated with taxpayers’ money, means that spectators are watching the game in maximum comfort. Football has gone a long way from standing room in poorly terraced suburban grounds with antiquated catering and toilet facilities. It is a great spectacle, but is it still part of the tribal soul of Melbourne?
Several factors maintained the tribal nature of Australian Football for much of the 20th century. From 1925 to 1981 (the year in which South Melbourne was relocated to Sydney) the same twelve clubs competed in the VFL. This was a remarkably stable competition confined to one city.
Soccer leagues in Europe were national and promoted and relegated teams every year. American sporting competitions moved their franchised teams around the country. Even Sydney’s top-level rugby league competition dropped inner city teams and replaced them with teams from the outer suburbs virtually every decade. The stability of the Victorian competition allowed deep rivalries to develop.
Between 1915 and 1983 players were zoned to their local teams; this created closer loyalties both between the teams and players and also between the players and local barrackers. A restraint of trade case in 1983 ended zoning and was one of the key steps to creating the national competition. The VFL/AFL’s long-held policy of rationalising the number of grounds has improved viewing conditions and saved the clubs money but it has eroded a key aspect of the tribal nature of local football.
Saturday’s game will be a magnificent spectacle, contested between 44 highly skilled professional athletes. It will make huge amounts of money for the AFL, the Melbourne Cricket Club, Channel Ten, Foxtel and their advertisers and various catering companies. I doubt, however, that it will reflect the soul of Melbourne in the way that the 1953 Grand Final did.
Dr David Nadel is a lecturer in the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University and a contributor to The Australian Game of Football Since 1858, published by the AFL to celebrate 150 years of the game.