We know Australian rules is the best so why isn’t it popular overseas?
June 7, 2016 1:37pm
Mitchell ToyHerald Sun
AUSTRALIAN rules football is intensely popular in one small pocket of the world and rarely played anywhere else, and that makes many Victorians very insecure.
The title ‘World Game’ belongs to another code of football and that mantle is used whenever the argument pops up about which is better.
Aussie rules with its fast pace, high scoring and frequent contact is, according to most Victorians, far better than soccer’s nil-all draws, delicate temperaments and car park flare brawls.
But the one rebuttal that is always difficult to get past is this: If Aussie rules is so good, why is it only popular in mostly one state in one country and nowhere else in the world?
Soccer is the real football, they say. It’s the World Game and brings people together in peace (even though Victoria Police might sometimes have a different view), and that’s why it’s a multibillion-dollar global behemoth.
And it’s true. Australian rules has not become popular overseas even though there have been plenty of attempts to make it so.
High-profile competitions happen between sides from different countries in Rugby League, and Rugby Union has its own World Cup.
Cricket has become a monster with first one-dayers, then Twenty20, now Big Bash.
Soccer remains a force almost bigger than Jesus (with more and more players actually called that) and its tentacles are reaching deep into Australian suburbs.
The closest Australian rules gets to the big Quidditch-style showdown with any foreign power is the International Rules match with Ireland.
Aussie rules players from Japan visiting in 2011.
And even then it’s not really Australian rules because the ball is round and the pitch is rectangular.
Our code’s own International Cup features teams from America, Asia and Europe, but is held at such ovals as Royal Park, and are not televised in prime time.
A parade of prominent former players and coaches have led delegations overseas to boost engagement, the latest being an announcement that Port might play in China for premiership points in 2017.
King among the advocates is Kevin Sheedy, who has pressed for international take-up of the game throughout his lengthy career, and who has suggested playing the opening game of the season on foreign soil.
And he doesn’t mean foreign like the WACA.
So despite all the diplomacy, why aren’t any kids in London or New York wearing Nick’s number 12 and yelling out “ball” in the schoolyard?
First we must be clear that very few other games in any other area hold such a tight grip over the local population, with the exception of target shooting in Raqqa.
A team from the US before a clash with Papua New Guinea during an International Cup match.
Such is our infatuation that deceased Victorians routinely have their coffins draped in team colours and club songs are played at funerals, and everybody thinks that’s normal and nice.
Australian rules football is rivalled only by complaining about the weather when it comes to intergenerational popularity in Victoria.
The few occasions in history when the game was held up were when the country was at war and many of the players were being shot.
To the AFL’s credit, a number of affiliation leagues have been dotted about the globe including the US, Canada, the UK, Japan, South Africa and a bunch of countries in the Pacific.
But there’s still no need to book tickets to many of those matches.
Part of the answer might lie in the unique format of the game, that requires a lot of physical space and grit that only Australians can manage.
Maybe we could try making the field smaller so you don’t need to clear out three blocks in Shanghai to make a suburban ground.
The inaugural AFL European Club Championships played in Amsterdam at which the West London Wildcats defeated a German side.
And roll back contact rules to encourage broader participation across all age groups and genders.
But all of that has been thought about before, and nothing yet can tell us why a game can become so intensely popular in one pocket of the world, with hardly a shrug of interest from anywhere else.
There can only be one firm answer.
We are the weird ones. We are the ones unreasonably obsessed with this game for reasons that nobody else can understand. For reasons that we ourselves can barely understand.
Our efforts to push this game on other parts of the world will likely be futile and will only make us look crazier.
And, really, why would we want to do it?
The game works for us, it has been passed from generation to generation with undiluted passion for more than a century and nowhere else in the world shares our history with this code.
It is time to accept that our game, in this form at least, may never be enormously popular overseas and we should be completely OK with the limited progress we’ve made.
We are the unusual ones here. And, God willing, we’ll stay that way.
liar extraordinaire 
