Peter Gordon says we need to fashion a competition where every game is an adventure of interest and the result unpredictable. Picture: Stuart Walmsley Source: Herald Sun
AN odd part of my past is that, as Footscray's AFL director in the early 1990s, I seconded the AFL board resolution to admit the Adelaide Football Club into the national competition.
(I've been quiet about this since the 1997 Crows-Dogs preliminary final.)
The Crows have been a great success.
They stand alongside the Eagles, Dockers, Power, Giants, Suns, Lions and the Swans as franchises forged, fashioned or remoulded by the AFL as part of a grand and unique Australian-designed premier sporting competition.
Think about that.
Eight clubs - almost half the competition - are the creation in whole or in part of the AFL itself.
By diverting and prioritising financial resources, it has given effect to a national design much greater than the sum of its parts.
The AFL equalisation debate will have some representatives of larger AFL franchises decrying the threat of football socialism. Those clubs will have fans asking "why should we support smaller clubs to get better and be more competitive?" It's the wrong question.
The right question is, "how should the AFL distribute the money the game raises to best build the game?"
The best way is to fashion a competition where every game is an adventure of interest and the result unpredictable. How not to do it is to allow a code to evolve where some clubs are permitted to leverage larger fan bases to trample smaller franchises in predictable 20-goal whitewashes.
Probably, it's just human nature for presidents, CEOs and many fans to want to cannibalise smaller clubs in search of more and more premiership success.
But it's no way to run a billion-dollar corporation. Nor is it any way for the AFL to position itself for the real market competition - against the NRL, soccer and the litany of other sports and entertainment options that AFL consumers will get to choose from in coming years.
Rounds of football in which five out of nine weekly games are over before the first bounce will be played in empty stadiums and with TV cameras that might as well be off because no one will be watching or advertising.
A recurrently even competition is the best way. Recurrent onfield evenness is, like it or not, most significantly influenced by evenness of football spend.
Some of the best evidence comes from the NFL in the US. Its evenness and unpredictability of result mantra is encapsulated in the expression "any given Sunday".
Private owners in the NFL, the world's biggest sporting competition, whose main aim is franchise profit, achieve this by centralising revenues and distributing them to achieve a competition where, on any given Sunday, any team can win. A mind-boggling 70 per cent of NFL revenue is shared.
US TV networks bid billions of dollars for the rights because pretty much every game is a blockbuster.
You'll hear lots of views in the next few weeks from different clubs and their sectional interests.
That's their job. I have mine, too - and they will be obvious to you.
Peter Gordon is the Western Bulldogs' President
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