The front and back pages of The Age today are all bad news for the AFL.  Commercial TV has snubbed the game tonight between two ‘giants’, Carlton and Essendon.  The sports pages discuss the sacking of the coach by Melbourne, and ask whether this is the worst AFL season ever.  The final eight looked settled half way through the season, and too many matches since then have been just frightful.  A grizzly Melbourne winter just got a lot worse for most of its people – including me, a Melbourne supporter for more than seventy years. 

It now looks like three ‘powerhouse’ clubs – Carlton, Essendon, and Melbourne – need a revolution from within to revive; while the Eagles are declared broken, North Melbourne has lost whatever spark it had, and St Kilda is the forever bridesmaid.  The performance of Brisbane and the two new clubs are the bright lights.

Football in Australia is a game vital to the upbringing of our children and to the sanity of us adults.  It is an essential – indispensable – part of our communal life.  For most of us, it takes the place of religion, with the MCG as its communal heart and shrine.  If you have not been there on Grand Final Day or Boxing Day, you have not lived in Melbourne. 

Football is an integral part of a vibrant city.  There are times when you can feel it in the air, and we can survey each other with what John Keats called ‘wild surmise’. 

And somehow life just gets better.

For those reasons, the people who run football hold offices of public trust.

Football at the top is still a game, but it is also a business.  The clubs are part of the entertainment industry, revolving around the rights to view and broadcast the games on television. 

As such, the standing of a football club will turn on the quality of its business management.  And the way to test the business management of each club is to assess its performance in the AFL competition each year.  How did your team go?  Where did it finish?

If you look at the results of the AFL competition for this century, it is clear that Collingwood, Geelong, Hawthorn, and Sydney have been well managed, but Carlton, Essendon, and Melbourne have not – indeed, they are what may be called ‘basket cases’.  (I put the others to one side.)  The sometime chieftains of the tribe are no more now than spent uncles, who can be relied on to spoil a family gathering.  (If you think that is an allusion to The Dead of James Joyce, you are correct.)

The conclusion is in my mind inevitable – there has been a bad failure of management at each of those clubs.  But the response is the same as that of our government ministers – they do not accept responsibility, but on a bad day, they just sack the poor bunny in the limelight. 

And utter some worthless bromide.  The head of Melbourne said ‘we are a proud club…. and an ambitious club.’ 

And for that, our pride gets us one flag in sixty years, and the rest is just purgatory. 

The people running footy are like those in government.  They are wont to bang on – ‘bloviate’ is the term – as if they think we came down in the last shower.

What we can see, then, is a failure of management in the way that most AFL clubs conduct their business.  (If it matters, I doubt whether many of the top 100 on the ASX come out much better.)

And it looks like that failure is now manifest in the management of the AFL – from the Chairman down.  A somber veil of mediocrity has descended, a house specialty here in Oz.  There is far too much mumbling and grumbling, and it passes my understanding that the AFL can slap us all in the face by counting out free TV on some nights, and saying ‘If you want to watch the best we can offer in the comfort of your home on a miserable winter night in Melbourne, you will have to shell out a kicker to Rupert Murdoch, or the like.’ 

It is hard to imagine a worse case of business management.  It all depends on keeping faith with your customers – and the AFL is losing it.  And that is before you get to the swooning salaries of the hangers-on.

It looks to me that those running the AFL have lost touch with you and me after being duchessed with cocktails and canapes by the set lovingly patronized by their Chairman when at home at fortress South Yarra.  When did they last down a Four’n Twenty in the outer with the real footy followers?

The AFL is also losing it by its grubby dealings with and condescension to the gaming industry.  This is a simple but gross moral failing, and one that taints the AFL – and all of us who support it.  And our governments.  If the AFL was listed on the ASX, I would refuse to invest in it on this ground alone.

And then there are the grifters in the press and elsewhere who just want to clip their ticket, and make the simple sound tricky.  They are like flies buzzing on refuse, and with their fellow travelers in sleaze, they show why I have not been to a game since 1999. 

I still enjoy tuning into a game occasionally, but so much of the tribal fervor has gone with the wind of the dollar and the glare of the machines. 

I have been fortunate to have a fall-back in Melbourne Storm, who have been well managed since their inception, and who have therefore kept my patronage and membership – although the big contribution of the NRL was to make themselves public enemy number one south of the Murray.  It was like test cricket – a sworn enemy!  A simple verity of childhood and youth.  (I subscribed to the Rebels four days before they finally hit the fence in another display of Australian communal incompetence.)

And there was a time when you went to watch the footy on Saturday arvo, and your one regret as a Melbourne supporter was leaving the Prince Alfred beer garden after lunch.  The rest was just foreseen misery – penitence, if you prefer.

Otherwise, those in charge of management at the AFL and its clubs, and those in the media and government, need, in the immortal words of the Couldabeens, to have a very good look at ‘votre selves.’  You are badly letting down us and our game. 

And that is a very bad place to be in the City of Melbourne.  Even if this comes to you from one who has grown old, and one, like King Lear, who is cranky as a result. 

But oh, for those times in Glen Iris more than seventy years ago, when every second kid in Rosedale Road had an Essendon jumper with number ten on his back, and the world was so much simpler – and, on a good day, even innocent.

The Woes of the AFL

The front and back pages of The Age today are all bad news for the AFL.  Commercial TV has snubbed the game tonight between two ‘giants’, Carlton and Essendon.  The sports pages discuss the sacking of the coach by Melbourne, and ask whether this is the worst AFL season ever.  The final eight looked settled half way through the season, and too many matches since then have been just frightful.  A grizzly Melbourne winter just got a lot worse for most of its people – including me, a Melbourne supporter for more than seventy years. 

It now looks like three ‘powerhouse’ clubs – Carlton, Essendon, and Melbourne – need a revolution from within to revive; while the Eagles are declared broken, North Melbourne has lost whatever spark it had, and St Kilda is the forever bridesmaid.  The performance of Brisbane and the two new clubs are the bright lights.

Football in Australia is a game vital to the upbringing of our children and to the sanity of us adults.  It is an essential – indispensable – part of our communal life.  For most of us, it takes the place of religion, with the MCG as its communal heart and shrine.  If you have not been there on Grand Final Day or Boxing Day, you have not lived in Melbourne. 

Football is an integral part of a vibrant city.  There are times when you can feel it in the air, and we can survey each other with what John Keats called ‘wild surmise’. 

And somehow life just gets better.

For those reasons, the people who run football hold offices of public trust.

Football at the top is still a game, but it is also a business.  The clubs are part of the entertainment industry, revolving around the rights to view and broadcast the games on television. 

As such, the standing of a football club will turn on the quality of its business management.  And the way to test the business management of each club is to assess its performance in the AFL competition each year.  How did your team go?  Where did it finish?

If you look at the results of the AFL competition for this century, it is clear that Collingwood, Geelong, Hawthorn, and Sydney have been well managed, but Carlton, Essendon, and Melbourne have not – indeed, they are what may be called ‘basket cases’.  (I put the others to one side.)  The sometime chieftains of the tribe are no more now than spent uncles, who can be relied on to spoil a family gathering.  (If you think that is an allusion to The Dead of James Joyce, you are correct.)

The conclusion is in my mind inevitable – there has been a bad failure of management at each of those clubs.  But the response is the same as that of our government ministers – they do not accept responsibility, but on a bad day, they just sack the poor bunny in the limelight. 

And utter some worthless bromide.  The head of Melbourne said ‘we are a proud club…. and an ambitious club.’ 

And for that, our pride gets us one flag in sixty years, and the rest is just purgatory. 

The people running footy are like those in government.  They are wont to bang on – ‘bloviate’ is the term – as if they think we came down in the last shower.

What we can see, then, is a failure of management in the way that most AFL clubs conduct their business.  (If it matters, I doubt whether many of the top 100 on the ASX come out much better.)

And it looks like that failure is now manifest in the management of the AFL – from the Chairman down.  A somber veil of mediocrity has descended, a house specialty here in Oz.  There is far too much mumbling and grumbling, and it passes my understanding that the AFL can slap us all in the face by counting out free TV on some nights, and saying ‘If you want to watch the best we can offer in the comfort of your home on a miserable winter night in Melbourne, you will have to shell out a kicker to Rupert Murdoch, or the like.’ 

It is hard to imagine a worse case of business management.  It all depends on keeping faith with your customers – and the AFL is losing it.  And that is before you get to the swooning salaries of the hangers-on.

It looks to me that those running the AFL have lost touch with you and me after being duchessed with cocktails and canapes by the set lovingly patronized by their Chairman when at home at fortress South Yarra.  When did they last down a Four’n Twenty in the outer with the real footy followers?

The AFL is also losing it by its grubby dealings with and condescension to the gaming industry.  This is a simple but gross moral failing, and one that taints the AFL – and all of us who support it.  And our governments.  If the AFL was listed on the ASX, I would refuse to invest in it on this ground alone.

And then there are the grifters in the press and elsewhere who just want to clip their ticket, and make the simple sound tricky.  They are like flies buzzing on refuse, and with their fellow travelers in sleaze, they show why I have not been to a game since 1999. 

I still enjoy tuning into a game occasionally, but so much of the tribal fervor has gone with the wind of the dollar and the glare of the machines. 

I have been fortunate to have a fall-back in Melbourne Storm, who have been well managed since their inception, and who have therefore kept my patronage and membership – although the big contribution of the NRL was to make themselves public enemy number one south of the Murray.  It was like test cricket – a sworn enemy!  A simple verity of childhood and youth.  (I subscribed to the Rebels four days before they finally hit the fence in another display of Australian communal incompetence.)

And there was a time when you went to watch the footy on Saturday arvo, and your one regret as a Melbourne supporter was leaving the Prince Alfred beer garden after lunch.  The rest was just foreseen misery – penitence, if you prefer.

Otherwise, those in charge of management at the AFL and its clubs, and those in the media and government, need, in the immortal words of the Couldabeens, to have a very good look at ‘votre selves.’  You are badly letting down us and our game. 

And that is a very bad place to be in the City of Melbourne.  Even if this comes to you from one who has grown old, and one, like King Lear, who is cranky as a result. 

But oh, for those times in Glen Iris more than seventy years ago, when every second kid in Rosedale Road had an Essendon jumper with number ten on his back, and the world was so much simpler – and, on a good day, even innocent.