Australia hosts a tennis grand slam tournament, Formula 1 and MotoGP series tour events, and will host its third Olympics in 2032, the nation certainly achieves a sporting pedigree that belies its population. For comparison, Australia is similar in population size to Taiwan or Romania, yet with a far more advanced sport market. Whereas Taiwan’s professional sport market featured 21 teams in 2019, Australia featured 120 teams across its seven largest commercial sport leagues. It is this breadth of passion across sports that, I argue, positions Australia as the most distinctive sport marketplace in the world. While an abundance of sport content has been a boon for the purchasing power of sport fans, it has contributed to a cut-throat competitive intensity within the Australian sport sector for the hearts and wallets of consumers. This intensity, particularly in the context of the hyper-competitive football landscape, is
the core focus of my recently published book: Code War$: The Battle for Fans, Dollars and Survival. Although our football codes have been entrenched in competition for over a century, the onset of COVID-19 has coincided with broader industry challenges and transformation. Accordingly, the 2020’s may represent the most profound period of industry development since the onset of sport sector’s hyper-commercialisation during the 1970s. Our modern football landscape: chance or fate? What differentiates Australia from more typical sport settings is not only that we have multiple football codes, but that their respective popularity remains so heavily geographic-centric. The Australian Football League (AFL) retains an average 89% share of Google search volume across the four football leagues across southern states, while the National Rugby League (NRL) achieves an equivalent 63% search volume share in northern states. By contrast, North America’s National Football League (NFL) is the most searched league among the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball and National Hockey League in every state of the USA, including regions without a local NFL team. Such Google search data also reveals the AFL’s generational success in northern expansion, as compared to the NRL’s laissez faire approach to expansion. Whereas the AFL achieves a 31% share of search in northern markets, the NRL achieves just 7% in southern states. Despite the ingrained dominance of particular codes within particular regions, history reveals that many tantalising ‘what if’ scenarios have shaped our modern football landscape. For instance, West Australia’s inaugural football code from 1881 was in fact rugby union. Rugby held ground for three seasons, until overthrown by Australian rules advocates. The now all-powerful West Australian Football Association (WAFA) was the last Australian rules state association to form, doing so on the 8th May 1885. So too in Brisbane does the current day passion for rugby, in particular the league variety, conceal that the state’s first football club was aligned to Melbourne rules. Melbourne
The Wallabies line up.
AFL action between Richmond and Geelong.
Optus Stadium during the 2021 AFL Grand Final.
Football’s survivors and thrivers Dr Hunter Fujak explains the state of Australia’s Code Wars
I
f we take a broad view of the global sport marketplace, it is uncontroversial to state that football (soccer) is the most culturally dominant sport in most domestic settings. It is rather uncommon for soccer not to be a nation’s favourite sport, and even less common for a nation to prefer another form of football over soccer. However, Australia sits alone as a sole outlier, as the only nation where four football codes operate at a commercial level, and soccer is not a clear favourite. When one further considers that
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