Carter report actually puts Tasmania back on the AFL’s map

Q: Who said: “I do think it’s illogical that we subsidise the 10th team in Melbourne, but we won’t subsidise the first team in Tasmania.”

A: Colin Carter, 10 years ago.

Carter has been misunderstood, and perhaps because of it, his report last week has been misrepresented. The ineradicable take-away is that there will be a Tasmanian team in the AFL.

Carter comes originally from Perth and as a kid barracked heartily for WA against Victoria. When he moved to Victoria, he hooked up with Geelong, though he has never lived there, and at length became president.

He has never seen footy as Melbourne’s game, but rather as the nation’s game. In 1985, he helped to form the Melbourne competition into a national competition and served on its commission. Without a Tasmanian team, his report says, that competition is incomplete.

Yes, he contemplates a relocation and a joint venture with a Victorian team as options, prompting Tasmanian Premier Peter Gutwein to snort that they wanted to have their own team, not rent one.

The passion that burns in Tasmania for Australian rules football is obvious.Credit:Getty Images

Crucially, Carter reports that a new team with its own licence is viable on every metric and through every lens. It would be smaller than the other models to start, and take longer to succeed. It would also be fiercely resisted by the other clubs, who would fear further stretching of the game’s resources. Carter would have been negligent not to cover off on this.

But his report stresses that the business of the AFL is not like any other. If it was, half the clubs would be out of business, yet some have survived literally for a century or more without ever turning a profit. Subsidisation is built into the game.

Credit:Matt Golding.

Carter makes his business case by demolishing business cases. “Sport doesn’t work that way. A football competition is not just an ‘economic’ industry. It is also a ‘social compact’ in which large and small revenue teams co-exist for very long times,” he says.

“Unlike in the commercial world, the smaller teams survive, and the larger clubs accept that this is so. That is the ‘social compact’ and this needs to be understood to make sense of what a Tasmanian team means for our competition.”

Carter cites the Green Bay Packers, whose American home town is half the size of Hobart, but who have won 13 championships. Inter alia, he observes that being small and cold is not antithetical to player retention: Green Bay, Christchurch, Manchester. In AFL, it is clubs in the sunniest climes who have struggled with this.

In surveying the landscape, Carter goes to possibly more contentious places than have made the headlines. One is the wooliness in membership figures. Richmond, with a notional 105,000 members, sell just 22,000 11-game general admission memberships. Even more astonishingly, this cohort attends only around two games a year on average.

St Kilda have 7300, Geelong merely 2500, which makes sense when you think that the Cats never play 11 home games in Geelong and 30 per cent of their members live in Melbourne. In a way, they are a de facto joint venture.

Carter wonders if the AFL players might contribute to funding the new Tasmanian club, not materially, but by agreeing to an already-mooted reduction in list sizes of two per club. This would also address the bugbear of dilution of talent. Carter thinks that dilution is a moot point anyway, since Australia’s population has grown faster than the AFL player body politic.

Home of the NFL’s Green Bay PackersCredit:Getty Images.

You can hear the grumbling of the players’ body already. You can also hear the clubs growl. Carter reveals that in designing the national competition in 1985, the AFL had thought to introduce two teams each from Perth and Adelaide immediately so as to make sure none could establish an instant monopoly. The extant clubs shot them down.

More broadly on funding, Carter notes that in the NFL, 72 per cent of all the game’s revenue is pooled and shared. In the AFL, the figure is less than 50 per cent. If the AFL were to bend a little towards the NFL way, a new Tasmanian club could be fully funded overnight. But that growl from the clubs would become a howl.

Favourite son Matthew Richardson in a Tasmanian guernsey.Credit:Vince Caligiuri

The AFL won’t make a call on a model or inauguration for the Tasmanian team until the COVID fog clears a little. But it’s when and how, not if. Looking to the further horizon, Carter envisages that the “how” will recede anyway. Geographical connection between a team and a place is loosening in all sports. However the Tasmanian team begins, it will become both a local artefact – like MONA – and a “formidable” national brand.

This is, or should be, the AFL’s true business.“The AFL as ‘keeper of the code’ is more than spin,” Carter says. “It defines the AFL’s obligations as nationwide and even more. The tragedy of football’s past is that there were missed opportunities because they were no-one’s responsibility.” The game had a presence in NSW, Queensland, Papua New Guinea and even New Zealand once, but it was not nurtured.

“Today, taking the long view, Tasmania is now at some risk,” says Carter. “However, the costs of securing it are reasonable. It fulfils the ‘purpose’ of the AFL. It is the right thing to do.”

Keep up to date with the best AFL coverage in the country. Sign up for the Real Footy newsletter.

Most Viewed in Sport

From our partners

Source: Read Full Article