Australian rules football culture
Australian rules football culture is the cultural aspects surrounding the game of Australian rules football, particular to Australia and the areas where it is most popular. This article explores aspects and issues surrounding the game, as well as the players, and society. Australian Rules is a sport rich in tradition and Australian cultural references, especially surrounding the rituals of gameday for players, officials, and supporters.
Popularity
Australian rules football has attracted more overall interest among Australians than any other football code, and, when compared with all sports throughout the nation, has consistently ranked first in the winter reports, and most recently third behind cricket and swimming in summer.In some of the southern states, it is the most popular of all sports.
As a football code, it is the most popular form of football in the Northern Territory, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria and Western Australia. It is less popular in New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory and Queensland, although there has traditionally been support for the code in regions within those states, such as parts of southern New South Wales including the Riverina and parts of Queensland such as Cairns and the Gold Coast. The AFL teams from Brisbane and Sydney attracted a strong increase in crowds and television audiences when they won four premierships between them from 2001-2005, though crowds and TV ratings have both declined as both teams' performances in subsequent years dropped. Demographic and migration trends have affected all football codes in recent years, but most significantly Australian football in Queensland.
It is particularly popular amongst indigenous Australian communities. Indigenous Australians are well represented in professional AFL players: while only 2.4% of the population is of indigenous origin, 10% of AFL players identify themselves this way.
Australian rules is the national sport of Nauru.
Attendance
Australian rules football is the most highly attended spectator sport in Australia: government figures show that more than 2.5 million people attended games in 2005-06. In 2007, a cumulative 7,049,945 people attended Australian Football League premiership matches, a record for the competition. In 2005, a further 307,181 attended NAB Cup pre-season matches and 117,552 attended Regional Challenge pre-season practice matches around the country.As of 2005 the AFL is one of only five professional sports leagues in the world with an average attendance above thirty thousand. In 2007, the average attendance of 38,113 made the AFL the second best attended domestic club league in the world, after only the NFL in the United States.
The Melbourne Cricket Ground is the largest stadium used for Australian rules football and the permanent home of the AFL Grand Final. It is one of the largest sporting stadiums in the world and was the venue for the record Australian rules football attendance of 121,696 at the 1970 VFL Grand Final, between Carlton and Collingwood - which game was also historic, in that it heralded the dawning of a new style of football - still largely in use today, wherein handballing was introduced more to commence the attack from the back line. Redevelopment since then to a mainly seated stadium has reduced the current capacity to approximately 100,000.
In addition to the national AFL competition, some semi-professional local leagues also draw significant crowds. Although crowds for state leagues have suffered in recent years, they continue to draw support, particularly for finals matches. The South Australian SANFL drew an attendance of 309,874 in 2006 and the Western Australian WAFL drew an official attendance of 207,154. Other leagues, such as the Victorian VFL Northern Territory Football League and the popular country league Ovens & Murray also charge admission and draw notable crowds.
Outside of Australia, the game has drawn notable attendances only for occasional carnival type events, such as International tests and exhibition matches.
Television
The national AFL is the main league which is shown on television in Australia.The 2005 AFL Grand Final was watched by a record television audience of more than 3.3 million people across Australia's five most populous cities—the five mainland state capitals—including 1.2 million in Melbourne and 991,000 in Sydney. In 2006, the national audience was 3.145 million, including 1.182 million in Melbourne and 759,000 in Sydney.
According to OzTAM, in recent years, the AFL Grand Final has reached the top five programs across the five biggest cities in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006. In 2007, it was #1 in metropolitan markets. Australian rules football has achieved a #1 rating in the sports category in both 2004 and 2005.
Some of the more popular regional leagues in Australia have the "match of the week" televised locally and free-to-air on ABC Television's respective state networks. The SANFL is the most popular of these regional competitions measuring a total of 1,415,000 television viewers in 2007.
Some of these regional leagues also attracted a national audience through free-to-air broadcasting on television networks such as ABC2. OzTAM began measuring these audiences in 2006. Despite a large number of complaints, ABC2 withdrew all of these broadcasts in early 2008. However in 2010 the ABC began replaying these matches nationwide, online via the new ABC iView catch-up TV service. In 2012, the ABC commenced screening replays of the previous weekends VFL, SANFL, WAFL matches in the early hours of the morning during the week from 3.00AM - 5.30AM nationwide on the ABC1 channel
Australian rules also has a nominal but growing international audience. Since 2005, some AFL matches have been shown in the pacific rim region for the first time through the Australia Network. The AFL Grand Final is broadcast to many countries and attracts many million viewers worldwide. This audience has grown to approximately 30 million viewers from 72 countries.
According to Roy Morgan Research, more Americans watch Australian Rules Football than Australians. A poll taken between April 2002 and March 2004 showed that 7,496,000 North Americans compared to 7,004,000 Australians watch Australian Rules Football at least occasionally on television.
New media
The AFL website was the #1 most popular Hitwise Australian sports website in 2004, increasing in market share by 9.86% over that year. In 2006, other consistently high traffic websites in the Australian Top 20 included AFL Dream Team, AFL Footy Tipping, BigFooty.com and Bomberland. In 2006, the search term 'afl' represented the highest number of search terms that delivered users to Hitwise sports category listed websites. Statistics show that Victorians consist of 43% of all visits to the AFL football category.Team rivalries
Rivalries are one of the main drivers in generating passionate supporter bases.In almost every league, there is a team which everyone loves to hate, like Collingwood, Port Adelaide and even the Southport Sharks.
The AFL in particular encourages the building of such rivalries, as a method of increasing publicity for the league, to the point of designating one round each year as Rivalry Round where many of these match-ups are held on the one weekend. Whilst some rivalries, such as between teams from adjacent areas are still strong, the designation of an entire round of fixtures as Rivalry Round is often criticised due to some arbitrary matchups, or ignoring stronger, more recent rivalries.
Traditions of the game
Clothing
As part of their uniform, players wear shirts called guernseys, often referred to colloquially as jerseys. Guernseys are similar to basketball shirts, but of a more robust design and tight fit. In the early period of the game's development players often wore sleeveless lace-up tops which gradually disappeared between the 1960s and early 1980s. A few players choose to wear a long sleeved variation of the modern guernsey design. Players wore full length pants, before adopting shorts in the 1920s. Tight-fitting shorts were a notable fashion trend in most leagues in the 1980s and some players began to wear hamstring warmers. A brief experiment with lycra by the AFL in the State of Origin series was quickly abandoned for more traditional wear. Long socks are compulsory and boots with moulded cleats or studs for gripping the ground are worn. Some players wear headbands or hair ties to keep the hair out of their faces when playing, though this is rare. Players will sometimes wear Black armband around their mid biceps and triceps, typically of electrical tape, in honour or in memoriam of someone related to the player or their club who recently died.Traditionally, umpires have worn white and were sometimes derogatively referred to as "white maggots" amongst supporters. AFL umpires now wear bright colours to also avoid clashes with the player guernseys and AFL goal umpires now wear t-shirts and caps, rather than the traditional white coat and broad brimmed hat which they wore before the 1990s.
Typical supporter wear includes the team scarf and sometimes beanie in the colours of the team. Team guernseys are also worn by supporters. Team flags are sometimes flown by supporters at the start of a game, when a goal is scored, and when their team wins.
Gameday and crowd
Before AFL matches, it is traditional for teams to run through a crêpe paper banner constructed by the cheersquads of each team. These often feature messages and slogans for the team in the context of the match, such as congratulating a player on a landmark number of games and more recently also sponsorship messages. The banners and sometimes also streamers are used in important local football matches such as finals. Some players are superstitious about running through the banner. As players run through the banners, the team's club song is always played. Calls for the banner to be scrapped have been met with condemnation from fans and players. The winning clubs song is also played at the end of each match.In recent decades, for important matches, a Welcome to Country has become an important part of pre-match ceremony.
Australian rules supporters are said to "barrack" for their team, the Australian slang term originated in cricket in the 1870s but has become more widely used by football fans. The Collingwood Football Club song is the only one to reference the word barracker.
Though other cultures have had an influence at various points in its history, Australian football tends to have different atmosphere to sports like soccer and American football. Partly due to Australian culture, Australian rules spectators are generally more solitary animals. Despite loud shouting and arguing, crowd violence, at least in Australia, is rare and there is no segregation between fans. In contrast to most other football codes, since the sports's early days, half of all spectators are female. With the exception of small official cheersquads, spectators at Aussie Rules matches will rarely engage in support for their teams with organised chants. Instead, each individual spectator will most often shout their own support using the nickname of their team i.e. "Carn the Crows !" or "Carn the Maggies", or after goals perform simple chants such as "Ess-en-don! " or "Freo! Freo!". In contrast, cheersquads are highly organised, have their own rituals and almost always congregate behind the goals during games. The nature of the sport reflects this method of supporting. While some sports such as English or American football may involve lull periods where large chants reverberate around the ground, Australian rules football is played at a constant, frenetic pace, often leaving the crowd too immersed to take part in 'soccer style' chants. Most professional clubs have official cheersquads which will sometimes wave enormous coloured pompoms known as floggers after the umpire has signalled a goal. American style cheerleading is very rare.
Meat pies, beer and chiko rolls are popular consumables for supporters at Australian rules matches. At AFL matches mobile vendors walk around the ground selling such pies, yelling out the well-known call of "hot pies, cold drinks!".
At AAMI Stadium in Adelaide; it is tradition to have a barbecue outside the stadium, in the carpark. Many families will bring their barbecues with them. This is particularly popular during the Sunday afternoon matches.
At the end of the match, it is traditional for a pitch invasion to occur. Supporters run onto the field to celebrate the game and play games of kick-to-kick with their families. In many suburban and country games, this also happens during quarter and half-time breaks. In the AFL in recent years, this tradition has been more strictly controlled with security guards to ensure that players and officials can safely leave the ground. At the largest AFL grounds, this tradition has been banned completely, to protect the surface, much to the discontent of fans. But most smaller regional & interstate grounds still allow fans onto the field after the game. Sometimes a mid-game pitch invasion is expected for various highly anticipated landmark achievements.
Reading the AFL Record and recording the goals kicked by players alongside the team lists is also commonly done by spectators.