Midnight Oil

[Powderworks] NMOC: Australian Professional Sports

Anna Offler aoffler@iprimus.com.au
Sun, 16 Feb 2003 10:41:34 +1030


Randy,
Yes there are national professional leagues. AFL, Rugby League(Of a sort) ,
Basketball and soccer. The last 2 are not wholly professional but close too.
Part of the problem is that AFL( Aussie rules) is not traditionally the
winter game in 2 large states New South Wales( Sydney) and
Queensland(Brisbane). They follow Rugby League or as us AFL fans say the
game played by men with no brains and no neck.
AFL is the wintergame in the Southern and Western States ,
Victoria(Melbourne), South Aust(Adelaide), Western Australia(Perth) and
Tasmania(Hobart). Melbourne being the largest city and having most teams.
The AFL is an offshoot of the old Victorian Football League and interstate
teams were formed and joined it to form the AFL in the last decade. So now
you have 10 teams from Melbourne, 2 each from Sth Aust and west Aust and 1
each from the Rugby cities Sydney and Brisbane. So at least the AFL has
teams from all major states, Tasmania is too small to support a professional
team.
Rugby League(NRL) is on the otherhand not truly national as it no longer has
any teams from Adelaide or Perth in it. It did have for a couple of years
but that is another story. It is basically Sydney(NSW) and Brisbane(QLD)
based and also has a team from Melbourne and New Zealand.
National sports leagues are a relatively new thing in Australia and have
only developed over the last decade or so. Part of the problem in the past
has been the big distances between capital cities and the small populations
of some of them. Compared to the US which has many mid size ( say > 1.5
million people) Australia only has Sydney and Melbourne > 1.5 m people.
There are also not the same level of corporate dollars as in the US.
The expansion of TV sport and the dollars that go with it has led to the AFL
and NRL being viable propositions.
Basketball and Soccer on the otherhand have national leagues that cannot
attract enough TV/sponsor dollars and some teams have gone broke.
Hope this has helped.
Lew and Anna

-----Original Message-----
From: powderworks-admin@cs.colorado.edu
[mailto:powderworks-admin@cs.colorado.edu]On Behalf Of Randy Van Vliet
Sent: Sunday, 16 February 2003 4:17 AM
To: Powderworks
Subject: [Powderworks] NMOC: Australian Professional Sports


I've been scanning some Australian news sources (by
the way, what's the deal with the detention centers
that people keep breaking out of?  Are they holding
immagrants under armed guard?  and if so, for what
purpose and how long?)

Anyway, I naturally tend to scan the sports pages even
though I don't know squat about Australian sports.
I've looked up some references to Cricket and Rugby
and the AFL.  So here's my question:  Are there
national professional sports in Australia?  Besides
the national Cricket team, it seems that most of it is
either local or regional.  I've seen a little bit of
Australian Rules Football on late night ESPN and sort
expected there to be a national presence (I'm from the
US and our professional sports leagues are very much
national based rather that regional).  But most of the
AFL teams are based in and around Melbourne.  I sort
of expected Sydney to be more represented.  Or is
Melbourne more of a "National Capitol" than Sydney?

I don't want to waste too much of your time, but I am
sort of a sports junkie (at least US sports) and I'm
sort of fascinated by how it's structured in
Austarlia.  I've decided that I want to follow the AFL
this season and I clearly don't have any rooting
interest in any team.  Does anyone outside of
Melbourne and the few other teams care that much about
it?  I'm just wondering.

Randy

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Shopping - Send Flowers for Valentine's Day
http://shopping.yahoo.com
_______________________________________________
Powderworks mailing list
Powderworks@cs.colorado.edu
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/mailman/listinfo/powderworks
---
Incoming mail is certified Virus Free.
Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
Version: 6.0.438 / Virus Database: 246 - Release Date: 7/01/03

---
Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
Version: 6.0.438 / Virus Database: 246 - Release Date: 7/01/03