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It''s more than a business: commerce, culture and clubs in the Australian Football League.

Article Excerpt
In early February this year, the Melbourne Demons became the third club to seek emergency assistance from the Australian Football League, after recording its third straight year of heavy financial losses. With accumulated losses of more than $5 million, and an outstanding tax bill of nearly $1 million, the Demons were forced to apply to the AFL's 'competitive balance fund' in order to stay afloat. Thus the AFL's oldest club--and the silvertails of the competition--joined two of Melbourne's traditional working-class clubs, the Kangaroos and the Western Bulldogs, as the mendicants of the league.

The collective plight of these three Victorian clubs highlights a number of troubling dilemmas for the AFL. On the one hand, the game has become heavily commercialised and corporatised, in keeping with developments in major league sports around the world. This has seen transformations in the game that favour corporate sponsors over members and supporters, television audiences over game-goers, and stadium owners over clubs. In the AFL this has meant the expansion of corporate hospitality and executive boxes, the rationalisation of playing venues and the closure of suburban grounds, the broadcasting of games 'against the gate' and, in the case of at least one stadium, tenancy deals that seem to favour the landlords over the clubs. In tandem with these changes, Australian Rules football has become big business in the sports entertainment industry, generating over $2 billion in economic activity each year. And the five-year $500 million broadcasting deal with Channels Nine and Ten and Foxtel means that the competition has never been more prosperous.

But herein lies a major conundrum: while the competition has become wealthier overall, the gap between the 'have' and 'have-not' clubs seems to have widened. While the powerhouse clubs of the competition, such as Adelaide, Brisbane, Collingwood, Essendon and West Coast, are able to generate annual profits of well over $1 million, many other clubs struggle to break even from year to year. This is particularly the case in Victoria, where ten of the AFL's sixteen clubs are locked in a fierce off-field competition for a limited...

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