Second-tier sports can’t compete

What is it with Australians and our lack of interest in second-tier sport?

It was only recently that I first gave some serious thought to this phenomenon, after learning that the 137-year-old WA Football League (which was the top level of football in this state for its first 102 seasons) didn’t have a major sponsor for 2022.

Since 2015, the major sponsorship deal has paid for the WAFL to be televised on Channel 7, so the expiry of the partnerships with Optus and Kia now raises serious questions about whether the competition will be on TV this year.

Between 1988 and 2014, the ABC had the television rights to the WAFL, but the rumour was that the national broadcaster wanted to give more support to women’s and community sport.

That led to the commercial deal with Channel 7, which relies on Eddie McGuire’s company to produce the broadcast.

The overall cost to the league, covered by sponsors, is understood to be around $850,000 per season.

And if Channel 7 was to walk away from the WAFL, it would mean no television coverage of the competition for the first time since 1960.

One would think that a competition sitting directly underneath the all-powerful AFL, and with plenty of current and former AFL players taking the field each weekend, would be attractive enough for a sponsor to sign on.

Partners in recent years, along with Optus and Kia, have included fast food giant McDonald’s and insurer AAMI.

Before that, it was the Road Safety Council and beverage giant Pepsi.

But the afterglow of being the state’s top-tier football competition for more than 100 years now appears to have faded.

The WAFL is a second-tier competition, and the public seems disinterested.

Frankly, that seems to be the way of things in Australia.

But if you looked at sport in the US, you would wonder why.

College sport in America is huge, and that’s where the professional leagues (the National Football League, National Basketball League and Major League Baseball) get their players from.

The best young American players are plucked from college teams via the draft, just as the best young footballers are drafted from the WAFL, the SANFL and the VFL.

In 2019, which was the last completed season pre-COVID, an average of 66,151 spectators attended each NFL game in the US.

And, for the 888 division one college football games played that season, an average of 41,477 spectators attended, or around 63 per cent the size of an average NFL crowd.

The NFL is the best-attended league in the world.

But the AFL isn’t far down the list, in fourth, with an average of 35,122 people attending each game in 2019.

The WAFL average was 1,656, or a little less than five per cent of the average AFL crowd. I struggle to understand why.

The cost to get in is just $15 for an adult, while children under the age of 16 are free.

You can kick a footy with the kids on the ground at the breaks, you aren’t packed in like sardines, food and beverage prices are usually reasonable, and the quality of the football is very high.

Other second-tier leagues in WA, and around the nation, also struggle to attract crowds or high-value sponsors.

The NPLWA, which features the best local teams in soccer, certainly doesn’t draw big numbers, nor does the State Basketball League or even the state Sheffield Shield cricket team.

I can only conclude it comes down to some sort of snobbery from us, the consumers.

If it’s not the absolute top level, we don’t want to watch it.

Forget the up-and-coming players who compete at state level, we want to see those playing at the national level.

Maybe we’ve been conditioned to think that way by various marketing machines.

After all, the advertisements aimed at luring kids to play Aussie rules football now urge them to “play AFL”, which of course they can’t possibly do at the age of six.

The name of the league has somehow become interchangeable with the name of the sport, further consigning other leagues to the dustbin of history.

It all makes for a bland sporting landscape, in which there’s a huge gulf between the top level and the rest.

That can’t be good for the future development prospects of any sport.