THE case for a Gold Coastbased AFL team isn’t necessarily a case for relocating a Melbourne club — but relocation was the preferred option of a key group that investigated the issue of a new northern franchise.
The so-called Gold Coast advisory group — headed by local lawyer and business advocate John Witheriff and comprising former AFL chief Ross Oakley and former Brisbane Lions chairman Graeme Downie, among others — examined the pros and cons of both a relocation and a local start-up.
On balance, they plumped for the former, giving rise to the $100 million carrot that the AFL dangled before the Kangaroos.
Failing that, however, the group still reckoned a start-up club could succeed and their bullish assessment of the Gold Coast market added fresh urgency to the AFL’s longterm ambition for a second Queensland team.
“I respect whatever decision that (the Kangaroos) make,” Witheriff tells The Age. “It’s a great club and if they’re part of the Gold Coast then that’s fantastic and if they’re not I wish them the very best of luck. And I don’t mean that in any negative sense. I genuinely wish them well. But this is a fast-growing city and there is an opportunity and I think it’s fairly apparent that it’s not one to be missed.”
Underscoring the Gold Coast push are three key factors — momentum, opportunity and threat. The AFL is keen to build on its recent grassroots success in the region and wants to tap Australia’s fastest-growing economy while thwarting the ambition of rival codes rugby league and soccer.
Its confidence overall is buoyed by the very state of the national game — surging attendances and club memberships, a growing foothold in key markets and bulging coffers (this year’s annual revenue of $275 million represented a 12-fold increase on footy’s earnings of 20 years ago when a club named Fitzroy barely existed, and Adelaide, Port Adelaide and Fremantle were merely twinkles in the eyes of league chiefs).
But the AFL’s “now-or-never” attitude to the Gold Coast has been inspired by compelling economic and demographic evidence, as well as a sense that it is only a matter of time before an A-League soccer outfi t joins the freshly-minted Titans rugby league franchise in this most golden of markets.
On balance, the advisory group recognised the natural advantages that a relocation carried: a Melbourne club would have transported to the Gold Coast a direct connection with the home of football, a genuine club culture and a ready-made player list and team management.
“But the upside of a local licence has been effectively demonstrated by the Titans in the NRL, which established a culture which was truly a Gold Coast culture and was successful in achieving signifi cant buy-in by the local community,” says Witheriff.
Undeniably, there’s romance, too, attached to the Gold Coast plan: the prospect of local rivalry with the Lions, similar to the annual western derby and Adelaide’s “showdown”, is an attractive optional extra. And there’s the genuine feel-good factor about footy evangelism, about spreading the word that was uttered originally by Tom Wills and his mates in Yarra Park 150 years ago.
But on hard economics alone, the region looks more than ready to support an AFL club. The Gold Coast economy is an economy on steroids: in the past decade, annual gross regional product has more than doubled to $14.2 billion, the region’s full-time population is growing at almost three times the national average, rising from 360,000 to 535,000 over the same period, and tourism is booming (10.2 million visitor nights a year compared with 4 million in 1998).
There is no comparison between the Gold Coast of the hapless Brisbane Bears’ days and now. Or, rather, the comparison is absolutely stunning. More than $60 billion worth of construction work is in the pipeline, household incomes have surged to an average of $1272 a week compared with $500 a decade ago and the region has become a base for nearly $7 billion worth of annual exports (largely marine industry goods, food and education).
“People in other places sometimes have a view about the Gold Coast and its economy which is out of date, reflective of what the place was like in the late ’90s, and of course it doesn’t resemble that at all,” says Witheriff. “And that’s why rugby union’s here and league’s here and soccer is in the process of trying to (come) and ... national basketball is here ...
“But I think the AFL are in touch suffi ciently to know that if they wait around and have no foothold they might well run into a Canberra experience, where some might argue that the delays associated with the commitment to that area saw an opportunity missed.
“I’m not sure that it’s eally analogous because Canberra has no way of continuing to grow over the next 50 years the way that the Gold Coast will, and I think the short answer about the Gold Coast is that we’ve only just started to see the tip of the growth iceberg.”
Economists readily talk about the dilemma of “opportunity cost” and Victorian supporters of the game might reasonably fear that AFL dollars spent north of the border are necessarily AFL dollars unavailable to Melbourne’s struggling clubs. But in the case of the Gold Coast, the league clearly fears more the prospect of opportunity “lost” in the north than it does a contraction of teams in the south.
The dynamism of the local economy, says Witheriff, “effectively makes the whole case; it’s just so patently obvious”.
The AFL's chief broadcasting and commercial officer, Gillon McLachlan, is quick to cite the region's potential, too. By 2020, it is expected to be home to 750,000 people (average age 37) and independent market research suggests 50% will be football followers — more than enough, says McLachlan, to sustain an AFL team.
"We feel we need to have a presence there," says McLachlan, "so what we've embarked on is a strategy that's been designed for us owning that region to the extent that we can."
But the AFL's nationalism is being encouraged further by its burgeoning support on the ground in the most heavily populated region outside Australia's capital cities, which is evident two years into a five-year, $20 million investment in the native game's development.
The league has 13 full-time staff working in the region, but its real imprint is demonstrated by the growing numbers of players booting a Sherrin throughout the Gold Coast hinterland. And, as AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou was wont to say yesterday: "There's a huge appetite for football there, make no mistake."
Over the past three years, participation in the region has grown by about 25%, with numbers of people now playing the code touching 6500 (3500 in the Auskick program and the rest in local teams). According to the AFL, the data compares favourably with the rugby codes: 4942 people play rugby league and 2580 union. And although the region is portrayed as a rugby-code stronghold, participation in league and union in the region has grown by just 5% over the same period.
The figures are a bit sticky, however, and seemingly conflict with those those bandied about by rugby-code administrators, with the Titans' own website claiming rugby league alone has 11,000 registered juniors in the region.
At any rate, growing participation in soccer could well be the greater long-term threat to AFL dominance. According to Football Queensland, 8050 people are registered with soccer teams on the Gold Coast, 6500 of whom are under 18, and registration numbers are climbing by about 10% a year. Further, soccer looks likely to have its own A-League team in place on the Gold Coast within a couple of years, with the expectation that it would be a natural co-tenant of the Titan' soon-to-be-completed stadium, which will hold crowds of 27,000. Up the highway in Brisbane, soccer's Queensland Roar is pulling average crowds of 17,000, and the prospect of two teams competing in a local derby is similarly attractive to the game's administrators.
But the AFL remains heartened by average crowds of 10,000-plus for its games played at Carrara this year, and by ratings for live Friday night free-to-air TV coverage beamed into the region, which exceeded those for the Seven-Prime network's alternative programming of a year earlier.
McLachlan says the AFL is by no means counting its chickens, knowing that there'll be plenty of hard work to presage the advent of a 17th AFL team. Nor, for that matter, is it counting its sharks: a decision on whether the wealthy Southport Football Club would be favoured in the licence race was a long way off.
Constructing a playing list would be an obvious headache, but the league had learnt from previous experience. "And obviously there'll be other challenges, such as securing a training and admin base, securing a ground, establishing the board and the governance, creating identity," McLachlan says. "But we feel we've got a pretty good handle on that."
The league's financial muscle meant it could provide the right level of resourcing and support that it had been unable to stump up during its early embarkation on a national competition.
But this week "urgency" was the new currency, and community "buy-in" a paramount goal in taking the national game to a new level. With the Kangaroos out of the picture, the shape of Aussie Rules on the Gold Coast was becoming more clearly defined.
There was no longer any point, according to John Witheriff, of dragging a Melbourne club north, because "no community wants to be 'the fish that John West rejects'. "
"In other words, it would be very difficult to rally around a team that has already said, 'Look, the Gold Coast isn't good enough', " he says. If it's to be a 17th licence, he adds, "then the hard work needs to be started and the community engagement needs to commence".
