IT'S July, 2013, and Homebush has precisely 11,055 paying customers, plus some primary school kids bused in to make ANZ Stadium seem less empty. Western Sydney is playing North Melbourne in a game that Channel Ten wisely let pass to the Foxtel wicketkeeper, screening Get Smart repeats instead.

The Sydney newspapers gave the 2012 debut of Western Sydney plenty of column space but, despite the support of carefully chosen celebrities such as John Laws and Singo, the fledgling club has disappeared off the local media radar in its second season.

No one is talking about it on 2UE talkback, except as an object of derision. Crowds are laughable by AFL standards. That this AFL-constructed and staffed team — with only one local player — is borderline competitive is beside the point. It has no supporter base and no basis for being, except the league's ambitious expansionist agenda.

While the AFL hasn't declared "mission accomplished" in year two, it has been spruiking endlessly how the game is growing in this rugby-occupied territory, and is preparing for a "surge" that will see footy invading the shopping malls and schools, as it attempts to take the western front suburb by suburb.

The rugby league insurgents, however, are fighting an effective guerilla campaign. They have the shock jocks and the P.E. teachers on side. Soccer and rugby union's tribes are also pushing footy back. The AFL is bogged down in, yes, a quagmire.

Western Sydney looms as the AFL's Iraq. The notion that the millions of infidels who live in Sydney's west will automatically follow a team which, like their Ford Falcons, is manufactured in Melbourne appears optimistic at best, and possibly as delusional as the idea that Iraq would instantly transform into a civilised democracy.

It will take lots of time and a bottomless pit of money before the burgers west of Homebush accept the historic inevitability of footy's cultural superiority; at this moment, that day appears a lifetime away, if it ever happens.

If veterans of the never-ending Swans campaign — not quite a Vietnam, but a draining exercise nonetheless — were given truth serum, they'd surely admit that a second Sydney team, based in less footy-friendly terrain than the cosmopolitan inner Sydney, is a fraught exercise.

In his book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, the noted historian Paul Kennedy coined the term "imperial overstretch" to describe what happens when an empire gets too ambitious. The short version is that it runs out of money, military capacity or both. Kennedy's thesis, as you'd expect, gained currency after "Mission Accomplished" turned into something much less accomplished. Just as the Bush administration and its neo-con artists convinced themselves that Iraqis would be cheering American soldiers in the streets, the AFL clearly believes that plonking a team in a footy-forsaken place is the best way to convert the natives, to get them turning up at games and kicking Sherrins on rectangular grounds.

The Gold Coast is a different story — that's more like peddling democracy in Poland or Hungary, in that there's an underlying, historic interest in the concept. The Gold Coast is the expat capital of Victoria, with an increasingly vibrant football culture; ratings for the Brisbane Lions aren't huge in south-east Queensland but they don't get mashed by Iron Chef (SBS), as a Swans telecast was in Sydney a few years ago.

Swans chairman Richard Colless is fond of saying that Sydney is the most competitive football market in the country — with two rugbys, AFL and soccer and a multitude of (mainly National Rugby League) teams. Colless speaks with a vested-interest tongue, but he's correct in his assessment of the nation's largest city.

Sydney also has less passion for watching sport than Melbourne (I'd argue the latter is a bigger "sports" market) where the Storm occupies a tiny niche and rugby union hasn't been game to set up shop. The Storm example demonstrates that on-field success doesn't necessarily create mass conversions when the culture is hostile, and it has the prop of News Limited's ownership.

If the AFL forges ahead with its (second) imperial adventure as planned, the Western Sydney team will consume untold millions and drain the coffers to the point that the code could be weakened elsewhere — textbook overstretch. My guess is it would be much cheaper to prop up a team in Tasmania, or even Canberra. In terms of financial viability, the best market for another team actually would be Perth.

In the AFL's logic, a large population is the precious natural resource. Tassie, sadly, doesn't have the numbers, which is tantamount to having no oil.