FOOTY'S back. Steve Johnson's been brilliant again on the field and not so brilliant off it (128 km/h in a 50 km/h zone).

Wayne Carey's in the news. This time he could face what a poet once called "the banquet of consequence". There have been calls for Eagles chief executive Trevor Nesbitt to quit.

People expect football clubs to be run like monasteries. Ben Cousins announced, thankfully, that he is not to fight on the undercard of an Anthony Mundine bout. The last thing you would want to see is him slide into sideshow alley.

Cousins did say one thing at his news conference with Mundine that deserves consideration. That part of what made him excel in the AFL is what got him into drugs.

As these things are now read in this society (if letters to the editor are any guide), this will be interpreted as a problem with or for the game. I have a different view.

Young men are always going to be young men (to quote something the poet A.E. Houseman wrote 100 years ago: "Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose, But young men think it is, and we were young").

What the more dangerous sports offer is a controlled environment in which young men can release that thing that made young Icarus want to fly. The big mistake is to think that if you do away with the sport, you do away with the problem a case such as Cousins' throws up for public scrutiny.

But it is true — what makes people dominant in sport is frequently what gets them into trouble off it (I seem to recall Peter Roebuck writing that Ian Botham was brave enough to have joined the Charge of the Light Brigade. And stupid enough to have ordered it).

And the AFL is expanding to 18 teams. I should be applauding but instead am full of misgivings. The proposal is buttressed by the news that it will add 20% to the league's revenue from television.

One huge assumption underlines this assertion. That interest in the game doesn't flatten or drop away. I am one of those who does not believe the game has a sufficiently deep pool of talent to sustain 18 teams at the standard at which the game is now played.

Do you want to see Geelong this year or do you want to see Geelong with two players from its magnificent team of 2007 missing? I want to see Geelong. I want to see the best.

One risk is a serious disparity in standard. Last year, after Geelong kicked a cricket score against them, it seemed for an awful few days that the Tigers were on the edge of a form landslide that could settle at a depth where such losses became routine for them.

Happily for the competition, the Tigers rallied. In soccer, you can lose badly and still have a score of 2-0. In our game, differences in the quality of teams translates into huge and obvious scores.

The Brisbane Bears were, for a considerable part of their life, about as uninteresting as a footy team can get. You can argue the Bears were a necessary prelude to the Lions, but I don't think you can argue the Bears did much for the game's audience figures.

The AFL is in danger of adding two new Brisbane Bear type teams to the game. The Gold Coast has a migrant population from the southern states and an established local club in Southport. But what evidence is there of any real support for Australian football in Sydney's western suburbs. Or doesn't that matter with a television game?

I know the life of a football administrator is not easy, particularly in a volatile time such as this. Soccer is a big player now and has every card in its hand but one — the best are still leaving to play overseas.

But one problem soccer certainly does not have is a lack of players. They can import from all over the world.

Rugby league, once considered the dinosaur of the football codes, is also doing remarkably well in the brave new world of television sport. Some say this is because, of the four football codes, it most closely resembles a video game.

But it also requires far fewer players than Australian football and does not have a history of big crowds being part of the spectacle. How many will go to watch West Sydney play North Melbourne in Sydney? Or doesn't that matter either?

And there's one other issue. Why not Tasmania? Why not Darwin? When expanding a business, don't you go from strength to strength? But then, I hear them say, the game has less of a "national footprint". It has to break out of its 19th century demography and go to where the people are now.

But this line of thinking can lead to folly when it becomes an end itself. But that's only one half of my reservation.

The other half is this — as a Tasmanian, I know Tasmanian footy is nothing on what it once was. That's true of local footy around Australia but what is noticeable in Tasmania is that the game appears to have become generally stronger in the north, as distinct from the south, since AFL games started being played in Launceston.

Traditionally, Hobart was the game's imperial capital. Not so any more. I fear the game is in a much more parlous state than our administrators suggest when they tout the fact that we are going to break the $1 billion mark for broadcasting rights. See what happens to that figure if audiences drop.

The club presidents are right to be asking hard questions of those running the game.