World Footy News

Additional reporting by Tobietta Rhyman and Aaron Richard.

AFL Italia Femminile have confirmed that they are not taking part in the Women’s Division of the International Cup. The Swiss men’s team also decided not to compete at IC11.

There’s always two sides to a story, and in this case maybe three. The situation with the Italian women’s side was always complicated as the AFL prefers groups to work through the local affiliated bodies such as AFL Italia and AFL Europe whereas AFL Italia Femminile appears to have worked separately to the local League and at times directly with the AFL. The Italian women were also more closely aligned with the Swiss men’s competition, although notably their jumpers did feature the AFL Italia logo, so at one time there was cross-over.

The situation between all the bodies appears to have deteriorated over a period of months, culminating with a possible communication breakdown as the Cup draw was announced. The bottom line is that sadly, despite a lot of work by AFL Femminile Italia and we believe an AFL desire to have them present, the women of Italy will not be represented at IC11.

Peta Lowry, a driving force between AFL Femminile Italia, told worldfootynews.com, “Well I can now confirm, the AFL are offering no support for AFL Femminile Italia initiatives and therefore we are not able to compete in the upcoming International Cup”.

We’ve had mixed advice as to exactly what AFL Femminile Italia actually wanted, from significant financial backing or at least financial coverage, down to just a show of support to help spread the word about their efforts. At this stage they now seem intent on going their own separate way. In fact AFL Femminile Italia is now looking at promoting a 6-a-side version of the game they are calling Oval Rules, and will direct their fundraising towards that.

For AFL Italia, President Nicola Giampaolo explained that their own body is run as a structured sports organisation with club delegates and committee members, had not been dealing with AFL Femminile Italia for some time and again, the organisations had effectively gone their separate ways. This is indicative of some deeper issues.

And finally to the AFL’s International Development Manager Tony Woods, who didn’t want to publicly inflame the existing situation but did express their difficulties in supporting a very different model of fundraising to that used by other countries.

Woods went on to say that, “We are in the position of managing the needs of multiple stakeholders including the needs of 23 other nations. This is a significant increase from 16 in 2008. We are disappointed that Italy and Switzerland won’t be participating and hope to welcome them to the next International Cup”.

“We deliberately established AFL Europe as the body we will direct our resource support to and see this as the most effective way to support the growth of AFL in Europe. We sincerely hope that individual bodies can find a way to work together in the best interests of growing the game”.

With all three parties, and the Swiss men, seemingly working in different directions, there may have been one last communication breakdown prior to the IC11 final draw deadline. The AFL, after many extensions, announced the final draw with Italy excluded. AFL Femminile Italia confirmed that they were given a few days extension after that, but said they were initially surprised to be excluded, and remained unable to commit due to finances. We’ve been unable to establish unambiguously where the communication regarding an extension broke down.

Let’s hope that whatever has happened over the past few months all parties can continue to take Australian football forward in the years ahead, in whatever form it takes, be it together or apart, although in the latter case the recent history of international Australian football has tended to show so far that fractured parties do normally re-unite eventually.