Opinion: Report card on IC2005

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Opinion: Report card on IC2005

Authored by: Anonymous (Anonymous User)
on Sunday, August 28 2005 @ 09:02 pm ACST

Hi there,

I see there are a lot of questions about the role of the AFL and how teams fund their trips.

The AFL has made it very clear that they see themselves as 'hosting' the tournament. The AFL is the best possible 'host' for the tournament in terms of available monies for promotion, access to venues and organisation of people. The AFL does author the standards for the play (e.g., the 15-minute quarters and 25-yd penalties were, so far as I know, directed from the AFL).

As for the monies that teams need. Yes it is incredibly expensive, especially for those coming from far away (I was part of the Team Canada contingent). Right now those nations living farest away tend to be from the most economically well-off countries (i.e., Canada, the US, Ireland, UK and Spain as opposed to say Mexico or Portugal).

In Canada, we put efforts into fundraising, though through a combination of things that did not really affect the actual travel expenses (funds went towards things like gear). What did help was that through our sponsor team and other connections we saved money by getting deals on accommodations or being sponsored for our local transport.

Other teams had some other exceptional deals (one nation actually had free accomodations so only had to raise airfare for a country that was not so far away, e.g.). Hopefully each team will learn off each other. Two things that can affect teams though, are tax status and pre-tournament promotion. I'm not aware of any teams yet that have charitible or not-for-profit tax status. If they can achieve that then corporate sponsors should be considerably easier to approach. As well, there were some problems when sponsors were lined-up in a local country but when they contacted their local office in Australia, that office had no idea there was a tournament (and therefore couldn't endorse the sponsorship).

The AFL may not have been aware of that particular impact on teams at the time (promotion seemed very focussed on immediately before the tournament and then some coverage during the games). Few Melbournians seemed aware of the tournament (and from what I gather few footy fans read The Record anymore, which is where the main pre-tournament info was publicised). Also on during the tournament was a lot of coverage of the Aboriginal Team of the Century, which seemd to overshadow the tournament in the news.

Being only the second tournament I think we can say that things are improving exponentially and will continue to improve for 2008. All the teams are learning and those that unfortunately didn't make it are learning too so that hopefully next time we will have a larger turnout and see that much greater a competition.

Before I close, one idea that I thought would help. If the AFL could have produced (the day before the tournament) glossy "rave cards" promoting the event showing the game dates and locations and distributed them to the players (there was a team managers meeting the day before it all began), the AFL would have suddenly found at a minimum 35 x the number of teams of volunteers to promote the event to the locals (each player gets 5 cards, e.g., and can hand them out to people on the train or bus e.g. when they explain about the tournament). Just a thought.

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