Opinion: Half sized versions of Australian Football have much to offer

Welcome to World Footy News Sunday, July 13 2025 @ 03:50 am ACST

Opinion: Half sized versions of Australian Football have much to offer | 12 comments | Create New Account

The following comments are owned by whomever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.

This site requires you to be logged in to post a comment. If you have an account already (or need to create one), please login here.

Opinion: Half sized versions of Australian Football have much to offer

Authored by: Brett Northey
on Thursday, December 31 2009 @ 12:07 am ACDT

Over the last 10 years 9-a-side or similar seems to be the only way US clubs have been able to progress, giving local games rather than a long road trip every second match. But it doesn't seem to have blossomed in the way I hoped - we were seeing 4 team local 9s like the Arizona AFL and Golden Gate AFL, and other cities now have similar, but very few have grown beyond 4 teams as far as I know, though I don't get a chance to follow the US too closely these days.

So the UK seems to have evolved quite differently, with it still being separate cities doing 9s, not multiple teams in one city league. Is it because there's more cities close by in the UK, or distances greater in the US so forcing to look local. With the old UK Regional League they used reduced numbers games a lot of the time too, but the shift to ARUK I guess formalised it as the full focus, 9s and Rugby fields, which would be less daunting for someone thinking about setting up a new club.

It'll be interesting to see if the rate of new teams keeps up after the recent sudden personnel change at Sport England. Has critical mass been achieved for sustainability? The answer is probably yes, especially given some of the people involved, in which case it will be interesting in say 5 or 10 years to see if the regions divide into smaller and smaller areas (i.e. more leagues, each over a smaller geographic area), until you virtually have local leagues in a city or a nearby cluster of cities, so then resembling local footy in Australia, except 9s.

And similarly in the US, will their 1 city metro leagues ultimately spawn individual clubs that are independent competing in a league of 8 clubs not teams from within 1 big club.

---
Brett Northey - Co-founder and Chief Editor of WFN

---
Brett Northey - Co-founder and Chief Editor of WFN

Opinion: Half sized versions of Australian Football have much to offer

Authored by: Christopher P. Adams, Ph.D.
on Thursday, December 31 2009 @ 01:00 am ACDT

There is no particular attachment to 9v9 in the metro competitions. Actually, I think most leagues would prefer to be 18v18 and to the extent it is possible, they have moved in that direction. So the number of participants has increased but the number of teams has remained relatively steady. The different versions of Rec footy have stayed pretty closely with 9v9 and it seems to work well.

---
Carna Revos!

www.usfootynews.com

---
Carna Revos!

www.usfootynews.com

Opinion: Half sized versions of Australian Football have much to offer

Authored by: TimSmith
on Thursday, December 31 2009 @ 01:18 am ACDT

Brett,

It is probably because the distances between cities in the US are so huge that they are forced to create inter-city competitions.

In the UK, like you say cities are closer together, for example in the Central England league last season the teams were all within around 2.5 hours of eachother. However, this is still a bit too far and work is being done to localise it further. The issue is in each city outside of London there isn't the demand right there right then to have more than 1 team, aussie rules is so low profile and only available on pay-TV ESPN.

These last few years of rapid team creation I believe will set up a skeleton structure for Aussie Rules in the UK. Some areas are already very strong with 2 or 3 clubs within a small radius, some completely empty meaning team creation here is nearly impossible. I expect some teams on the periphery of regions to dwindle and fall out, but theres enough strong teams now in the regions to keep competition going.

If its really going to blossom into every region of the UK, the sport needs terrestrial TV coverage of AFL, and national media coverage of large local events, for example the Northern, Central, Southern, Welsh, Scottish & London grand finals (eg reports in national newspapers, BBC Sport website etc). We need to expand the game beyond the australian expats and have it predominantly British players, and this is starting to happen. However all this needs work and with the shake-up at Sport England hopefully this progress won't be knocked back a step or two.

Cheers,
Tim Smith
President, University of Birmingham Sharks

---
Carna Revos!

www.usfootynews.com

RSS news	RSS events
Twitter	Facebook

World Footy News

Search

Translate

User Functions

Events

Featured Sites

Older Stories

Friday 11-Apr

Sunday 30-Mar

Thursday 27-Mar

Friday 21-Mar

Thursday 06-Mar

Wednesday 05-Feb

Tuesday 04-Feb

Socials

Who's Online

Random Image

What's New

Articles last 2 weeks

Comments last 2 weeks

Links last 2 weeks

Advertisements