In potentially big news for the international development of Australian Rules football, the AFL have revealed preliminary plans to allow AFL clubs to take on young international players as apprentices. The initial discussion is being treated as a background issue by mainstream Australian media, with the high profile issue the AFL's plans to have a similar scheme in Sydney.

Organisation has commenced on the 2006 Barassi International Australian Football Youth Tournament (BIAFYT), which promises to be the largest international youth tournament in the sport's history.

World Footy News doesn't focus heavily on the Australian Football League because as the premier competition in Aussie Rules, it receives a great deal of coverage already - much more than all the other leagues outside of Australia put together. But we also encourage all our readers to have an interest in the game's top professional league, so here we offer a review of the season at the halfway point.

International footy is still searching for its first home-grown recruit to make it to the AFL, the undisputed premier Aussie Rules league in the world. We're also yet to see such a footballer make it to the second best league in the world. But what is that league? The top three contenders would clearly be the state competitions of Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia. For our international readers to understand better what sits beneath AFL level, we look at the matches which see the best non-AFL players from each league come together to play traditional interstate footy, with one match each year, giving a 2 year cycle of matches. On the line is bragging rights for the winners to claim theirs to be the best comp outside of the AFL.

The World Footy Census 2004 has, hopefully, answered the common question, of just how many players there are playing Aussie Rules in various countries around the world. It can also stand as an historic record of where the game has progressed to, and can be used as a measuring stick in the years and decades to come. It took 5 months to gather all the results from across 34 Australian Rules playing nations. Here we present all the results summarised and the countries ranked by total player numbers.

The Melbourne Age reports (note this may require an account at some point) the Brisbane Lions as having taken on Gerard Sholly, former Collingwood recruiting manager to assist with taking on a rookie from Gaelic football in Ireland.

While worldfootynews.com focuses on Aussie Rules outside of Australia, in compiling the statistics on player numbers around the world, it would be remiss of us not to examine the numbers in the game's traditional homeland. Fortunately, such a mammoth task is performed independently, with consultants Street Ryan and Associates hired by the AFL to examine the game each year. Here we present a snapshot of those numbers, in the same format as our survey of other countries.

Continuing the tradition of BARFL clubs taking to the road for pre-season warmups, three British clubs went abroad this weekend. The North London Lions headed for sunny Spain to take on the Madrid Bears, the Reading Roos landed in the deep south of the USA to take on the Atlanta Kookaburras and the West London Wildcats visited Scandinavia, taking on the Stockholm Dynamite - all three giving the locals a lesson in how footy is played.

In this article we look at the remaining countries that have begun playing Australian Rules football. We've previously reviewed the regions of North America, Europe, Africa, Oceania and Asia. Here we'll see the beginnings of the game in the Middle East and South America.

Australian Rules Football has found it difficult to break into the Asian region. Although there are plenty of expatriate Aussies keen to spread the game, they have struggled to interest large numbers of locals, more so than in North America, Europe and Oceania. Japan and Indonesia are two possible exceptions. We look at their numbers, along with all the footy teams of Asia, in our latest in the World Footy Census 2004 series.