I think it was the clubs and the corporatisation of the game that led to this result. Recommended reading, to get a picture of how the competitive pressures build, should include Barry Oakley’s “Salute to the Great McCarthy” and David Williamson’s “The Club”. They’re great fun. Both were written in the 70s (from info compiling from the mid-60s)and show that the obsessivness with success was already taking over even then. The Big Three (Carlton, Essendon, Collingwood) usually had some money and influence as well as historic success to back them.

But suddenly battling Richmond was a force, Hawthorn was evolving into a power, and then a syndicate made a determined effort to lift North Melbourne from the cellar. I guess that probably sowed the seeds, and others wanted to follow.

The game was no longer owned by the fans, which I think is the point you are making. I used to be fascinated by this aspect, which didn’t occur at Adelaide where I came from and probably not in Perth: the aggregate crowd attendance at the weekly club games exceeded that at the Grand Final. From memory, I think it was about 120,000 to 140,000. Whereas the GF was restricted to about 100,000.

But much has changed since the 60s and early 70s. I think we are much less a monocultural society than we were then. Footy was all Saturday arvo. Nothing was open Sunday; so the next best thing was to watch the footy reviews from 11 o’clock and enjoy Lou and co clowning around.

Football has become professional, but it has also had to look for a wider audience to justify its TV time. By and large it has done that, but at a cost. The new clubs are not part of that old tradition so they’ve had to create their own. The grass roots and history is what it’s all about. I followed Richmond during the VFL, but my heart was always in the SANFL with North Adelaide. So it was no problem for me to become a Crow supporter once the game went truly national, even though I no longer lived in SA.

Not everyone is in that category, which is why the new forces have tried to create their own traditions. Brisbane is leaning heavily on its Fitzroy connections (albeit they are flimsy). Sydney has retained stronger links to its South Melbourne origins and has very imaginatively revived the Bloods spirit.

Fremantle and Port Adelaide at least have strong home origins. For West Coast and Adelaide, however, there is no real past. Their best chance (which both seem to be achieving) is to establish a tradition of success.

But it is all a lot different from what we knew as kids.

You commented: “So I think it is pretty hard to point the finger at the interstaters for the loss of the VFL.” I do not think I did that Don. On the contrary I said: “How did the VFL manage to betray their supporters and create this abomination?” The history you describe is exactly my vision of greedy VFL businessmen moving cultural assets around like chess pieces. They had no right and I for one did not shed a tear when Jack Hamilton died in a car crash.

The problem with teams like Fitzroy trying to buy premierships and bankrupting themselves was solved by salary caps, not the national competition. The plundering of players from other states may have been irritating to them. But again it is no reason why the VFL should have created the eagles.

Tony T: I accidentally deleted your comment while trying to change its time stamp to put it in the correct sequence with other comments. Sorry. I will delete the three meta comments above now since they will not be of interest to anyone else.

In the 70s RM Ansett more or less controlled the 0-10 TV Network, in addition to his airline. He tried to get a national night comp going using both of these resources. Its function would have been similar to the FA Cup – separate and independent of the local leagues. Looking back, it would probably have done all the things you’d still prefer, like preserving the local comps, history and identification. What happened?

Ron Casey from 7 resented letting in another TV player, even though it would only have been a bit of part-time midweek stuff. He went secretly to the VFL clubs and convinced them that since they drew the biggest TV audiences they were entitled to the biggest share of the takings. He could offer them more if they pulled out and just ran a local night comp. So the clubs did, and scuttled the first attempt at a national comp. They might’ve got a bit more money this way, but the night comp with just the same clubs became boring pretty quickly.

And how did they use that money? A lot of it went to creaming off players from Tasmania, WA and eventually SA. Many seemed to believe you could buy a premiership and became reckless in the chase for players. South went broke,(hence the move to Sydney) and others such as Fitzroy and Footscray were horribly close. Still the frenzy went on.

In 1985 Jack Hamilton, in charge of the VFL then, took it to new depths when he issued permits to Collingwood and Footscray to play Greg Phillips and John Riley even though both were contracted players to Port Adelaide and North Adelaide respectively. Port, itself then in financial trouble, could not afford a fight and hastily cut a clearance deal with Collingwood. North fought it in the courts and won. Riley returned to North Adelaide after two games with Footscray.

But this type of plundering had seriously damaged the other states as well as costing VFL clubs. That’s why the Eagles were formed – partly to give fans in Perth something and partly to extend TV rights (even though the ABC covered the first year).

Adelaide held out against going into a national comp to preserve their local comp. It was only when Port (getting tired of being plundered all the time) tried to go it alone and cut a deal with the AFL that SANFL came on board and formed a composite team, the Adelaide Crows.

So I think it is pretty hard to point the finger at the interstaters for the loss of the VFL. The balance was tilted so much in favour of the VFL that eventually a national competition could only come from there. Now it’s tilted the other way partly because the markets are less crowded than Melbourne. But also because the interstaters hav been quicker to adapt to the new conditions.

From memory my best friend Johnny and I were at one end of a row in standing room. Then a smallish guy got into a fight with some drunk guys much larger than him. They broke a bear bottle and jammed it into his face. Johnny being braver than I was desperately trying to get into this fight – to protect the poor bastard whose face was being cut to pieces. I was trying to restrain him from getting his face sliced up. The cops eventually stopped it.

Ah . . . those were the days.

When I was in Manchester in January, there was a great deal of interest in FC United of Manchester, a semi-professional club started by disgruntled Man U fans who didn’t like the increasingly corporate approach of their former club. FCUM is a co-operative or friendly society, with a cap on individual shareholdings, and a one-member-one-vote (regardless of financial contribution) constitution. Interestingly, Wikipedia suggests that readers see also “Stand Up Sit Down”, which is a campaign in favour of standing room in stadiums.

The national competition is a non-issue for practically everyone under the age of 35.

All of those teams played at least 1 final in Melbourne. They lost, so they don’t get to play again. That’s pretty much the nature of “finals”.

Yobbo said: “This entire post is just sour grapes. There is still a Victorian competition. It’s called the VFL.” As has already been explained, the VFL used to be the VFA (more or less). So Victoria moved from VFA plus VFL in 1980 to VFA plus AFL in 2006. Net result. AFL replaced VFL. VFL was by far the most important competition culturally and it got sacrificed in Victoria and in no other state. Not to mention two clubs getting banished.

I don’t see how this argument can be sour grapes. I am not complaining about Melbourne not winning the flag. I am complaining about not getting to see Melbourne, St.Kilda, Footscray and Collingwood play off in the finals.

Sorry if this is getting boring for the rest of you, but several people refuse to acknowledge the point. If you don’t care that the VFL was merged into the AFL, then fine. If you come from Perth then your view does not count. If you come from Melbourne then your vote is worth just as much as mine. Many Victorians of my generation do care.

As for complaining about socialism, in the same paragraph I complain about free markets as well. And suggest that perhaps there is something fundamentally pointless about sport as business. Both the AFL (with its draft) and the Premier League (with Russian oil barons buying the best teams) seem somehow rigged to me.

The AFL is just a football league like any other football league in Australia. If all of a sudden the Ovens and Murray league reached an agreement with Channel 9 to televise its games in prime time, the AFL couldn’t do a damn thing about it. It has some control over the WAFL, SANFL and VFL only because many of those clubs and their players are affiliated with AFL teams.

It only has control over the clubs and players that play in its league, and control over some of the major stadiums.

The equivalent in software is the process – nobody owns the processes which is why Microsoft (or more correctly Apple) couldn’t patent things like pull-down menus, double-clicking or windowed multitasking.

What it all comes down to is that if Chris doesn’t like the AFL he is quite free to watch the VFL, O+M or the local amateur games instead.

Many Australians spend more time watching, playing and coaching amateur football than they do watching AFL. Only TV couch potatoes who have never played for a club themselves think the AFL is the be all and end all of football.

Many people have turned their backs on an AFL career because playing for their local club (and remaining in their local community) was more important to them. So if Chris Lloyd really cares about tradition and rivalry he should stop whining about a competition that is designed to appeal to a mass TV audience and start supporting the Fitzroy amateur team instead (as many ex-lions fans did when they moved to Brisbane).

There’s also wider issues. Who owns the standard – which in sport is the rules or the ‘code’. The clubs, the players, the community?

There’s a similar issue in software – who owns the standard. Microsoft owns the standards its software has established (even though it realised it had to licence quite a bit of them to get them to become the standard.

But no-one owns the standard in open source and that means it can’t be monopolised. It’s all a pretty interesting subject.

Should the rights to watch the greatest player of a given code (and all the other ones) private rights (inhering in the player or the club or the code) or are they community rights which cannot be monopolised?

I think the bigger issue, which I hoped someone would pick up on, is that of ownership of collective and cultural assets. A closely related issue is the extent to which people can have control over cultural assets even when they are not willing or able to pay for them (not everyone can afford to be a club member). The fact that the VFL’s actions twenty years ago were legal shows that the law has some catching up to do.

There is still a victorian competition. It’s called the VFL. The fact that you don’t care much about it is just an indication of how much of a success the AFL has been.

I went and watched my local Perth team lose the grand final yesterday. There’s no reason you couldn’t do the same.

And complaining about socialism is the biggest joke of all. Without the AFL’s socialism the only teams who would ever make the grand final would be West Coast, Adelaide and Collingwood.

I reckon you could recreate greater local tribal identification and breathe life into the VFA even now, by implementing a system of promotion and relegation between the VFA and AFL for Victorian-based teams. Rather than doing it annually (which would create too much instability and uncertainty), you would calculate the bottom two Victorian AFL teams over the last 3 years, and the top two VFA teams over the same time period. The two bottom AFL teams would be relegated and the two top VFA teams promoted to the AFL. The same thing would occur every 3 years. At the moment it would (I think) mean Carlton and Essendon being relegated, which would certainly attract more than few screams of outrage, but you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.

I think the aussie rules diehards are at least in part mistaken. Developing any football code interstate (and desirably internationally) potentially adds a whole additional dimension of tribalism, identification and excitement to a sport. That’s certainly true for rugby union and soccer, the only significantly international football codes. The interstate and international dimension is also potentially very attractive for the players, adding to their career options (or just playing options for amateurs – a stint in the UK, France or Italy was a desirable option for rugby players long before true rugby professionalism arrived in the early 90s). The trick is to develop the game interstate without abolishing the local top level comp in the game’s existing heartland, or turning it into a complete joke. An AFL/VFA promotion/relegation system could just turn the VFA into a vibrant local competition that people would want to go and watch (Tony T already does) and where good players would queue up to play for at least the top teams because it would provide a potential pathway into the AFL bigtime.

Nevertheless, my mum grew up in Linacre Road, a stones throw from the Beach Road Oval, as a hardcore Sandy fan. Her zeal for the Zebras filtered down to me and my brother, and although I spent a long time in WA where I didn’t follow the VFA as it was, I was back on that striped horse as soon as I returned in 1988. Since then Melbourne haven’t won a flag, while Sandy have won seven (1992, 1994, 1997, 2000, 2004, 2005, 2006).

So I suppose what I’m saying is, you take ‘em where you get ‘em, even though I’d most definitely take one Melbourne flag over seven Sandy flags.