I love how people rewrite history and howthey interpolate only some facts wrt future.

The Swans struggled until they were properly capitalised.
The Bears were a joke until they were properly capitilised.
The Swans' success co-incides with Swans' onfield success.
The Lions' success co-incides with Lions' onfield success.
The GC had an excellent first year but have faded.
GWS started very well but have faded onfield.

In Australian Football it's very much about onfield success.
Don't flatter yourself by implying AR has to steal support from rl in the WS.
Soccer is by far the most dominant grassroots sport in the WS and that's where
AFL has to achieve generational change.

IMO GWS are on the right track.
I can see scenarios where they fail, they survive , they're a success or become the dominant force in Sydney AR.

Is your back sore after moving those goalposts?

For popular support, RL is the competition. For participation, it's football, and on that front you've got a looooooooong way to go. There are 200,000 football players in FNSW (and another 60k or so in NNSW) - the AFL doesn't publish its figures but if actual club registrations (weekend club footy, not school gala days and clinics) are as high as 20,000 I'd be enormously surprised. AFL NSW/ACT is also massively over-catered for fields, where football is capacity constrained (try registering for football in the Shire if you're not a returning player - they're effectively capped at 18k down there by capacity of fields).

Just to back you up with some numbers published last year the AFL had 3,000 juniors playing weekend competition in western Sydney, Rugby League had 23,000 and Association Football had 66,000 juniors registered in their competitions in the region. Add to that the fact that Rugby League is the game of choice for the people in western Sydney and the region has 700k migrants mainly from Association Football playing countries and you have a huge task for the AFL to catch up to second place let alone challenge for supremacy in either popular support or participation.

http://www.smh.com.au/rugby-league/leag ... 1j6tr.html

Not sure what the definition of west Sydney is, Gyfox? If it = 2 mill people then would be interesting to compare with Brisbane. Also to compare (in reverse) with, say, western & northern Melbourne, which = similar demographics & about same size.

Western Sydney is made up of the LGA's of Auburn, Bankstown, Blacktown, Blue Mountains, Camden, Campbelltown, Fairfield, Hawksbury, The Hills, Holroyd, Liverpool, Parramatta, Penrith and Wollondilly. The total population of those LGA's in June 2011 was 2.02m.

Brisbane population at the same time was 2.074m.

Melbourne population was 4.08m. Unfortunately I don't know the LGA's that make up the parts of Melbourne you mention so I can't provide a comparison.

How do you reconcile that statement with your "facts"

Game of choice by viewing habits, perhaps - but certainly not by attendance.

I have no doubt there are more juniors playing AFL (sic) in Brisbane than in GWS. What would be interesting is the numbers for RL & soccer. My guess is that it would show there are less juniors playing all codes in western Sydney than Brisbane. Which means the field is ripe for the AFL.

If you go to the ABS site they show tables of participation rates.
In traditional football states football is hugely dominant followed by soccer way down.
In NSW soccer is hugely dominant followed by rl way down.
In QLd soccer is dominant but the four codes are reasonably close.

Particiaption numbers for NSW and Qld have overtaken traditional states likw WA and SA
however they don't break that down for Sydney and Brisbane.

If you say that WS is home to 2 million people then 1% equates to 20k.
using Slyfox's figures it shows nobody is playing sport in the WS
and that is a big opportunity.

.

Funnily enough, WS isn't where football's main strength is - about a third of the city's footballers are there, with the other thirds pretty neatly split between the north and south of the city. density is interesting - about 2.9% in the west vs 3.3% in the south and an astonishing 5.1% in the north. one in 20 people in the areas covered by manly, ku-ring-gai, gladesville-hornsby and central coast play football.

What is it about Western Sydney that has all the codes fapping themselves stupid? Spend 1/10th the amount and convert some island in the pacific.

The attention on GWS comes from the Sydney media's "code war". A distinctly Sydney thing - probably because Sydney doesn't get spectators to H&A games of football in any code. Or is there another reason?

Forum debates here now are a smidgen lower than the quality of the past...

We have evangelicals trying to talk up the crowds in Western Sydney and why it is ripe for AFL, even though by their own admitted measures the crowds have been below expectations (First game at SKODA, First game at Blacktown).

Egan wants to talk about crowds. I tried googling Brisbane junior football figures & finished up with St Kilda City!

Quite simple. Professional Rugby League has been played in western Sydney since 1947 when Parramatta entered the NSWRL competition. This was followed by the addition of Penrith in 1967. Currently Parramatta draw an average crowd of 15k and Penrith 12k this with the teams being last and second last in the 16 team competition. When performing better both clubs have been known to average 16-17k per game. No other professional football has been played in the region until this year. Rugby League has had the run off the market unchallenged for 65 years with only the semi professional NSL clubs in competition between 1977 and 2004. The region is also home to families who grew up closer to Sydney and have moved west to get their 1/4 acre block of land and house. These people have brought with them their affiliations to the inner city Rugby League clubs. The game that the majority of sports fans follow in western Sydney is Rugby League.

By attendance Rugby League has had the western Sydney region to itself until this season. By participation Association Football wins hands down.

Using the FootballNSW 2011 Annual Report there are 203k registered football players in NSW. This does not include the region from the Hunter Valley to the Qld border who play in the NNSW Federation where there are another 50k registered players. The split up for the NSW Federation is roughly 165k registered players in Sydney and 40k registered players in country NSW. The Sydney figure can be split into 65k in western Sydney and 100k in the rest of Sydney. Of those playing competition football in Sydney 70% are under 21.

FootballQld do not appear to publish an Annual Report but from time to time you see figures quoted. They also freely give you the numbers if you ring them. The latest figures quoted that I read mentioned that the number of registered players in Qld had dropped 11% this season from a figure of 80k. This would mean that the number of registered players in the whole of Qld is about 10% higher than in western Sydney.

Comparisons between codes is a tricky business as the codes report differently. Association Football for example only report players registered for weekend club competition. AFL on the other hand includes participation in all programs but their 2011 Annual Report does break the total figure down into different categories. The total participation in all categories was 791k. The number of players involved in club competition across the entire country was 314k. To break this 314k figure up you have to look at small bar charts so the following numbers are give or take a bit. ACT/NSW just under 30k, NT just over 5k, Qld about 20k, SA about 50k, Tas about 10k, Vic 140k and WA just over 50k, Total 314k.

The equivalent number taken from Annual Reports in each case except for Qld for Association Football are ACT/NSW 18+203+50=271k, NT 2k, Qld approx 72k, SA 23k but there is a large rump that refuses to affiliate with the federation, Tas 12k, Vic 53k, and WA 37k, Total 470k.

I have found Rugby League stats hard to find. The Queensland Rugby League Annual Report 2011 indicates 16k senior competition players and 44k juniors across the state. The latest figures for Rugby League across the country showed 34k seniors and 120k juniors playing the game in 2008 with junior registrations roughly equal between the QRL, NSWRL and Country Rugby League.

From these figures it is clear your statement that all codes have less juniors playing in western Sydney than Brisbane is not correct with regard to Association Football, is probably not correct for Rugby League but is correct for AF.

Just as an indication of the task the AFL has "to re-educate" western Sydney, as Nines put it, the popularity of playing Association Football in western Sydney is 30% greater than the popularity of playing Australian Football in Victoria on a per capita basis.

That playing in club competitions does not necessarily reflect on attendances at professional sport is no clearer seen than figures I came across for the Gold Coast/Tweed region while trolling the net to get the information in this post. The region has 10k registered Association Football players, 8k registered Rugby League players and 2k registered AFL players. Attendances have been somewhat different.