Rob wrote:Pfft, every code grossly inflates their participant numbers. Last I heard the FFA were claiming 1.7 million participants. There was an article on sports business insider a few months ago which completely debunked those particular numbers.
Why a Rugby League writer would bother writing an article on Australian football participation is what's got me baffled. Talk about constantly looking over your shoulder. Which given soccer utterly obliterates rugby league in it's own heartland in regard to participation, I reckon they're worried about the wrong competitor.
Actually she did nothing other than show that she doesn't know how to check sources that people list.
For your information the sources the FFA quoted were ERASS and ABS.
ERASS Report 2009 for 15+ participants. Table 15.
Outdoor football. 879.8k
Indoor football. 372.8k.
ABS Children's participation in sport (15 and under) April 2009. Table 1.
Soccer (outdoor) 360.4k
Soccer (indoor) 76.9k
Total. 1,689.9k which is close enough to 1.7m for me.
Interestingly using those same tables participation in AFL in 2009 was 722k which ties remarkably with the total quoted in the AFL's 2009 Annual Report of 732k in all forms of the code.
Bonita Mersiades who was the author of the article was setting up an argument that participation in junior football under the FFA's administration was in a stagnating state. She started trying to question the FFA's use of data by using data from a different source to come to a different result. All this shows is that data collected through different processes can come to different conclusions. It does nothing to discredit the FFA who referenced publicly available data that could be checked by anyone who wanted to check it.
I won't go into detail here but in the body of her article Mersiades cherry picked data from an ABS table put it into her own table and used it to make a case that did not hold true if all the information in the ABS table had been reproduced. If she had bothered to look at previous data in the same series she would have seen that the data she chose as a standard to test against was in fact a post Olympics aberration.