The Devils were wound up at the conclusion of the 2008 …
Low population, negative growth and diminishing tourism revenue mean there’s no chance of this changing any time soon.You could argue that the very introduction of a club would be a financial boost through interstate tourism, but it doesn’t really stand to reason: Why have the supporters of one interstate team make the trip down to Tassie for matches when you’ve already got supporters from two sides coming down?Thus, you have to wonder where the state is going to find and maintain the $30 million it costs each year to run a footy club. Gold Coast, he said, is likely to remain a small football club, of similar proportion to provincial Geelong. The petition will no doubt form part of the business case that will be presented to the Tasmanian Government in December, and pointed to as a sure-fire sign of public support for a Tasmanian team.
“If we have a Tasmanians men’s team, we’d want a lot of the list to be Tasmania, otherwise we’d just be setting up a club and asking people to move from the mainland.” One of the numbers arguments against a Tasmanian team is that the state doesn’t attract big enough crowds to the current games in the state to warrant a team.
The last time this issue was so topical was after the AFL’s expansion in 2012. Hopefully this latest attempt at national inclusion can be the state's last. AFL Tasmania CEO Trisha Squires in Hobart, April 2018.James Worpel of the Hawks (left) runs during the Round 6 AFL match between the Hawthorn Hawks and the St Kilda Saints at the University of Tasmania Stadium in Launceston, Saturday, April 28, 2018.Hawks captain Jarryd Roughead (left) is congratulated by Steve Motlop of the Cats after match 2 of the AFL Community Series between the Hawthorn Hawks and the Geelong Cats at University of Tasmania Stadium, Launceston, on February 17, 2017. A steep decline in their crowds coincided exactly with the arrival of the Suns and the numbers suggest Gold Coast has eroded Brisbane's south-coast following.Now, even Demetriou is conceding that Gold Coast's support base is unlikely to ever amount to more than that of a "small football club".
Scarcely any more people are going to Queensland AFL games now than was the case when the Lions had a monopoly. "We've had very strong support from South Australia, Western Australia and New South Wales, virtually in equal quantities.
And that’s just the average – big clubs like Hawthorn and Collingwood easily rack up expenditure bills in excess of $40 million annually.Economic issues also relate to another factor in the argument for a Tasmanian club.Cornelius recalls a meeting he and several other Tasmanian-based AFL representatives had met with Andrew Demetriou in the months after the two expansion teams were announced.“I was at the Lions when that was going on, and we actually got spoken to by Demetriou about the reasons they went with teams in the Gold Coast and Western Sydney,” he said.“I actually asked the question at that meeting ‘Will there be a side in Tasmania?’, and Demetriou said the AFL was only really looking at putting new clubs in growth areas.“The league thought they could get in those markets and create more interest in the game, whereas in Tasmania that interest is already there and can’t really be built on any more than it already is.“There were about five other Tassie boys in the room that day, and none of us had a leg to stand on by the time they’d finished giving us the facts. And I reckon if the footy public had heard what we did in that meeting, there wouldn’t be much of a debate about this.”“What I took away from it was that the AFL doesn’t need to take a team to Tasmania to get people to buy into it.”There will not be an AFL side based in Tasmania, at least not in the next 10 years.The way the AFL is run now, with profit and growth being the ends that justify the means, putting the next team in Tasmania just does not make sense, even if rewarding a state for its unfaltering support of the game does.“They call it the national game,” Cornelius observes, “and I think it’d be fantastic if there was a senior team down here.“But I don’t think that’s in the AFL’s near or mid-term plans for the future.”Melbourne-born, Horsham-based footy fan. "It's quite a contrast from the mindset at the dawning of the expansion dream. For at that rate, nine games-per-round would be worth a total of $2.34 billion annually. On 24 June 1990, Tasmania's state team defeated the Victorian state team in front of a full house at North Hobart Oval fuelling the first calls for the state to house its own AFL team. (AAP: Julian Smith)Of course, the numbers are probably inflated.
Tasmanian support for AFL clubs Hawthorn and North Melbourne was declining, the report said — urging a Tasmanian team be granted a licence by 2025 After 20 years of "enjoying the highest per capita rate of participation in Australian Rules across the country", the code was now fading on the island… By comparison, the Suns had 13,643 members in 2015, the Giants just under 14,000.Ultimately, the biggest financial obstacle Tasmania faces in striving for an AFL team is the fact they are Tasmania, the consistent under-performer of the Australian states and territories financially.If each state were a team, Tasmania would be the Demons of the past few years, fighting a losing battle to remain competitive with the mainland. A relocation is the wrong model and there isn't a 20th team on the horizon. "Powerful voices are at last speaking out. Believers, at that time, spoke of the western Sydney and Gold Coast corridors as growing too fast to be ignored. It doesn't seem right from a cultural perspective that one of those states haven't been given an opportunity to have a team in the AFL. AFL. Demetriou was reported as having said in the interview that the ninth game each weekend, brought about by the new clubs, is worth "more than $260 million in any year".This is an eyebrow-raising figure and Demetriou has since conceded that, if he said this, it was incorrect. The life members, the past legends.“That’s where I think it would be hard for a Tasmanian team: Would you use people from the state teams like Gary Linton, Peter Hudson and Alastair Lynch?