The football codes

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This post is a crosspost from Jayeless, and can be read in its original location here.

With the grand final rematch set to take place tomorrow, it feels like a fitting day to write about something of great cultural significance to Australia: football. This is something so significant to people in this country that even people who reject the entire idea of “Australian culture” (like I don’t know… me) still take an interest in football.

The first thing to know about football, though, is that there is a cultural battle of sorts raging over which sport even gets the title of “football”. Our three main contenders for the position are:

• football
• soccer
• rugby

Based on this list, I’m sure you will see that I am not at all biased when I say that the true bearer of the name of “football” is, uh, football. That is, the kind of football they play in the Australian FOOTBALL league.

Those who insist on referring to one of these other fine sports as “football” (okay, I lie, only one of the other two is a fine sport. I hate rugby.) will often insist on referring to true, Australian football as “AFL”. I feel like this is semantically wrong though, as AFL is not the name of the sport, but the league it’s played in. I mean, imagine for a moment that a new sport sprung up claiming the name of “basketball”! Calling Australian football “AFL” would be like calling the old form of basketball we all know and may or may not love “NBA”, just so the new sport can claim the name “basketball”. But to be more accurate, imagine that the new sport actually had another name… like I don’t know, netball. Imagine that a whole movement sprung up around calling netball “basketball”. That is this “football” battle in a nutshell.

Obviously this is dependent on where you are: if someone went to the UK and insisted that everyone there start calling soccer “soccer” because “football” could only ever refer to Australian football, they would rightfully deserve a slap. However, in Australia — at least, in Victoria, the heartland of the AFL — this is what the word “football” has always meant. It’s not fair for soccer — a sport which already has another name — to muscle in and insist that the word “football” refer to it now. It’s not like the Football Association was always called the Football Association, it changed its name only a few years ago! So fuck off, Football Association, I don’t actually mind your sport at all but I mind your attempt to steal other sports’ names.

So, like you might imagine, I am no great devotee of soccer, but I actually don’t mind watching it. I was raised to dislike soccer as a sport replete with nil-nil draws and confusing “offside rules”, but then I started watching bits and pieces of soccer matches, and I was like, “This is actually pretty good.” I still don’t really follow it, but if the A-League had the same level of coverage (especially in terms of matches being shown on free-to-air TV), I’d probably follow both sports equally. Until the AFL ceased to exist, and probably still not even then, I’d never call soccer “football”, but I’d be willing to pay attention to the sport.

That said, probably the reason I found soccer so entertaining was that I was mentally comparing it to rugby, which I’d grown up seeing a little more of and which has to be one of the most boring sports of all time. (I mean, it can’t quite beat lawn bowls, but it’s pretty boring.) So far as I can tell, rugby seems to involve running one metre, getting tackled to the ground, passing the ball to someone else who runs one metre before getting tackled to the ground, and only five players get to do this before the ball gets passed to the other team and since the ground is more than five metres long, scoring basically never happens.

However, for some reason this mind-numbing drudgery is popular in New South Wales and Queensland, and whatever, I’m not here to judge. If you enjoy incredibly boring sports, that is entirely your choice. Anyway, apparently rugby is sometimes called “football” in those states, and I know this because I once had to read this boring book for school in which the main character was a Sydneysider whose dad had been a “football legend” and I spent the whole book going, “But… Sydneysiders don’t play football?!” Towards the end of the book I finally worked out he was supposed to have been a rugby player. D’oh. Anyway, it was a really boring book and I’d tell you its name so you know never ever to read it ever but I don’t actually remember its name… so… just avoid all books that look like they’re about boring things like Sydneysiders taking long bus trips to North Queensland and you’ll be fine.

So where was I? Oh right. Rugby. Well, truth be told, Victorians referring to rugby as “football” is not actually a big problem. I’ve heard exactly one Victorian call rugby “football”, and she was born in New Zealand, so I’m willing to discount that. If Queenslanders and New South Welsh people want to call rugby “football”, I mean, I’d rather they didn’t because the National Rugby League is in fact the National Rugby League not the National Football League… but I understand that football isn’t a popular sport in those states, so whatever, really. If they’re determined to apply the name “football” to some sport but they don’t follow AFL or the A-League… then I think they’re a bit fussy, but they can call rugby what they want.

The last question I suppose I should address in this entry is, supposing one does for whatever reason reserve the name “football” for another sport, what should one call the sport played in the AFL?

As I already said, “AFL” feels semantically wrong. The term I tend to go for is “Australian football” (following the precedent of “American football”), but I’m also down with “Aussie rules”, “Aussie rules football”, “Australian rules football”… whatever, really. I’m cool with a lot of things. And also, just to make this clear, if you actually want to discuss the AFL competition, or the AFL body itself, then “AFL” is an appropriate name, kind of like how “A-League” is an appropriate name to refer to the A-League competition. It’s when the actual sport is being discussed that this gets on my nerves, e.g. “Kids playing AFL in schools…” or whatever. Do you mean those kids all got contracts with the Richmond Tigers?! If the answer is no, and if they didn’t get contracts with any of the other teams either, please don’t do this.

So, that’s all I have to say about football for now! Except that — I have to say this — I think it is absolutely amazing that when the AFL Grand Final ends in a draw, they have a rematch. I mean that — amazing. What other sport matches the greatness of that? This is why I love football.