To the gimlet eyes of the AFL marketing supremos the Melbourne Football Club — the oldest sporting club in the world that is still alive — is simply a supermarket item. The Age’s Caroline Wilson reported yesterday that the AFL has told Melbourne this week “that its brand was meaningless and that it virtually stood for nothing in 2008.”
The AFL’s attitude tells you one thing — the markets and PR flunkies have run riot, and clubs are now reduced to being bottles of shampoo placed on the supermarket shelves for the consumer to pick one up simply on the basis of its packaging and how it makes you feel. Will the punter buy Sunsilk or Pantene? Melbourne or West Coast?
But let’s stick with this flawed marketing babble for a moment and take the AFL on over its assumption that Melbourne’s brand is bereft of meaning.
The foundation of the Melbourne Football Club in 1858 coincides with the origins of the game that gives the AFL its reason for being. Melbourne’s home ground is the Melbourne Cricket Ground, the arena that gave football its first paddock on which to play. In the same way that the Marylebone Cricket Club based at Lords is fundamental to the heritage and spirit of cricket, so is Melbourne to football in Australia. One would have thought that such lineage would please the AFL no end given its efforts of the past few seasons to promote the heritage of the game.
And Melbourne, given its history, is the antithesis of the meccano set clubs like Brisbane, West Coast and Adelaide. Clubs created by the AFL in recent years to enable it to expand its empire nationally. Once again, that contrast is surely important to a sporting competition that believes it can speak for all Australians down the ages.
The AFL has managed to insult the thousands of Melbourne supporters in this country and overseas with its disdainful attitude this week. It is essentially saying to us, you are supporting an empty vessel. The years you have spent watching the inevitably mixed fortunes of your football club are wasted years, because the club you support stands for nothing and has no relevance in the AFL’s collective mind in 2008.
The AFL has already killed one club with its arrogant do as we say or die attitude – Fitzroy. It declared war on the Roys from 1989, when a merger with Footscray did not go ahead, starved it of oxygen and kicked the carcass around until it was dead, dead, dead. It appears to be gearing up again to ensure Melbourne meets a similar fate.
The AFL is a ruthless organisation for which sentiment and history are simply useful tools to tap into dollars and consumers. Its insensitive and crass comments on one of the most important elements in Australian sporting history – the Melbourne Football Club – is testament to this.
It’s taken the AFL years to announce what most footy people have known for years; Melbourne is irrelevant.
Like the Kangaroos, Melbourne lives on the goodwill of the AFL and its clubs. It has no training facility, no social club, no support, no money and ah……no wins. Need I go on?
I won’t say it has no heart, but the pathetic level of support suggests its supporters have none.
The same people now attacking the AFL voted to merge with Hawthorn not so long ago.
Melbourne could disappear tomorrow and barely anyone would notice or care.
It is sad to see a once powerful club reduced to its present state but Melbourne people seem unable to face to truth; but for the AFL’s generosity Melbourne would have disappeared years ago and probably with barely a whimper.
After five years living overseas I feel helpless looking at what is going on in the club that I first went to see in 1956. I have followed them through the good times (a few and the really good ones were many years ago) and I have followed them through the bad (and boy were some of them bad!!), I will continue to follow them, albeit from afar as long as the Redlegs exist but I fear that one day in the not too distant future the AFL will do the hatchet job them have done to South Melbourne and Fitzroy and more recently the attempt on North Melbourne. Footy without a Melbourne club would remove the heart and soul from the game, but I am afraid that got lost many years ago when the AFL decided that money was more imporant than the supporters that breahed life into what is without a doubt the world’s greatest game. Go Dees
Excellent piece of writing; a sad but very true commentary on the AFL hierarchy and its machiavellian objectives and obsession with club profitability – Adelaide and West Coast are nothing other than clubs with strong corporate backing (and branding) but without a soul. The AFL has no regard for the history that has sustained the competition with the involvement of a founding club such as Melbourne.
“In the same way that the Marylebone Cricket Club based at Lords is fundamental to the heritage and spirit of cricket, so is Melbourne to football in Australia.” To Australian Rules football, Greg, not to soccer, rugby or rugby league, which can all, in case you haven’t noticed, make just as legitimate (in soccer’s case, a more legitimate) claim to being football.
An interesting op piece re Melbourne footy club and branding.