That is the lesson learnt from this past fortnight of soccer. Australia are not good enough to be influential in the best company. And might never will be.

The guy's a genius.  In his mind, in AFL, Australia are the best in the world and that is the measure of a sport.

AFL can take the athletes. After all it's all they have. I'll settle for the skillful sportspeople, I will go on for watching the very best athletes every four years, the AFL can have the leftovers from the olympics.

Personally I am happy with where our game *football* is at the moment, purely because of the people it attracts.
Anyone who has ever been to an AFL match knows that it attracts the absolute bottom wrung of lifes ladder. You could go to any given AFL match and see utter human filth, you will see moccosons worn in public and you will hear many racial slurs hurled in abuse at any player who's surname is not of anglo decent.
You just dont get that A-League matches, you get good like-minded people there to watch a vastly superior and far more intelligent sport. Let the lessers of society have their 'our sport is more popular than your sport in one country in the entire world ' argument, because for most of these people it's all they'll ever have.

RE: Because of the hold the AFL and NRL have on sport across Australia, soccer has little chance of getting the best of our young males.

I think some missed the point of this article. In a way the writer is correct, however I disagree that soccer has little chance of getting the best of  our ( Australia's)  young males.
I think we do get some of the best of  Australia's  young males...but the pool would be soooo MUCH bigger if :

1. we didn't have to compete for talent against the AFL ( but  the reality is we do)
2. If there more opportunities for young players at the elite level in this country
3. If we had more clubs in the A-league
4. If had a robust financial sustainable 2nd division
5. If euro snobs quit complaining about the standard in Australia and actually contributed to raising the standard but supported the local game with their presence and wallets 
6. If this administration took their heads out of their shorted sighted arses and actually listened

The hold the AFL and NRL currently have is ALL about Dollars $ it can generate for  Networks wishing sell air time to sponsors. Sponsor only care about how may people they can reach in a 30 sec slot.

Until we implement points 2, 3,4 & 5, only then will the product ( football) become more valuable to TV networks  &  sponsors...attracting more  revenue for all stakeholders in football...thus attracting a bigger pool of Australia's young talent, ending the strangled hold of the AFL and the media that serves it.

We all have a part to play.

 

In Melbourne maybe. 

Swans' fans in Sydney seem to be largely slightly upper-middle class, probably eastern suburbs types that are too highbrow for rugby league, but not "elite private school" enough to be rugby diehards. 

In Sydney the bottom rungs follow league, or the Wanderers ;)

You do realise we are the number one sport?
Icelands population is 330,000
Uruaguays population is 2,000,000

Golf is doing well.

People on this forum too easily confuse AFL-focused sports writers as elected representatives of the entire Australian Rules community.

Of the 150k spectators who bought tickets to Brazil/Argentina and Brazil/Australia in Melbourne, how many do you think don't also moonlight as AFL fans? The answer: not many.

Sitting here slagging off another sport and blaming it for all the failings of your own (as consistently happens on this board) does nothing but intensify this perceived code rivalry (in the media at least) that you all sook so hard about and which exists purely in the minds of fanatics of both sports (about 2% of the respective fan communities).

The average AFL spectator is most likely also a 'soccer' fan and without a doubt most AFL footballers are soccer fans and vise versa. Half the AFL (those who can afford it) have done preseasons with EPL clubs ffs. Normal people and anyone born post-1970 don't really give a shit about the agendas of either sport and would rather just watch both. 

Just as not all Muslims are terrorists, not all AFL fans are 'wog-hating, anti-nil-all-draw' Anglo Australians. The sooner you all accept these facts, the better off you will all be.

Definitely a club sport

Which multi are you?

Do they provide a breakdown of data by gender and age groups?

I saw a video on Facebook that timed his short burst speed as being as good as the fastest American NFL footballers. So yeah, he fast.

His core strength/power through his legs would be elite.

Darren Burgess spoke years ago about how the repeat effort ability of elite footballers (based on his experience at Liverpool) pretty much left AFL footballers for dead.  

@ pr Timmy

Lol

The idea that football will never be the most popular sport here or that we'll never have the chance to produce a world-class team because other codes "take all the best athletes" (which is what the author of the article is outright saying - "soccer has little chance of getting the best of our young male and female athletes") is the EXACT mentality that has caused us to be in this predicament whenever we get humiliated by superior international football teams. The whole problem with the current set of players (and historically it always has been) is that Australian players rely too much on physicality and raw athleticism rather than technical ability.

Look at Brazil's third goal they scored against us: that was pure technical brilliance that we could only ever dream of. When we lose to superior teams in world football like Germany, Brazil, France, Spain, Netherlands, Chile, etc, why is that? Is it because they're knocking our players over, out-sprinting them, beating them in aerial challenges, out-muscling them, and absolutely crushing them physically? No. It's really because they can pass it around the field like our players aren't even there, move through players like they're training cones, read the game far better, control the ball better, dribble effortlessly, anticipate the movement of the ball, detect structural weaknesses, make incisive runs that generate more chances, starve us of possession, easily steal possession, make good decisions under pressure, minimize mistakes, and cap it off with composed finishing by masking their body language to make their shots harder to save. Those are skillsets that can be learned and retained independent of whether one is an "athlete" or not. And when there are half a million people registered players, there's no excuses that the sport can't have good players because they "went to the other codes", especially when the dominant two codes are either niche or non-existent internationally, so it's a poor comparison because they require different strengths and we're about the only country that takes them seriously. If we want to compare football to other sports, we're better off comparing it to sports like hockey and tennis, which require far more technical ability rather than just mindless athleticism. And unsurprisingly, our international ability in those sports is nothing special either.   

The fact that this journalist has to write this article & the likes of Pippinu, Mister Football & all their multis are constantly on here shows their insecurities.

Has anyone ever asked this 'journalist' why are AFL spending so much money in Sydney, AFL will never go close to being the game of power and influence it is in the 3 southern & western cities?
In Sydney it's not Australia's game, Rugby league has it covered so easy & even football is above AFL.

Fair enough but I will say that whilst Brazil's third goal was technically brilliant the penultimate pass (the backheel) was by a bloke that muscled past our fella like he wasn't there. It's particularly obvious in the front on replay. The arm came up and he shoved him out of the way like you'd shoo off your annoying brother.

4:30 mark of this video. 



The facts are not only were Brazil technically better than us they were far physically stronger. It's a concern that some are not worrying about the physical aspect because umm... Messi. All other things being equal the more physical side will have the advantage.

They break it down to Children (u15) and Adult (15+).

Club Sports
Children
Football  551,911  1st.
Australian Football   328,540  2nd.

Adult
Football  535,075  2nd behind Golf
Australian Football  307,087 6th.

They also provide data for organised sport out of school hours for children by gender.

Boys 
Football  538,304 2nd behind Swimming.
Australian Football 320,650 3rd.

Girls
Football  135,790 5th behind Swimming, Netball, Dancing and Gymnastics.
Australian Football  45,812  10th.

These figures are for 2015/16 and it will be interesting to see the changes resulting from greater marketing of women's sports in the last couple of years.

He isn't the only poster boy, FMD the amount of small footballer players that are playing in the top leagues is ridiculous.

Hazard, Valbuena, Iniesta, MESSI, Neymar, Payet, Modric

How many more do you want to name - The overriding factor for all these players is Technique

We aren't anywhere near as agile any of the top teams. For instance Brazilian players are able to accelerate far quicker than most of our players, their lateral movement and balance is also far superior to any current Australian player bar maybe Rogic. You can see the difference so vividly when we play these nations as it looks like all the Australian players are stuck in quicksand in comparison. 

We also see the lack of agility against Asian oppositions but we are physically far superior but against the rest of the world we are matched physically if not beaten while lacking in agility and it shows.

I like football. I'm not a huge fan of Aussie Rules, but I grew up watching it and playing it and being in Melbourne am constantly (and I mean constantly) bombarded with it. 52 weeks of the year, it is the lead story in the sports news, and in the paper, and on the news websites. It is played at junior and local level in every suburb and everyone knows someone that plays it or has a kid playing. It is practically a religion here. What that means, is that people are HUGELY invested in it as part of the culture. As a cultural icon, "THE GAME" is seen as part of being Australian, and you are seen by many as unAustralian if you do not follow a team, or at least profess to follow a team and express some support for the game (even minor). As a result of this all pervasive narrative of football being part of an 'Australian' identity, most people who are proud to be Australian desperately want for "THEIR GAME" to be recognised as superior to other sports and therefore recognising that the Australian way of life and they are therefore superior to the rest of the world. It is a validation of their own identity if Aussie Rules is held up as the pinnacle of sport in the world. That's one of the reasons why many Aussie Rules fans are so negative toward other sports, and in particular football. 
As for me, I like football. I don't hate Aussie Rules, but I am sick of Aussie Rules fans who are so insecure constantly attacking football to validate their own identity.

I feel sorry for you. This really and I mean really doesn't apply in Sydney. The game is virtually invisible compared to being in Melbourne anyway.
Its funny when we have visitors from Melbourne and they try and steer us on the topic of AFL and we just ignore it. It doesn't rate.  

When I open The Australian articles on football there are always watch AFL online ads.

The worst online paper is the West Australian. They pretty much have ads and always play an AFL vid automatically on football articles.

Yeah that's what irks me the most. The fact that their journos are getting on and talking about our sport and pretty much ALWAYS belittling it whereas I can't remember the last time one of our journos and wrote a column openly sledging and bagging either AFL or NRL. I've only ever seen our journos have to write columns on defending our game and then perhaps mentioning other sports, but only in defence of articles written about our game.

That's what annoys me. But you may have a point that the obsession of having to tell us where we sit on the pyramid is perhaps more of a sign as to how insecure they truly are.

Too much truth in one post! 

Don't respond to this troll mate 

Agree with this, against the Asian teams we are physically superior but once we play against teams that can match us in that department and can even be better than us we get exposed for our poor technical quality.

The Socceroos have got some good athletes but we got exposed on our poor first touch, shielding, playing in tight spaces...i could go on