You'd expect to get that attendance number, there's an extra game per round this season. Bumping up the crowd numbers doesn't make things harder.

To this point of the season, the AFL has already had seven matches in excess of 80,000 fans, equalling the best mark in the game's history with eight rounds remaining. As at the end of round 15, total AFL attendance for the 2013 season is at 4,178,571, compared to 4,107,305 fans to the same point last year, a rise of 1.7 per cent.

The best attendances for a single round in the history of the game:
371,212 - round 15, 2013
367,974 – round 22, 1998
367,792 – round one, 2012
365,507 – round one, 2013
364,544 – round one, 2007
361,003 – round 17, 2009
357,948 – round 21, 2007
350,885 – round three, 2008
349,489 – round one, 2009
347,824 – round six, 2010

Evidence that the inclusion of the Suns and Giants has been good for the league?

Not really, they lower the crowd average and ruin the competition with poor performances and dreary atmospheres.

Adds more TV dollars.

A multicultural AFL? Not quite

http://www.theage.com.au/comment/a-multicultural-afl-not-quite-20130712-2pvik.html

July 13, 2013

Ian Syson

Someone needs to call out the AFL on this one. As if we don't have enough ''noble work'' rounds already, we are this weekend lumbered with the most ludicrously framed of them all, Multicultural Round. The only round more silly would be one that celebrated the game's great Barrys.
I'm not against the idea of celebrating cultural diversity in any arena. More power to those who want to remind us that we live in a diverse and multicultural society.
But if anyone in the AFL bothered to think deeply for even a moment about the motivations of the Multicultural Round, they would run a mile.
Unfortunately, the AFL does not have all that much to celebrate in terms of its cultural diversity - yet. While the AFL diversity website claims that ''Australian football has the extraordinary power to bring people together regardless of their background'', the proof is just not there. For example, of the 817 listed AFL players, only 22 were born overseas, just below 3 per cent. This can be compared with the general Australian population in which 25 per cent were born overseas.
Perhaps it could be argued that AFL figures are not representative of the game as a whole. This may be the case but it would then be an indictment of the development pathways available for the non-Australian-born.
The AFL claims a higher figure in relation to those of a ''multicultural background''. About 15 per cent of listed players fit the AFL's multicultural criterion of having at least one parent born overseas. So the AFL falls down here as well, because more than 45 per cent of the Australian population fits this criterion.
When we look more closely at the figures, further problems appear.
Of those 121 ''multicultural'' players, more than half have one parent from Anglophone countries, mainly Britain, Ireland and New Zealand. Steele Sidebottom, born in Australia to an Australian father and English mother, does not strike me as a significant embodiment of cultural diversity. And the idea that Simon Black's Kiwi father makes him somehow ''multicultural'' borders on the perverse. Dermott Brereton? Really?
Bizarrely, this definition would allow most of the game's Anglo-Australian founders to be described as multicultural and eligible for selection in the all-time multicultural Australian rules team.
Yet this construction of multicultural identity is not universally applied in the AFL's thinking. Fourth-generation Australian Ron Barassi is included in a historical list of multicultural players. There's a tokenism here that cares more about the woggy surname than it does about the realities and differences of Italian-Australian culture. It's all just a bit silly.
Actually, it isn't just silly. It's also pernicious. The problem with all of this lies in the construction of a ''multicultural'' identity as opposed to another (true blue?) identity. The diversity gurus at the AFL seem to think that in breaking Australian society into two categories (insiders and outsiders, native-born and migrants, or Australians and multiculturals?) they are doing us a favour when in fact they are replicating the kind of Hansonite stereotypes that gave us the Cronulla riots.
When Eddie McGuire makes stupid comments about the ''Felafel Land'' of western Sydney or Kevin Sheedy reveals his ignorance in talking about the Immigration Department supplying supporters for the Western Sydney Wanderers Football Club, they articulate the AFL's failure to understand the social fissures encouraged by this false division between ''real'' and ''wannabe'' Aussies.
The bottom line is that in a multicultural society we are all multicultural. We all have ethnic and cultural baggage that sets us up in relation to the fluid process that we call multicultural Australia. We are all in it together and none of the imported cultures deserve the priority that is the privilege of the truly indigenous.
The AFL is to be congratulated for recognising and using its great social clout for good on any number of issues. The way the AFL has supported indigenous players in their struggle to be recognised as powerful and legitimate contributors to the game is one of our great sport stories of recent times. It should also be supported for acknowledging that it is not a particularly diverse sport and for taking steps to correct that.
But I'll be buggered if I am going to pat it on the back for playing catch-up football on cultural diversity. Let me know when the siren sounds on this game because I reckon we have a while to go. Meanwhile, I'm off to a game this weekend that, for all its faults, is so culturally diverse that to play ''spot the wog'' would be redundant. I'll leave that to the AFL.
Ian Syson teaches literary studies and professional writing at Victoria University and is researching the history of football codes in Australia.

Aren't the English, Scottish, Irish and New Zealanders part of our multi-cultural society.

I note Syson is not game enough to talk about our indigenous Australians.

I love AFL, but this has made me cringe all week. Classic AFL administration, trying to be so much more than it is

They are essentially the same as us, most white Australians can trace their heritage back to countries in the UK.

What sickens me is that the afl are trying to claim moral superiority over other codes because they have majak as the first Sudanese player and have bachar as the first Muslim player. I don't care if they are the first ,to me their aussies I don't look at them and say wow a Sudanese kid is playing or a Muslim is playing . Their people like everyone else .

For anyone to suggest that the English, Scottish and Irish are the same demonstrates massive ignorance, especially in the context of the early years of the European colonisation of Australia.

Not all australians have british isles heritage and not all are white and either way they still form part of Australias "cultural diversity".
Edited by Iridium1010: 14/7/2013 12:57:07 PM

Is GWS getting better or worse? Sheedy should just leave it is obvious that he is no longer up to the task, talks a lot delivers record breaking losses.

Meanwhile North Melbourne give up another 5 goal lead late in the game to lose.

It's a very inexperienced side so it's a tough call to make, I thought GC looked a tad worse in their second season but look at them now. GWS have the potential to be great in a few years time but in the short term they really need to target some experienced players.

Edited by fredsta: 14/7/2013 06:09:18 PM