Gather Round should stay in SA for all footy lovers | David Penberthy

There’s just one reason you’d move Gather Round elsewhere, writes David Penberthy. And it ain’t a good one.

The AFL might think it’s got the whip hand when it comes to future negotiations over the location of Gather Round.

It might think it is perfectly placed to start a bidding war between state governments to maximise the taxpayer-funded contribution it can obtain to stage the coveted event.

All I will say is … good luck with that. If the AFL goes down this path, it will do so at risk of harming its reputation. It will look like an organisation that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, by turning what has quickly become a cherished, feel-good event into an opportunistic, money-making scheme.

Fairly or unfairly, there is already a view out there that this is what the AFL does anyway. The AFL brings us a lot of joy but, when it comes to financial questions and its relationship with government, it certainly has its detractors.

What should have been a welcome foray into Tasmania has instead alienated locals through the AFL’s demand that the cost of building a covered stadium be born almost exclusively by taxpayers. The cost of the stadium was originally put at $753 million but has ballooned to $1.41 billion, with the AFL still only offering a paltry $15 million towards its construction. This is loose change versus the money AFL House will make from a further expansion of the national competition and an increased value of broadcast rights. What should be a unifying moment of state pride in Tassie has become an all-in political brawl, with the state government forced to announce an expenditure cap amid fears taxpayers are being played for mugs.

This will resonate with South Australian taxpayers in the context of the Adelaide Oval upgrade, where almost every cent of the $535 million renovation was stumped up by state and federal governments, despite the obvious enduring benefit to the AFL of having a whiz-bang new ground, the use of which is now dominated by Aussie Rules. So much so that the Sheffield Shield final couldn’t be played there, even though it was still cricket season.

The AFL has also attracted a stack of complaints from less affluent fans for selling off live, free-to-air Saturday football.

Premier Peter Malinauskas and AFL Chief Executive Andrew Dillon. Picture: Dean Martin

It is a matter of guesswork how much public money has been ploughed into hosting the past three Gather Rounds. The estimate for the first one in 2023 was around $15 million. The estimate for the three-year extension to 2026 was around $80 million.

Whatever the exact figures, the return to the state vastly dwarfed the public outlay, with this year’s Gather Round expected to have injected $100 million back into the economy. By the end of next year we will have spent around $100 million but made around $400 million for the state, not counting the huge promotional value for SA as a long-overlooked tourist destination.

But it’s also been a huge boon for the AFL, for as with the finals series, the entire gate from the round goes back to AFL House. While some of that money is distributed back to the clubs, their share is paltry compared to what the AFL makes, with the first Gather Round alone in 2023 believed to have injected $30 million into AFL coffers through ticket sales.

With the Gather Round deal expiring in SA next year, there is a consensus in the football world that it’s been such a great success that it should be held here as a matter of course.

One of the biggest champions of a permanent SA fixture is Mr Melbourne himself, Eddie McGuire, who said last week that rather than shopping it around, the AFL should simply announce it’s here to stay.

McGuire’s arguments are threefold – SA does the event so well, it’s a deserved recognition of our football ancestry, and our state is so footy-mad and perfectly placed geographically that we will always attract huge crowds of local and interstate fans.

So why would you hold it anywhere else?

Tassie isn’t big enough and you can’t even get direct flights there.

The drive from London to Moscow is 600km shorter than the drive from Melbourne to Perth. And Margaret River is three hours’ away from Perth, meaning the state has none of the appeal of a compact place like SA where the Hills, Barossa and Southern Vales are less than an hour from the CBD.

As for the NRL heartlands of Brisbane or Sydney holding it, forget about it.

A quick story. In 2005 I became editor of the Sydney Daily Telegraph, the same year the Sydney Swans/South Melbourne were looking to break their 72-year premiership drought.

The Tele is the rugby league bible and its coverage of AFL back then had been scant at best. But when the Swans beat Geelong in that amazing final where Nick Davis kicked four goals in the final quarter, I put them on the front page the next day. When they beat the Saints in the prelim to make the GF, I went all out covering the Swans through Grand Final week. As an AFL fan living in Sydney, I was more than happy to kickstart the bandwagon and hopefully win new readers in the process.

There was a near revolt from my good mates in the sports department, who regarded my coverage as an insult to everyone who loved league. They would have been happier if I started running positive opinion pieces about Osama bin Laden than endorsing the sport they disparaged as “aerial ping-pong”.

When the Swans beat West Coast in the Granny, one of the league reporters came and showed me a letter he’d received from a reader which was simply a folded up copy of that day’s paper angrily scrawled with the words: “Get this Victorian shit off the front of my paper”.

So to repeat the question asked previously, why would you want to hold it anywhere else? It’s increasingly looking like the answer to that is: Money.