Two of the nation’s major sporting codes ignore the majority of Australians | David Penberthy

Sydney and Melbourne might be big, but there’s a reason 16 million Aussies choose not to live in either, writes David Penberthy.

A bleeding Tom Glover of Melbourne City is escorted from the pitch by team mates after fans stormed the pitch at Melbourne’s AAMI Park on December 17, 2022. Picture: Darrian Traynor / Getty Images

The concept of a Sydney-Melbourne rivalry has at its heart a brand of big city arrogance which holds that one of these must be the best in Australia, making the other one second best.

Sydney people insist they spend no time pondering the rivalry question, so confident are they in their own supremacy.

It’s a mindset best evidenced by one of the city’s most famous sons, Paul Keating, who reportedly quipped: “If you’re not living in Sydney, you’re camping out.”

Melburnians deny that they are insecure about the issue. Rather, they simply struggle to see how a joint as uncouth and unsophisticated as Sydney could ever dream of being superior to somewhere as classy as Melbourne.

Last time I looked, Australia had a population of about 26 million people. Of those, about five million live in Sydney and Melbourne respectively.

That means that 16 million Australians choose not to live in Sydney and Melbourne, and happily so.

It would make more sense then to talk about a Sydney-Melbourne-Rest of Australia rivalry, with the rest of Australia holding the ascendancy, a thumping a more than 60 per cent majority voting with their feet in favour of a less frazzled, more affordable, equally fun life.

It is a pity that two of Australia’s major sporting codes have been suckered into ignoring the rest of Australia to the detriment of the game they claim to love.

One of the greatest PR disasters in Australian sporting history has to be the decision by the body that runs the A-League, Australian Professional Leagues, to sell off our national soccer competition’s grand final to the NSW government for an undisclosed sum.

The decision means the grand final will be played in Sydney every year for the next three years, regardless of which of the 12 A-League clubs around the nation fares best during the season.

Confirming the code’s longstanding capacity for self-harm, the decision alienated every club in Australia and also helped cause a riot at that dreadful Melbourne Victory match

The decision was made for two reasons. Firstly and most obviously, money. Secondly, because the people who made the decision assumed the rest of the country would regard Sydney’s new (taxpayer-funded) stadium as our own equivalent of Wembley, and be buzzing with excitement about going there.

The announcement of this divisive deal was made barely a week after the Socceroos had their best-ever showing at a world cup, the future of the game in Australia looking brighter than ever before.

Confirming the code’s longstanding capacity for self-harm, the decision alienated every club in Australia and also helped cause a riot at that dreadful Melbourne Victory match, providing ammo for this great game’s detractors who delight in inflating any instance of soccer violence.

At least the Sydney A-League grand final deal was predicated on a Super Bowl-style determination to rotate the fixture around in future among other Australian cities. Sure, it has at is centre a gouging, profit-driven motive for the stagers of the game, with long-suffering taxpayers being enlisted by future state governments to engage in election-eve bidding wars to win the hosting rights. But it still raises the prospect of the grand final being staged elsewhere, albeit with the downside that it will be done on the basis of which government paid the most, as opposed to which team played the best.

The most proprietorial and pig-headed sports deal in Australia remains the complete stitch up between AFL House and the Dan Andrews government to hold the AFL Grand Final at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in near perpetuity, until 2057 at the earliest. In announcing that deal – on the eve of an election – Andrews ticked every arrogant big-city box as he claimed that fans everywhere would be rejoicing over the deal.

Andrews ticked every arrogant big-city box as he claimed that fans everywhere would be rejoicing over the AFL Grand Final deal. Picture: NCA NewsWire / David Crosling

“This is for the fans – giving them the best venues, better access to the sports they love, and keeping the Grand Final where it belongs – at the MCG – for the next 40 years,” Premier Andrews said.

Fans in Melbourne might like it as it not only entrenches a home advantage for the sides, even if they’re not the best performing in that year’s competition, but also means that Victoria keeps all the fun, buzz, excitement and economic benefits of hosting the granny. Fans elsewhere think it stinks.

And the language Andrews used about sporting capitals and the home of football ignore the fact that plenty of other capitals also adore sport, and AFL has many homes. The MCG is no more the home of football than Adelaide Oval or the SCG or Optus in Perth.

The Melbourne-mindedness of those who run the national game is on full display again over their handling of the proposed AFL licence for Tasmania, which will also involve the construction of a new stadium.

The belated insistence by the AFL that Tasmanian taxpayers will need to be enlisted to fund the thing shows no knowledge of Tasmanian history or politics. It even risks killing an important and belated idea dead.

Hobart and Launceston can’t even agree on which beer to drink, let alone where this coveted stadium could go. And with a political system of proportional representation, where majority governments are rare, and both Labor and the Liberals must govern with the support of Greens, the idea of the cashed-up AFL telling a cash-poor state that its taxpayers should foot the bill is close to politically unsellable.

Barry Humphries once quipped that the best thing about Canberra was it was only a short drive from Australia. The same could be said the way these two national codes have been run by those whose gaze rarely extends beyond Melbourne’s Punt Rd and Sydney’s Moore Park precinct.