Port Adelaide’s Chinese adventure could replicate North Melbourne’s experience with Friday Night Football
PORT Adelaide should not expect to feast on its Chinese fortune cookie alone as its Shanghai backer looks for more AFL clubs.
Michelangelo Rucci
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PORT Adelaide’s Chinese backer Guo Jie Gui is unlike most AFL fans. Everyone else falls in love with a club more so than the game.
The Shanghai billionaire loves the sport.
“When I first saw this game, I was attracted to (Australian football) in my heart,” the tycoon said in Adelaide on Tuesday at the announcement of the second Power-Gold Coast game for Shanghai in May.
A week earlier, Gui told Port Adelaide chief executive Keith Thomas in Shanghai that China cannot be for the Power alone.
Port Adelaide went to China to get away from the crowd of 18 AFL clubs chasing the same limited corporate dollar in the Australian economy. Playing an AFL game — for premiership points, a breakthrough made in Shanghai this year — was Gui’s wish rather than Port Adelaide’s agenda.
And now that Gui wants more, there is a tone of history repeating itself. North Melbourne in the mid-1980s gambled on Friday Night Football to get away from the cluttered Saturday afternoon VFL program.
Now everyone wants to be on the primetime Friday night stage with unchallenged national television coverage. China could go the same way for Port Adelaide. The Power, as the Kangaroos did, could be building a stage for other AFL clubs, particularly when the AFL Commission is keen on China.
Thomas took Gui’s love for the game — more so than Port Adelaide — without a zealous wish to protect as a monopoly the Power’s new-found fortune cookie on the old Silk Road.
“Other clubs will be inspired to join us in China,” Thomas said. “This is not a Port Adelaide project. This is an AFL project.
“And China is a big country — a big market.”
It is remarkable that the cynicism that came with trying to put on this year’s Power-Suns premiership game in Shanghai has become replaced with grand plans for AFL expansion in China.
As successful as the AFLW was in its inaugural season this year, there are still major challenges for the national women’s league — particularly with infrastructure, coaching development and talent identification.
But there already is the discussion of taking the AFLW to China.
“Makes sense,” says Thomas. “If you are going to take a new game to China, make sure it is for both boys and girls.”
AFLX — the seven-a-side, high-speed shortened game — fits on the international stage by its need for rectangular fields. It is easier to take AFLX to China than full-blown AFL matches when there are many soccer pitches to inherit.
There certainly is no lack of money to underwrite Australian football in China. This was the very point behind Port Adelaide’s entry to the world’s No. 2 economy while carrying mission statements of building cultural and diplomatic bridges between China and Australia.
But as North Melbourne learned with Friday Night Football, there is no chance of China remaining Port Adelaide’s alone. Certainly Gui wants more than one AFL club for his Shanghai parties.
“I hope more (AFL) clubs become interested in China,” he said on Montefiore Hill on Tuesday.
michelangelo.rucci@news.com.au
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