State’s football seeking support

NEW polling shows the impact the world game has on Tasmania and now Football Tasmania wants its fair share of the pie.

With the Taskforce releasing its business case for a Tasmanian AFL team, FT says it is only fair it receives the same backing for an ALeague team especially given new data. Polling conducted by EMRS shows 20 per cent of Tasmanian households were directly involved in local football matches, up from 17 per cent in 2018.

This comes after Sport Australia’s AusPlay survey showed with 38,000 participants, or 7.4 per cent of Tasmanians, football was the state’s biggest team sport.

FT chief executive Matt Bulkeley welcomed the state’s push for an AFL team.

“But what we have also said is we would welcome and anticipate that same level of support for any ALeague ambition and we are working very closely with government in that regard,” Bulkeley said.

“It does add value to the pathway, having that highlevel product for people to watch and be able to consume close to home.

“As a code we haven’t asked for money or what we want to achieve around the A-League. At the moment our strategy is working very hard on making sure Tasmania has the best possible case to convince the people that make the decision there should be a team from Tasmania.”

But while football might have the biggest participation, it doesn’t translate to Tasmanians as their favourite sport. In the AFL business case, a survey undertaken by Gemba showed only 10 per cent of Tasmanians said football was their favourite sport, behind Australian rules (30 per cent), cricket (18), tennis (18), motorsports (15), swimming (14) and basketball (12).

Bulkeley said having an A-League, W-League and youth league team would help turn participants into rusted-on fans.

“It is not necessarily a primary objective of FT because we don’t have a high-profile team,” he said. “We would love to have one or at least support one, but certainly as a sport across the country that is very much an ambition or an objective is to convert well over one million participants or as many of them as possible to be fans.”

The last A-League expansion saw Tasmania’s bid, backed by millionaire Melbourne businessman Harry Stamoulis, fail to make the top-10 shortlist. But Bulkeley said with the running of the A-League handed over from Football Federation Australia to club owners, Tasmania was right in the running to gain a spot with further expansion on the horizon.