Interesting point, deeman12.For what it's worth, I've always believed that Rugby League would be the ultimate amateur sport. Union reflects much better as a professional code, particularly given the spectacle that the RWC provides. The codes got it wrong.
I must say that by any logic, Australian Football ought to be the ultimate amateur sport: it not only plays poorly on TV despite the efforts of the AFL to change the game to eliminate the wide-angle kicks that constitute the chief cause of this problem, but it also requires such a supply of land in a mild climate as is not available except in the southern and western states of Australia. When we see this logic, it is obvious that Australian Football (in the form it was before Waverley’s demise, by when it had already changed a lot) is unlikely to have the support necessary to become a major professional sport, but that it could have been played by many people (it takes more to make a team than in any other significant sport if we discount the huge substitutions in gridiron) at a lower level.
The trouble is that the outer suburbs of Melbourne and presumably Adelaide and Perth are just so noncompetitive that the very idea of competitive sport is viewed as a short-term waste of time. As Hans Hoppe once said to me, the much lower time preference of these extremely conservative outer suburbanites means they are more concerned about their and their family’s long-term future and believe competitive sport provides very short-term gain or pleasure at best. For this reason, no sport of even the suburban and amateur or semiprofessional type has been able to establish itself in the mortgage belts of Melbourne, Adelaide or Perth.
The result is that Australian Football become concentrated in the small, less conservative, working class enclaves and among businessmen who saw its potential owing to the low ticket prices (40¢ per game in 1970 I recall) as mass entertainment not found anywhere else in the world. The troubles Australian Football faces now can be traced to the emptying of the inner cities for the ultraconservative suburbs mentioned above where the culture is so noncompetitive and its ability to fulfil the role one guesses it could disappears.
The AFL is now faced with a dilemma that is unpromising to say the least: it fears losing an increasingly limited talent pool (because roofed stadiums create height requirements not found beforehand) to established, telegenic sports like basketball. Though the AFL has done better than it feared, it must still envy those sports (as well as union and league) for their international scope alone.