Every year come AFL grand final week, we hear the sad stories about devoted club members who watch their team play every week until the game that matters most. This week, you're going to hear a lot more than usual.
The Western Bulldogs are in their first grand final for 55 years. Their fan base consists of arguably the game's most long-suffering set of supporters. Most of whom still won't actually get the chance to watch their beloved Doggies win their first flag since 1954.
The MCG holds just on 100,000 people. The Bulldogs have around 39,500 members and their grand final opponent Sydney 56,500. Yet each club will be given an allocation of only 15,000 tickets. That's just 38 per cent of the Bulldogs' members. And only about a quarter of the Swans'.
Sure, not everyone can get to arguably the most popular sporting occasion on the calendar. But what always galls most, and particularly now given the romance attached to the Bulldogs' fairytale, is who can.
While many Doggies fans who've been watching their team 50-odd years and never got to see them at the "big dance" miss out, there's still a spot for those with enough money and the lust to be seen at "an event".
On Sunday, AFL event office corporate packages costing anywhere from $1610 to as much as $2590 were still available to anyone, regardless of whether they were an AFL club member.
And not long after the Bulldogs had won their stunning preliminary final victory over Greater Western Sydney, Etihad Stadium was contacting its mailing list offering packages costing between $990 and $1400.
Smells a little off, doesn't it?
It's fair to suggest the club of the western suburbs probably has a greater share of members and supporters from lower socio-economic groups. Those sorts of amounts are simply beyond their means, regardless of their passion for their club. And that's simply wrong.
It's no easy task for the AFL to satisfy the demands of all its various interest groups, who on grand final day include competing clubs, the other clubs, AFL members, Melbourne Cricket Club members and the corporate sector.
It has also at least attempted in recent years to address the inequities of the grand final ticket carve-up, hiving off some more tickets to members of the clubs actually involved in the grand final.
But last year, the break up was still 30,000 to competing clubs Hawthorn and West Coast, 25,000 to MCC members, 21,000 to AFL members, 7000 to other clubs and 17,000 to the corporates and other stakeholders.
The legitimacy of that 17,000 is highly questionable. Corporate backers already get a pretty good bang for their buck. Is this not one occasion where the AFL could insist that there's a fundamental principle involved of allowing paid-up, passionate members of the grand final clubs to have a decent chance of getting there to see their team?
The AFL Fans' Association continues, rightly, to bang on about this issue, and has now launched an online petition calling for competing club members to be allocated at least 50,000 tickets on grand final day.
It also makes this very valid comparison. In England, another code of football's showpiece event, the FA Cup final, played at the 90,000-capacity Wembley, allocates just on 57,500 tickets to the competing clubs.
That's 64 per cent of the total allocation, and more than double the AFL's 30 per cent. And for our game's administrators, that should be an embarrassing contrast.
Romance is an essential part of our indigenous game, and there have been few football stories in memory as romantic as the Western Bulldogs making it to the grand final. No group of fans are more deserving of being there to witness it. And if Australian football truly is the game of the people, it needs to do a lot more to make sure that starts happening
