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This site was created to provide information to footy fans that you can't get easily elsewhere, a home for North American fans of the sport, and a forum for discussion of Australian football (or "Aussie Rules") by fans of the sport. Our goal is to provide for interaction between fans on footy in a civil and fun environment without "flames" or other obnoxious messages. We welcome questions about footy (who, what, where, why, how, rules, etc.), television coverage, goings on in the sport, footy outside Australia, this web site, and more.
Effective immediately. Paat Kelly has been appointed President of AFANA. Mr. Kelly has already assumed his duties and is now responsible for the day to day management of AFANA. (Ed. note: Press release is linked at the bottom of this article.)
Last year, the organization announced that 2016 would be the last year co-founder and chairman, Rob de Santos, would lead the organization on a daily basis. Mr. Kelly has been part of the management team for over a decade and previously headed up the marketing and publicity for the organization as well as serving as a photo-journalist. Mr. de Santos said: "He understands our mission and the organization and will be a great leader of our effort to bring footy to North America. AFANA is in very capable hands."
(This is the first in a series of long form editorials on the state of footy on TV in 2016 and the future outlook.) A long time ago in TV world far, far away, a small group of passionate AFL fans managed to get the AFL and ESPN together and save the weekly highlights coverage on US and Canadian television. It was an early and largely unnoticed accomplishment of the internet age as e-mail and newsgroups were the media used to launch coordinated action. Looking back, it was an amazing achievement in 1995-1996. It also was the catalyst for the formation of AFANA.
Over the past 20 years we’ve evolved from lobbying by fans to more sophisticated ways of attempting to drive the AFL’s TV strategy (with varying degrees of success). We’ve successfully helped steer them to new TV homes for the sport when old ones blew up on us. We’ve succeeded in keeping it on the air for 21 seasons without fail. Now, we have to decide what we do in 2016 and beyond. The answers for 1996 and 2006 no longer are the right ones. The TV market has changed. The fan base has changed. The AFL is far more media savvy than before and nominally, has an “international” strategy (although fans and marketing seem not to be a big part of that). We must change our tactics and strategy to deal with the AFL, TV networks, and fan development to match the world as it is in 2016.
Let’s take a look at the US landscape today (we’ll deal with Canada and Mexico in a future article):
Fellow AFANAns,
A new number is on my calendar and it repeats every day: 2016. AFANA is in its 21st year and it will, by all indications, be a year of change. ...
This will be my last full year of daily involvement with AFANA as 2017 will bring ... my relocation to another part of the globe.
Today, Fox Soccer Plus dropped coverage of the pre-game for the Grand Final.
Coverage now starts at 12:30 AM US EDT, just before the first bounce. We were surprised by this change and so far, we have no explanation from Fox regarding the change but we have requested an explanation.
Regardless of the reasons given, this is very disappointing. We strongly urge all fans to contact Fox and the AFL and let them know we want the full coverage restored.
Contact Fox and the AFL via any means you can. Web, Facebook, Twitter, Phone, Fax, whatever you can use. Time is of the essence with the match only 72 hours away.
Here are a few links to get you started. If you find others, reply to us at aussiefb [at) afana [ dot } com and let us know.
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Editorial and commentary from the Chairman of AFANA.