Australian Football; could it have spread to the US (given the chance?)?

Yeah, still around but not liking this new format for YA ..... AT ALL !

Good spotting on the article BTW. The big difference between sport in USA & Aust is the private ownership of American Clubs V the Assn / Club Inc. status of AFL. We will have a real opportunity of making substantial inroads in the near future when the American Dollar loses its place as world reserve currency and the USA economy crashes. First thing to go will be the sporting economy $$ followed by a lot of owner / franchisees and recovery may take 10-15 years as it did after WW2 when Great Britain lost the Pound Sterling as world reserve currency to the USA. It will be a great opportunity IMO.

I'm not a great judge of this since I generally enjoy most sports and can pick up the rules and follow them with ease because I love competitiveness and the fine points of different games.

Anyway, probably not. I feel that Australian Rules Football is probably one of the hardest games in the world to pick up and follow if you aren't raised with it from a young age. There's a lot of complexities to the game and it's simply less enticing to others when a sport in the market already exists so to go into America and be competing against American Football, Basketball and Hockey all at once isn't going to warrant sustained and large scale growth. Also there's no hole in the landscape of sport in America to give it any relevant place, you'd need American football to be outlawed for there to be sufficient desire for contact sport on grass. Even then you lack the infrastructure (oval grounds) to provide the vehicle for exposure.

I think there are millions of dollars for the AFL in American television. Only issue is being on a channel that the American sports fans can see. Wise guy Andrew had it only a channel nobody could see a few years ago. Now it is on Fox Soccer Plus (another idiotic decision) and a few games on FS2 (fuel) channel that I get to see 1 game a week in Kansas. Maybe 1 percent of America understands the game, only because they have never seen anything but the goal umpires before the change out of the white coats and hats. I think it would catch on, a great game. I have been to Oz 6 times, 38 AFL matches--that is what I think about it. We are Geelong!!