Rugby league will always be the biggest game in town, but the Swans are easily the city’s biggest sporting team. | Vince Rugari
, but hundreds of others who don’t make the top level, yet still go on to strengthen grassroots leagues with their superior skills, understanding and stronger bond with the game.
“You’re basically investing into that fundamental exposure in this club in Sydney ... that is only possible because the AFL, as a central organisation, have always been so strategic about wanting to promote northern expansion in a way that other codes haven’t been anywhere near.”Fujak contends Sydney’s territorial gains are also the product of good timing and misfortune from other codes, which helps explain why the Swans and the sport are so popular in the northern and eastern suburbs.
Fujak argues that repeated off-field scandals involving NRL players have also turned off some followers, particularly women and white-collar workers. “I don’t have the data myself, but I’ve had these conversations with the guys at the SCG Trust – you get given a ticket when you’re a member, and you use your barcode to get in and out. They can look at the ticket scanning to see how people’s behaviours have changed over time. And the growth of the Swans was very much the people who had previously been scanning in to watch rugby union.”
Any fan who makes the trek from Central Station to the SCG will walk past a mural of club legend Adam Goodes – and during the racism saga that saw him booed into retirement, supporting the Swans, or at the very least wearing a guernsey with the number 37 on it, became a sort of political statement of its own.
None of these trends look like ceasing any time soon. In fact, there is every reason to think that, from here, the Swans will only get bigger – limited, in some ways, by the 48,000-capacity of the SCG, which they generally go close to filling for big games, although that doesn’t mean their broader support base cannot also grow.
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