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Remove items from your saved list<\/a> to add more.<\/p>\n AAA<\/p>\n Kos Samaras has spent much of his time lately explaining why Pauline Hanson\u2019s One Nation has eaten into the voting bases of the major parties, identifying the demographic and social change behind the drift away from the Coalition and ALP and the fragmenting of the old order.<\/p>\n On Monday, Samaras made comparisons between the forces that have shaped Australian politics and the challenges facing the AFL and the clubs, and of the differences between Generation Z and Generation X in outlooks, and what this might mean for the AFL and the code.<\/p>\n Samaras, a former political operative for the ALP in Victoria who founded the polling\/research company RedBridge, told club chief executives and AFL brass that, like the ALP and the Coalition, they can no longer count on what he called \u201cinherited loyalty\u201d.<\/p>\n Samaras offered the examples of those who, such as himself, who had grown up with allegiance to a particular political party (Labor in his case) and footy team.<\/p>\n Today, he posited, when one in three Australians had been born overseas, inherited loyalty to a team\/party, wasn\u2019t assured.<\/p>\n Further, Generation Z were \u201cdigital nomads\u201d and the AFL and the clubs were competing for attention, not only against other sports, like soccer and cricket, but with everything they could access digitally.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n These nomads, for example, could follow European soccer or the NBA and American sports in preference to the local codes (AFL, NRL, cricket, soccer).<\/p>\n Samaras told the gathering for the CEOs conference on the Gold Coast that they needed to earn the loyalty of these fans. They couldn\u2019t assume they would simply follow the game (or a club) automatically. This masthead gained an account of the pollster\u2019s briefing from two sources who attended it.<\/p>\n Related Article Another message from the pollster was that community distrust of institutions was a global phenomenon, driven by demographic and economic change.<\/p>\n Distrust of the AFL head office, though, is hardly novel; it has been part of the game for decades, pre-dating the digital revolution.<\/p>\n The background to the Samaras briefing is that the AFL is confronting the reality that many recent immigrants and multicultural communities are not natural followers of Australian football<\/a>, at local or AFL level, which contrasts with the Italian, Greek, Balkan and middle-Eastern post-war migrant groups, who used footy as a passage for assimilation.<\/p>\n The competition with soccer \u2013 and the global game\u2019s more obvious connection to multicultural Australia \u2013 was highlighted. Samaras used the example of Tarneit, in Melbourne\u2019s expanding western sprawl, where soccer was well ahead of Australian rules in appeal to the newest Australians.<\/p>\n Related Article Naturally, the comparison with soccer is one that has more relevance when the Socceroos are front and centre<\/a> in the World Cup finals<\/a>, and holding their own with a team that is replete with players from myriad and visibly immigrant backgrounds<\/a>, such as Nestory Irankunda<\/a>, who scored the critical first goal against Turkey.<\/p>\n The collision of two ideas of Australia \u2013 the \u201cmonocultural\u201d version Pauline Hanson spruiked at the National Press Club<\/a> \u2013 and that multicultural paradigm that the Socceroos implicitly represent, was on display in the days following that first World Cup game.<\/p>\n The AFL\u2019s decision to bring Samaras to explain the changing face of Australia demonstrated a level of anxiety from the nation\u2019s richest sporting body about their struggle to connect with many of the most recent arrivals. The generational differences \u2013 such as his observation that Gen X was the most hooked on footy \u2013 added a demographic layer.<\/p>\n The push to increase their presence in India<\/a> was on the agenda Monday, too, when AFL executive Walter Lee outlined the league\u2019s ambition to gain a toehold in India, which had the highest participation of the dozens of other countries where the game is played, despite minimal investment.<\/p>\n Related Article The more optimistic comment from Samaras about the game was that, as the custodian of the code that was uniquely Australian, the AFL could still make a strong pitch to new Australians who wanted to assimilate.<\/p>\n He reckoned sport had the capacity to connect people \u2013 to bring them across divides \u2013 when politics was fragmenting the citizenry.<\/p>\n The overall take-out, however, was evidently that the game had to adapt to the new Australia, rather than the reverse.<\/p>\n Keep up to date with the best AFL coverage in the country. Sign up for the Real Footy newsletter<\/a>.<\/p>\n Save<\/p>\n You have reached your maximum number of saved items.<\/p>\n Remove items from your saved list<\/a> to add more.<\/p>\n![\"Kos](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/98165ee4ad4ce5c01d309b268f0ff7a687ba81cb.jpeg\")
Kos Samaras runs polling\/research firm RedBridge.Wayne Taylor<\/p>\n![\"Balraj](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/4f24f06dfcbbd8e868e389137ebb3caf2e75e7f9.jpeg\")
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Jake Niall<\/a> is a Walkley award-winning sports journalist and chief AFL writer for The Age.Connect via X<\/a> or email<\/a>.From our partners<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Save You have reached your maximum number of saved items. Remove items from your saved list to add…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":753196,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[560],"tags":[638,64,63,55,639,85],"class_list":["post-753316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-afl","tag-afl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-australian-football-league","tag-australianfootballleague","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=753316"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753316\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/753196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=753316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=753316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=753316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}