The AFL’s India Gambit: Bold Vision or Familiar Folly?

When a football initiative arrives flanked by two sitting prime ministers, you are obliged to take it seriously — even if you have heard variations of the same speech before. The AFL’s commitment to establishing Australian rules football in India carries genuine diplomatic heft, but the history of the code’s international ambitions counsels a degree of sober reflection before the bunting goes up.

The Political Scaffolding Is Genuinely Different This Time

Let us begin with what is legitimately new here. AFL chief executive Andrew Dillon standing alongside Anthony Albanese and visiting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is not the sort of backdrop you manufacture with a press release and a hopeful travel budget. When a bilateral sporting initiative is woven into the fabric of a state visit, it acquires a layer of institutional seriousness that the AFL’s previous offshore adventures largely lacked.

The framing matters, too. This is explicitly positioned as a people-to-people initiative — a mechanism for deepening cultural and diplomatic ties between Australia and India — rather than a naked attempt to sell broadcast rights into a new market. That is a more defensible foundation. It also means the AFL is not alone in having skin in the game; government departments, trade bodies and both nations’ diplomatic networks share a stake in seeing something meaningful emerge.

Whether that scaffolding translates into genuine grassroots traction in a country of 1.4 billion people who already have a perfectly adequate national obsession in cricket is, of course, an entirely separate question.

A Brief and Instructive History of the AFL’s Global Ambitions

The AFL has been here before, in spirit if not in geography. The International Cup — contested every four years by nations ranging from Papua New Guinea to Ireland to the United States — is a wonderful advertisement for the code’s reach but has never translated into a meaningful expansion of the professional competition’s footprint. Nauru plays Australian rules football with genuine enthusiasm. Nauru has not produced an AFL draftee who went on to a long career at the top level.

The Jock McHale Medal, the various Pacific outreach programs, the flirtations with China — including a pre-season game in Shanghai that briefly felt like a genuine strategic pivot — all carried the hallmarks of ambition without sufficient follow-through. The Shanghai experiment, in particular, deserves to be studied carefully by whoever is drawing up the India playbook. It demonstrated that novelty and spectacle can attract attention, but that attention does not automatically convert into administrators, coaches, local competitions, or junior pathways. When the spectacle ends, you need structure waiting to receive the interest it generated.

The AFL, to its credit, appears to have absorbed some of those lessons. The language around the India initiative emphasises building from the ground up — community competitions, school programs, local coaching development — rather than parachuting a marquee event into a major city and declaring victory.

The Structural Challenge No Amount of Diplomacy Resolves

Here is the fundamental difficulty, and it is worth stating plainly: Australian rules football is a complicated, physically demanding sport that requires significant infrastructure — oval grounds, the right shaped ball, qualified coaches, functioning local associations — before it can properly take root. Cricket needs a pitch and some stumps. Football of the round-ball variety needs a patch of grass and twenty-two pairs of boots. Our game asks considerably more of any community that wants to play it properly.

India’s sporting infrastructure, while growing rapidly, is not yet organised around the oval-ground model. The administrative work requried to establish even a functioning metropolitan competition is considerable, and that work is almost entirely invisible to the prime ministers smiling for cameras. It falls to local volunteers, AFL International staff, and whoever the governing body partners with on the ground to do the unglamorous heavy lifting.

There is also the question of athlete pathways. The AFL’s most successful international development stories — think the Caucasian and Polynesian communities in Australia, or the ongoing development of Indigenous talent through programs like Next Chapter — work because they connect young athletes to a clear pathway into the elite competition. It is not obvious yet what the equivalent pathway looks like for an eighteen-year-old in Mumbai or Delhi who turns out to have the athleticism and instincts to play at the top level.

What Success Would Actually Look Like

It is worth resisting the temptation to define success as an Indian-born player running out for a club in the opening rounds of the 2030 season. That is a headline, not a strategy. Genuine success over a ten-to-fifteen-year horizon might look something like this: a functioning school competition in two or three major Indian cities, a small but self-sustaining administrative structure that does not depend entirely on AFL funding, and enough engagement from the broader Indian-Australian diaspora community to create cultural bridges between the two countries through the game.

That is a quieter kind of success, but it is the kind that lasts. The AFL has a reasonable model in Papua New Guinea — where the game has deep roots, genuine community ownership, and a functioning national competition — even if the pathway to elite Australian football remains narrow. Building something comparable in India would be a genuine achievement worth celebrating.

The Commission’s Role and the Governance Questions Worth Asking

From a governance perspective, the Adelaide supporter in me is mildly alert to any major discretionary spend by the Commission that is not transparently connected to the competitive and financial health of the existing eighteen clubs. International development is genuinely worthwhile, but the AFL’s member clubs — particularly the ones in South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland that have historically felt the gravitational pull of Melbourne-centric decision making — have a legitimate interest in understanding how resources are being allocated.

Dillon and the Commission owe the clubs a clear-eyed accounting of what the India commitment will cost, over what timeframe, and against what measurable benchmarks. That is not cynicism — it is responsible stewardship. If the initiative is as well-structured as the diplomatic fanfare suggests, it should be able to withstand that level of scrutiny without difficulty.

Cautious Optimism Is the Appropriate Register

None of this is to say the India initiative is misconceived. On balance, I think the AFL is doing the right thing, and doing it with more sophistication than it has managed in some previous offshore ventures. The diplomatic foundation is real, the stated commitment to grassroots development rather than spectacle is encouraging, and the sheer scale of India’s population means that even marginal penetration of the sporting culture would represent a meaningful outcome for the code.

But the Australian rules football community has cheered for international expansion announcements before, and it has watched those announcements quietly fade when the cameras moved on and the hard work turned out to be harder than anticipated. The game deserves to grow. India would be a remarkable frontier for it to reach. The AFL’s task now is to demonstrate — through patient, sustained, properly-resourced work on the ground — that this time the ambition is matched by the follow-through.

Two prime ministers at the launch is a promising start. It is what happens in the years after the handshakes that will determine whether this goes down as the AFL’s most significant international initiative, or simply the most expensive photo opportunity in the code’s history of optimistic global dreaming.