The Tasmanian government has made it very clear, they will only ever support a stand-alone state team, not some hybrid linked to an existing Melbourne team.
I don't object to another (19th) team entering the national competition and Tassie should have been brought into the comp years ago, unlike the teams in NSW and Qld, AFL is the only football code in Tasmania with wide community support.
It doesn't bother me if the expansion clubs have had a negative impact on St Kilda's chances to win a second premiership (as some suggest), I regard it as far more important for the AFL to be the only football code in the nation to be truly national, and quite enjoy watching all the other 18 teams play. Competition for the marketing dollars between national sporting codes is fierce and the AFL needs to continue to "grow the product" in order to maintain the decisive commercial advantages it has worked so hard to achieve. We need to understand that while we as supporters enjoy the simple pleasures of watching our footy team play, the AFL is predominantly a business, Very Big Business in fact, and so it's decisions have to be based entirely on protecting the bottom line. The Tasmanian government no less will have to come up with a financial package that make a new franchise successful.
Objections to the Tasmanian bid appear to me to be entirely based on self-interest by some of the club presidents. A classic example is the GC Suns, led by boofhead president Tony Cochrane, whose own team has been on constant life-suppport with countless millions of AFL handouts since its inception 13 years ago and for most of that time a basket-case, had the hide to bleat in the media this week that Tasmania would lose $12 million every year that would have to be propped up by the AFL!
What utter hypocrisy.....in the first 7 years alone the AFL spent over $100 million on the GC Suns, "stick that in your pipe and smoke it Tony, what a joke!"
and despise the Pies, the Blues, and the Injectors.
