If sporting administrations were a Year 3 class, the AFL would be the ADHD kid who traded his Ritalin for Wizz Fizz.
The notoriously fidgety league makes a habit of endlessly tinkering with the game whenever the season isn’t happening – the sport’s executive version of saying “whenever Poochie isn’t on screen, all the other characters should be asking ‘Where’s Poochie?’”
We’re talking extremely slight rule changes, structural re-alignments… hell, even weird-ass truncated trial versions of the sport bizarrely played on a rectangular field. The works.
But this latest quibble, under a week out from the start of the 2018 Men’s AFL Season, is the weirdest and most head-scratchy of the bunch.
Reports circulating through footy media suggests that the AFL has ordered every club’s theme song, bar two, be re-recorded for use in the upcoming season.
In a developing story, AFL Clubs have a directive to use new theme songs. One’s I’ve listened to so far sound ok. Little younger. It’ll create debate!
— Tom Browne (@TomBrowne7) March 16, 2018
The songs, played before games as teams enter stadiums and after games in celebration of a win, are a jaunty, if not entirely curious, tradition of the AFL and it’s one that makes it one of the more unique leagues in world sport.
Interestingly enough, all Victorian sides – by and large – have theme songs recorded and performed by the footy famous Fable Singers; a sound that’ll be intimately familiar to any ardent fan of the game.
The only two teams not instructed to re-record their themes are Gold Coast and Greater Western Sydney, both of whom have theme songs that were relatively recently recorded.
It remains to be seen how exactly the new versions of the songs will differ from the traditional renditions, but tinkering with tradition is a fraught task at the best of times.
The AFL has yet to officially comment on the matter at this time.
