Australian Football Exchange

It’s easy to think of Australian business pretty much the same way that we think about footballs. Yes balls, plural.

Australia is unique in that we have four major codes of football and a gaggle of minor codes that we never hear about; gridiron, gaelic football, and a bunch even more obscure codes that you can see on wiki.

Most countries only have one code of major interest.

Oddly, Australian men are quite conversant with all four of our major codes, or generally at least three of the four. They might have one which is their pet project but generally speaking they will pay attention to what is going in in all four codes.

Back to the ASX Top 20. Here is a list of the types of companies that make up the ASX Top 20.

Finance, Insurance and Banks made up 8 of the ASX 20.

Resources make up 6 of the ASX 20.

Mixed Industrials and telcos make up 3 of the ASX 20.

Shops & Malls make up 3 of the ASX 20

In football terms we have:

Finance, Insurance and Banks is the biggie and in football terms this is the AFL.

Resources correlates to Rugby League; is the second largest code and from time to time seems to get near ascendency, always to slip back somehow.

Mixed Industrials is Soccer. It’s made up of anyone and anything and always seemingly chucking a phoenix rising. It has no chance in the global scheme of things because our market is too small for local teams to ever have enough scale to compete internationally.

Shops and Malls is Rugby Union. A smaller code that loves cartel-like behaviour and is always at threat from foreign equivalents and other codes with more money.

The Australian tech sector is represented by our local American Football code. Never heard of it? Well it exists – Wiki tells me that Gridiron was first played in Australia as a league in 1983. There are 2,500 registered players and 73 clubs. That seems just about right for our tech sector.