Participation: Football, AFL and Rugby League Compared
Football has the largest participation base in Australia and the smallest professional crowds. The three codes compared on the same terms, honestly.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Culture19 min read
- Football participants 2025
- About 1.93 million on Football Australia's own census
- Rugby league participants 2025
- 1.12 million on the NRL's count, of which 207,744 were club-registered
- Aussie rules participants 2025
- A record 625,000, up from 580,000 in 2024
- Registered outdoor footballers
- 640,170 in 2024, the closest thing to a like-for-like club figure
- AFL average crowd 2025
- 38,227 across 216 matches, a total of 8,257,027
- NRL average crowd 2025
- 21,418 across 213 matches, a total of 4,390,791
- A-League Men average crowd
- 8,879 across 163 matches in 2025-26, a total of 1,447,247
- Football community clubs
- More than 3,300 nationally, of which 2,219 take registrations
Football is the most played team sport in Australia and the least watched of the three football codes at professional level. Both halves of that sentence are true, both are supported by published figures, and the distance between them is the single most argued-about fact in Australian sport.
The scale of the gap is easy to state. Football Australia counted about 1.93 million participants in 2025. The A-League Men averaged 8,879 people per match in 2025-26. The AFL, on a participation base roughly a third the size on the broadest reading, averaged 38,227. Rugby league, whose club-registered playing numbers are a third of football's, averaged 21,418.
This page does three things. It sets out what each code actually counts, because the headline numbers are not measuring the same object. It gives the closest available like-for-like comparison. And it explains, without either the defensiveness or the triumphalism that usually attaches to this subject, why a sport can be enormous at the bottom and thin at the top for twenty years without either fact changing much.
The headline numbers as each code publishes them
For 2025, the three governing bodies published these totals.
Football Australia: about 1.93 million participants, across club football, schools, futsal, social formats and inclusion programmes, supported by more than 3,300 community clubs. Women and girls reached 231,435.
The NRL: 1.12 million total participants, up about 7 per cent. Within that, club participation reached a record 207,744 registered participants, and 829,347 children engaged with the game through school programmes.
The AFL: a record 625,000 participants, up about 7 per cent from 580,000 in 2024, with Victoria above 250,000, Queensland above 91,000, Western Australia about 90,000, New South Wales and the ACT combined above 78,000, South Australia 70,500 and Tasmania 24,000. Women and girls made up nearly a quarter of the total.
Read as a leaderboard, that is football first, rugby league second, Australian rules third. Read carefully, it is three organisations counting three different things.
What each code actually counts
The NRL is the clearest illustration, because it publishes both halves of its own number. Of 1.12 million participants, 207,744 were registered club players and 829,347 were children reached through school programmes. A school programme touchpoint is a child who did a rugby league unit in physical education, or attended a clinic, or played a modified game in a schools carnival. It is a real activity and a legitimate thing to invest in. It is not the same as registering with a club, paying a fee and playing a season.
Football Australia's census is broad in a different way. It counts outdoor club football, futsal, social competitions such as five-a-side and walking football, school programmes and inclusion programmes. The 2024 report, which published more granular figures than the 2025 release, recorded 1,911,539 total participants, of whom 640,170 were in outdoor football and 174,846 in social football. That leaves roughly 1.1 million in schools, futsal, inclusion and other categories.
The AFL's headline is narrower. Its 625,000 covers club participation together with Auskick and Superkick, the introductory programmes that run through schools and clubs. The AFL reports school-based reach separately rather than folding it into the top-line number, which makes its figure look more conservative. That is a presentational choice rather than a moral one, and the AFL is perfectly willing to quote its school reach when the argument calls for it.
None of these approaches is fraudulent. Each is defensible internally. The problem is that they are published as though they belong on the same axis, and they do not.
- 1930000Football total participants
- 1120000Rugby league total participants
- 625000Aussie rules total participants
- 207744Rugby league club-registered
- 3300Football community clubs
Headline figures from each governing body's own 2025 participation reporting. The three totals use different definitions of a participant and are not directly comparable. The club figure shown for rugby league is the registered club subset of its 1.12 million total.
The like-for-like number
If you want one comparison that is close to fair, use registered club players in each code's main outdoor competition format.
On that basis: football 640,170 outdoor participants in 2024, Australian rules 625,000 club and Auskick participants in 2025, rugby league 207,744 club-registered participants in 2025.
Two things fall out of that immediately. The first is that football's lead over Australian rules on club players is real but narrow, nothing like the three-to-one implied by the headline totals. The second is that football's lead over rugby league on club players is enormous, roughly three to one, and is understated by the headline comparison rather than overstated.
This still is not perfect. The AFL number includes Auskick, which is closer to a school programme than to club competition. The football number includes some outdoor social formats. Neither body publishes a clean "registered in a graded club competition, played more than one match" figure, which is what an honest comparison would need. But the direction is clear enough: football is the largest club sport in the country by a modest margin over Australian rules, and by a very large margin over rugby league.
What AusPlay says, and why it disagrees with everyone
AusPlay is the Australian Sports Commission's national tracking survey and is the only source that applies the same method to every sport. It works by surveying the population rather than counting registrations, which means it picks up informal play the codes never see and misses some people who are on a club register but did not play.
Its recent estimates put Australian rules at 641,390 players and rugby league at 531,323, the latter including touch football and Oztag, both of which are administratively separate from the NRL's club game and are enormously popular in their own right. For children, AusPlay has repeatedly found swimming first at around 23 per cent participation and soccer a clear second at around 14 per cent, ahead of gymnastics and basketball, with both football codes further back.
AusPlay's numbers will not match any federation's census and should not be expected to. It is a different instrument measuring a different thing. Where it is genuinely useful is in cross-code comparison, because at least the same questionnaire was asked about every sport. Where it is misused is when a single AusPlay line is quoted as settling an argument the survey was never designed to settle.
| Measure | Football | Australian rules | Rugby league |
|---|---|---|---|
| Headline participants, 2025 | About 1.93 million | 625,000 | 1.12 million |
| Registered club players | 640,170 (2024, outdoor) | 625,000 incl. Auskick | 207,744 |
| School programme reach | Counted within total | Reported separately | 829,347 |
| AusPlay estimate | Second-most played by children | 641,390 | 531,323 incl. touch and Oztag |
| Top league average crowd | 8,879 (A-League Men, 2025-26) | 38,227 (AFL, 2025) | 21,418 (NRL, 2025) |
| Top league total attendance | 1,447,247 | 8,257,027 | 4,390,791 |
| Clubs in top league | 12 | 18 | 17 |
| Club memberships | Far below both | About 1.32 million (2024) | About 400,000 (2024, club data) |
The other side of the ledger
Attendance is where the comparison stops being ambiguous. These are completed-season totals, counted the same way by every competition, and there is no definitional argument available.
The 2025 AFL season: 216 matches, 8,257,027 total attendance, 38,227 average. The 2025 NRL season: 213 matches, 4,390,791 total, 21,418 average, the highest aggregate and average regular-season crowds in the history of first-grade rugby league. The 2025-26 A-League Men season: 163 matches, 1,447,247 total, 8,879 average.
Per match, the AFL draws more than four times what the A-League draws and the NRL more than twice. Across a season the AFL draws almost six times as many people through the gate.
Reason one: the base is overwhelmingly junior
The largest single explanation is the least discussed. Football's participation base is dominated by children, more so than either rival code's.
Football is the default first organised team sport for a very large number of Australian children. It is cheap to set up, needs almost no equipment, has minimal contact at junior level, is played in every suburb, and is the sport most likely to be chosen by families with no inherited attachment to an Australian code. AusPlay has soccer as the second most common organised activity for Australian children behind swimming.
A nine-year-old registered in MiniRoos is a participant. She is not a ticket buyer, a member, or a broadcast audience. Whether she becomes one depends on what happens between roughly thirteen and twenty, and Australian football loses a great deal of that cohort, both from playing and from following. The teenage attrition problem is covered in more detail on the women's football participation page, and it is not unique to football, but football's pyramid is unusually wide at the bottom and unusually narrow at the top.
The AFL's base is smaller but its retention into adult supporterhood in Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania is close to total, because in those states following an AFL club is a civic default rather than a choice.
Reason two: the people who love football already have a league
This is the reason Australian football administrators dislike most and cannot argue with.
A large share of Australians who genuinely love football, watch it weekly, own shirts, know the transfer market and can talk for an hour about a back four, follow the Premier League, LaLiga, Serie A or a national league connected to their family's origin. The A-League is not competing with the AFL for those people's attention. It is competing with Arsenal, Liverpool, Real Madrid and whichever club a grandparent supported in Zagreb, Athens or Naples.
No other Australian code has this problem, because no other code has a global version of itself available on television at a higher standard. The AFL and NRL are the best competitions in their sports on earth. The A-League is somewhere around the fortieth-best league in its sport, and its own supporters know it. That is a structural ceiling on domestic club attention that has nothing to do with marketing, stadium quality or the quality of the football itself.
Reason three: the 2004 rebuild cut the league off from its own crowd
When the National Soccer League was wound up and the A-League designed from a blank sheet, the new competition deliberately excluded the migrant-community clubs that had built and funded Australian football for fifty years. New names, new colours, one club per market, no ethnic association.
The commercial reasoning is set out at length on the Crawford Report and National Soccer League pages. The participation consequence is simple: the A-League began in 2005 with no inherited support at all. Every other major Australian club competition rests on clubs with a century of family attachment. Collingwood, South Sydney, Port Adelaide and Newtown were supported by people whose grandparents supported them. Melbourne Victory was twenty years old this season.
Meanwhile the displaced clubs kept their supporters. South Melbourne, Sydney Olympic, Marconi, Preston Lions, Sydney United 58 and Wollongong Wolves still exist, still draw crowds in their own communities, and are now foundation clubs of the Australian Championship. In some cities the best-supported football club is not the A-League one. That is a participation base that never transferred, and it is covered at migrant clubs and Australian football's origins.
Reason four: the summer calendar
The A-League plays October to May because the winter weekends were already taken. It was the only clear air available in 2004 and it costs the competition a great deal.
Summer means competing with the Big Bash and the cricket season for the casual audience. It means the opening rounds are played in Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane in heat that forces cooling breaks and visibly lowers the standard. It means school holidays fall in the middle of the season rather than at its edges. And it means the domestic competition is running while European football is also running, so the football audience is choosing between them rather than being handed the A-League as the only option.
A junior player registered in a winter community competition finishes her season in September and the A-League starts in October. There is no shared calendar between the participation base and the professional competition, which is precisely the opposite of how the AFL and NRL work, where a junior season and a professional season run in parallel and reinforce one another every weekend.
Reason five: broadcast instability
The A-League has changed broadcaster more often than any other major Australian competition. It has been on pay television, on free-to-air, on a mix, and is currently split between Network 10 and Paramount+ with a small number of free-to-air matches each round.
The AFL and NRL built habitual audiences over decades of stable free-to-air placement, at consistent times, on channels people already had. Habit is the thing that converts a passing interest into a weekly appointment, and habit is precisely what a competition cannot build if the channel, the platform and the kick-off times move every few years. A parent driving a child to Saturday morning football does not thereby learn when the A-League is on.
Reason six: fewer clubs, fewer matches, fewer markets
The A-League fields twelve clubs and played 163 matches in 2025-26. The AFL fields eighteen and played 216. The NRL fields seventeen and played 213.
Two of the A-League's twelve are in New Zealand. That leaves ten Australian clubs against eighteen AFL clubs and sixteen Australian NRL clubs. There are large Australian population centres with no A-League club at all, and there is no promotion route by which a well-supported second-tier club can reach the top division and bring its crowd with it. The closed-licence structure is discussed at promotion and relegation in Australian football.
Fewer clubs in fewer places means fewer people for whom attending is convenient, which caps total attendance before any question of appeal arises. Auckland FC's arrival in 2024-25 is the clean demonstration: adding one genuinely large new market immediately added a club averaging above 18,000, which is more than double the league average.
Reason seven: membership and the club as institution
The AFL reported about 1.32 million club memberships across the competition in 2024. The NRL does not publish a consolidated figure but club-level data suggests slightly over 400,000. A-League club memberships are far below both.
Membership is not just a revenue line. It is the mechanism by which an Australian sporting club becomes an institution that people belong to rather than a product they consume. An AFL member has a seat, a vote at the annual general meeting, a scarf, and a relationship that survives a bad decade. That structure is a hundred years old in Victoria and it is the reason AFL crowds are resilient to poor on-field performance in a way A-League crowds are not.
Football has 3,300 community clubs and very deep institutional attachment at that level. What it does not have is a mechanism connecting a community club to a professional one. A junior at a suburban club in Sydney's west has no formal relationship with any A-League club at all.
- Club-registered participants207744
- Children reached via school programmes829347
The NRL's own published breakdown for 2025. The two figures together make up the 1.12 million headline. Club-registered participants pay fees and play a season; school programme figures count children reached through in-school and clinic activity.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Club-registered participants | 207744 |
| Children reached via school programmes | 829347 |
Where football's participation does convert
The national teams. When Australian football puts the Socceroos or the Matildas in front of the country, the participation base shows up in numbers no domestic code can match.
The Matildas' 2023 World Cup semi-final against England drew 75,784 to Stadium Australia and reached 11.15 million Australians on television, the highest-rating programme on record since the OzTAM measurement system began in 2001, displacing Cathy Freeman's 400 metres from 2000. That is not a football audience. That is the entire country, and it exists because football's participation base is national in a way no other code's is.
The lesson administrators keep drawing from this is that the A-League should be able to convert the same audience. The lesson the evidence actually supports is narrower: the participation base converts for events of national significance, at the highest available standard, on free-to-air television, a handful of times per cycle. It does not convert for a weekly club competition it regards as several tiers below the football it already watches. The 2023 World Cup legacy page follows what did and did not carry over.
The women's leagues complicate the picture
If participation drove crowds, the AFLW would be enormous, because Australian rules has grown female participation to nearly a quarter of 625,000 and has the full institutional weight of eighteen established clubs behind it. The 2025 AFLW season averaged 2,713 per match. A-League Women averaged 1,985 in 2025-26 and NRLW averaged 6,929 in 2025, the last helped considerably by double-header scheduling with men's fixtures.
All three women's competitions draw small crowds relative to their participation bases, and the code with by far the largest institutional advantage does not draw the largest crowds. That is useful evidence against the simple story that football's crowd problem is a football problem. It is at least partly a general problem about how slowly spectator habits form, and how much they depend on scheduling, venue and broadcast placement rather than on how many people play.
Geography: the only code played everywhere
Football's genuine structural advantage is that it is played at scale in every state and territory. Australian rules dominates Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory. Rugby league dominates New South Wales and Queensland. The boundary between them is the Barassi Line, examined at rugby league versus AFL in Australia.
Football is on both sides of that line and in the places neither code reaches properly. That is why its national participation total leads, and it is also why its participation is diffuse. Australian rules can convert 250,000 Victorian participants into ten Melbourne clubs and a stadium economy because they are all in one city. Football's 640,000 registered players are spread across every postcode in the country, and spread participation is much harder to monetise than concentrated participation.
Cost, and what a participant is worth
A registered footballer typically pays a club fee, a state federation levy and a national governing body levy, plus kit and in some competitions a share of referee costs. Season totals commonly run into the hundreds of dollars per child, and football's fees are frequently higher than Australian rules fees in the same suburb, a subject covered at football registration fees in Australia.
That produces an awkward economics. Football extracts more revenue per participant at community level than the other codes and less revenue per participant at professional level, because participation fees flow to clubs and federations while broadcast and matchday money flows to the professional competitions. The AFL and NRL redistribute large professional revenues down into their community game. Football's community game substantially funds itself, and then Football Australia asks government to fund the facilities.
That is the argument behind Football Australia's request for a coordinated 3 billion dollar infrastructure programme, including 1.56 billion for community changerooms, 851 million for lighting and 391 million for pitch drainage and weather resilience, against an estimated national infrastructure gap of about 2.8 billion dollars. The claim underneath it is simple: the largest participation base in the country receives the smallest share of public sports infrastructure. The stadium half of that argument is set out at Australian football's rectangular stadium problem, and the community half bites hardest outside the capitals, as football in regional Australia sets out.
- Outdoor club football33.5%
- Social football9.1%
- Schools, futsal and inclusion57.4%
Based on the 2024 national participation report, which published more granular categories than the 2025 release. Total 1,911,539. The outdoor and social figures are as published; the third slice is the residual covering school programmes, futsal and inclusion programmes and is derived by subtraction rather than published directly.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Outdoor club football | 640170 |
| Social football | 174846 |
| Schools, futsal and inclusion | 1096523 |
How the codes use these numbers politically
Participation figures in Australia are not neutral statistics. They are the primary evidence in three arguments: community facility funding, broadcast rights negotiation, and the recurring public contest over which code is the national sport.
That is why the counting boundaries are drawn where they are, why every code announced a record in 2025, and why nobody has proposed a common audited definition. A common definition would produce a single leaderboard, and at least two of the three parties would rank lower on it than they currently claim.
The honest position is that the three codes are strongest on different measures and that no single measure settles the question. Football leads on participation. The AFL leads on attendance, membership and revenue. Rugby league leads on broadcast audience and is the dominant code in Australia's two largest states. Each of those is a real fact about a real strength, and each is routinely presented as though it decided the whole argument.
What participation actually buys
It is worth being precise about what a large participation base does and does not deliver.
It delivers a talent pool, which is why Australia produces exportable footballers in numbers disproportionate to the A-League's standing, and why the Socceroos and Matildas are competitive at levels the domestic league would not suggest. It delivers political weight in facility funding arguments. It delivers a national footprint that survives the failure of individual professional clubs.
It does not deliver crowds, memberships, broadcast value or club revenue, and twenty years of A-League history is a long enough run to say that with confidence. Those are built by scheduling, stadium quality, broadcast stability, competitive relevance and inherited attachment, and Australian football has been weak on most of them for most of that period.
Common misconceptions
That 1.93 million people play club football in Australia. They do not. About 640,000 are registered in outdoor football; the rest of the total is schools, futsal, social formats and inclusion programmes, all of which Football Australia counts openly and none of which are club competition.
That the AFL's participation number is small because Australian rules is a smaller sport. The AFL's number is smaller partly because it is drawn more narrowly. On registered club players the two codes are close.
That rugby league's 1.12 million makes it the second-largest participation sport. Roughly three-quarters of that figure is school programme reach. Its club-registered figure of 207,744 is the third-largest of the three codes by a wide margin.
That A-League crowds are low because Australians do not like football. Roughly two million Australians engage with football every year and the country produced the highest-rating television programme in modern measurement with a football match. The problem is the specific product, not the sport.
That fixing the A-League would automatically convert participation into attendance. Every structural improvement helps at the margin, but the ceiling set by a global game available at a higher standard on the same television is not removable by any Australian administrative decision.
That participation is the same argument as which code is biggest. It is one measure among several, and it is the only one football leads.
For the competition itself, see the A-League Men explained and A-League crowds: the numbers and the trend. For what sits beneath it, see the National Premier Leagues and the Australian Championship. For the governing body making the funding case, see Football Australia explained, and for the wider Australian picture, the Australia hub and the sports overview.