Rugby League and the AFL: How Australia Splits
Australia is divided between rugby league and Australian rules by an invisible border called the Barassi Line. Where it runs and why it formed.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Culture18 min read
- Term coined
- Ian Turner, 1978 Ron Barassi Memorial Lecture
- Line runs from
- Cape Howe on the NSW-Victoria coast to Arnhem Land
- Population either side
- Roughly half and half
- Grassroots clubs across the line
- 15 percent of Australian rules clubs, 13 percent of rugby league clubs
- AFL 2025 average crowd
- 38,227
- NRL 2026 average crowd
- About 21,000
- AFL club membership 2025
- 1,363,437
- AFL spending on expansion clubs
- About 220 million dollars over a decade
Australia is the only country in the world with an invisible line drawn across it that tells you which football your neighbours watch. Stand on one side of it and the winter game is 18 players on an oval kicking a ball worth six points through the middle sticks. Stand on the other side and it is 13 players on a rectangle, six tackles and a handover. The line has a name, the Barassi Line, and it has barely moved in 150 years despite both codes spending enormous sums trying to shift it.
The short version, if you want it now: rugby league owns New South Wales and Queensland, which is the east coast from about Eden northwards. Australian rules owns Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory, plus the western third of New South Wales. The border runs roughly from Cape Howe on the New South Wales-Victoria coast, through the Canberra region, out to Broken Hill, north along the Queensland western border, and into Arnhem Land. It splits the population almost exactly in half.
This page is about rugby league against Australian rules — two entirely different sports competing for the same country. If what you want is the difference between the two rugby codes, that is a separate argument and it is covered in our comparison of rugby league and rugby union. Nothing below is about union.
The line and the man it is named after
The historian Ian Turner coined the phrase in 1978, delivering the Ron Barassi Memorial Lecture at Monash University. The lecture series honoured Ron Barassi Sr, a Melbourne footballer who enlisted in the Second World War and was killed at Tobruk. The line was named for his son, Ron Barassi Jr, a Melbourne and Carlton champion, a premiership coach, and the most persistent public advocate for taking Australian rules national. Barassi Jr spent decades arguing that a truly national league would one day include clubs from New South Wales and Queensland. He turned out to be right about the competition and wrong about the culture.
Turner offered the line partly seriously and partly as a joke, which is often how the best descriptions of a country arrive. He noticed something everyone already knew and nobody had drawn: that you could put a pencil on a map and separate the two footballs with a single stroke. The joke has outlived him, and it is now used without irony by demographers, sports administrators, journalists and the codes themselves.
Two sets of goalposts stand on Federation Way between Corowa and Wahgunyah on the New South Wales-Victoria border, installed in 2005 to mark the line physically. Barassi Jr visited in October 2012 for the unveiling of new signage. It is the only sporting border in the world with a monument.
- 1978Year the Barassi Line was named
- 1500Australian rules clubs mapped nationally
- 860Rugby league clubs mapped nationally
- 38227AFL average crowd, 2025
- 21000NRL average crowd, 2026
- 1363437AFL club members, 2025
Figures are drawn from published season summaries for 2025 and 2026 and from the 2022 grassroots club mapping project. Club counts are proportional estimates rather than a census, and the two competitions play different numbers of matches in different sized stadiums, so the crowd averages are not a like-for-like comparison of popularity.
Why the split happened: the 1850s and 1860s did it
The divide is not about temperament, climate or class, whatever people tell you in pubs. It is about the order in which things were written down.
Melbourne got there first. In 1858 and 1859, cricketers looking for a way to stay fit through winter began playing variants of the football they remembered from English public schools, and the Melbourne Football Club codified a set of laws. Those laws became Victorian rules and then Australian rules. Crucially, they were written in a colony that was booming on gold money, with a large population and the resources to build a competition immediately.
The code travelled. It reached Sydney in 1865 and Brisbane in 1866. It did not take. Both colonies were already looking to English rugby, and in 1870 the Wallaroo club formalised rugby in Sydney. In 1874 the Southern Rugby Football Union adopted a rule that its member clubs could only play matches against other members, which made forming a new Australian rules club in Sydney close to pointless — you would have nobody to play. That single administrative decision, made by a body that no longer exists, is arguably the most consequential thing that ever happened to Australian football geography.
Queensland closed the door in the 1880s. In 1884 the colony's largest schools voted to switch to rugby, and Australian rules in Queensland collapsed by the end of that decade. Schools decide these things, because schools decide what twelve-year-olds play, and twelve-year-olds become the adults who take their own children to a club.
By 1890 the map was set: rugby unopposed through New South Wales and Queensland, Australian rules unopposed everywhere else. Federation in 1901 was too late to change it. The 1907-08 split that created rugby league, covered in detail on our page on the 1908 rugby league split in Australia, did not shift the border at all — it simply replaced rugby union with rugby league as the dominant code inside the same territory. The origins of Australian rules football and the origins of rugby league in Australia are covered separately, and read together they explain why neither code was ever going to lose its half.
- 1858-59, Melbourne codifiesCricketers write down rules for a winter game, giving one colony a native code with clubs and grounds before anyone else has one.
- 1865-66, the code travels and failsAustralian rules reaches Sydney and Brisbane but arrives into colonies already committed to English rugby, with no institutional support.
- 1870-74, Sydney locks the doorThe Wallaroo club formalises rugby, and the Southern Rugby Football Union rules that members may only play other members, making new Australian rules clubs unviable.
- 1884, Queensland's schools voteThe colony's largest schools switch to rugby, and Australian rules in Queensland collapses within a decade.
- 1890s onwards, entrenchmentEach code builds schools, junior systems, grounds and newspapers inside its own territory, so a child inherits a code rather than choosing one.
- 1907-08, the league splitRugby league replaces rugby union as the dominant northern code without moving the border by a single town.
A sequence of the decisions that fixed the map, not a measurement. Each step made the next one more likely and the reversal of the previous one harder.
What the two games actually are
If you have only watched one, the other will not look like a variation. They are unrelated sports that happen to share a season and a country.
| Rugby league | Australian rules | |
|---|---|---|
| Players a side | 13 | 18, plus interchange |
| Field | Rectangle, about 100m by 68m | Oval, typically 135-185m long |
| Match length | Two halves of 40 minutes | Four quarters of 20 minutes plus time on |
| Possession | Six tackles, then handover | Unlimited, contested continuously |
| Offside | Yes, defenders must retreat 10m | None |
| Main scoring play | Try, 4 points | Goal, 6 points |
| Other scores | Conversion 2, penalty goal 2, field goal 1 | Behind, 1 point |
| Typical winning score | High 20s | 80 to 100 |
| Ball movement | Passed backwards, kicked strategically | Kicked and handballed in any direction |
| Home ground shape | Rectangular stadium | Cricket oval or purpose-built oval |
| Peak event | State of Origin and the grand final | The grand final at the MCG |
The consequence that matters for the divide is the last row but one. Australian rules needs an oval, which in practice means a cricket ground. Rugby league needs a rectangle. A town that builds one cannot easily host the other, and stadium infrastructure is close to permanent. That is why the line survives even where the population changes: you can move people across a border far more easily than you can move a ground. The MCG and Suncorp Stadium are the two cathedrals, and neither would work for the other code without compromise.
If you need the actual laws rather than the comparison, the beginner explainers are separate: AFL rules explained and NRL rules explained.
The grassroots map is the real evidence
Attendance and television numbers describe the professional competitions. The club map describes the country.
A 2022 Wikidata mapping project by Brett Tweedie plotted community football clubs across Australia and produced the clearest picture anyone has of where each code physically exists. It identified roughly 1,500 Australian rules clubs and about 860 rugby league clubs. Of those, only around 15 percent of the Australian rules clubs and 13 percent of the rugby league clubs sat on the wrong side of the line.
The asymmetry inside that finding is the interesting part. Where Australian rules is dominant, it is overwhelmingly dominant — rugby league makes up at most around 15 percent of the two-code total in Australian rules states. Where rugby league is dominant, Australian rules still holds a noticeably larger minority share. In plain terms, Melbourne and Perth are closed to rugby league in a way that Sydney and Brisbane are not closed to Australian rules. That difference explains why the AFL's expansion projects have produced something and the NRL's, outside Melbourne, have mostly not.
The AFL's invasion of league country
The AFL made the decision the NRL did not: that a national competition had to hold the largest cities regardless of cost.
South Melbourne, financially broken, relocated to Sydney at the end of 1981 and played as the Sydney Swans from 1982. It was the first serious Australian rules presence in a rugby league capital in a century and it was not immediately welcome. The Brisbane Bears were granted a licence in 1986 and debuted in 1987, the first privately owned club in the competition's history, in a state that had voted rugby out of Australian rules in 1884 and never revisited the decision. The Bears merged with Fitzroy to become the Brisbane Lions and won three consecutive premierships in 2001, 2002 and 2003, which is the single most successful piece of code expansion in Australian sporting history.
The second wave came at the start of the 2010s. The Gold Coast Suns entered in 2011 and Greater Western Sydney in 2012, both into markets the AFL had identified as growth corridors rather than existing football territory. Greater Western Sydney signed a ten-year, 23 million dollar arrangement with the ACT Government to play matches in Canberra. Across the following decade the AFL distributed roughly 220 million dollars to its expansion clubs, and the Gold Coast alone has received annual assistance around the 25 million dollar mark.
The results are genuinely mixed. Television audiences in New South Wales and Queensland have grown. Both Sydney clubs and both Queensland clubs are viable. The Swans are a major Sydney sporting institution. But the club map barely moved, and that is the measure the AFL actually cared about. You cannot buy a junior system; you can only fund one and wait a generation.
The full club landscapes are covered separately in the guides to the Victorian AFL clubs and the non-Victorian AFL clubs, and the competition's history from the VFL onwards is set out in AFL and VFL history.
The NRL's attempts in the other direction
Rugby league's crossings of the line have been fewer, later and less well funded.
The Super League war of the mid 1990s produced Perth and Adelaide clubs almost as a byproduct of two competitions racing to claim territory. Neither survived the settlement. Both were launched into markets with no junior base, no history and no reason to care, and when the money stopped they stopped.
The Melbourne Storm are the exception and the proof. Entering in 1998, the club has won multiple premierships, built a real supporter base, established a settled home at AAMI Park and produced players who came through Victorian junior rugby league rather than being imported. Melbourne draws around 21,000 a match, which is a respectable NRL figure and a modest one by Melbourne football standards, where an ordinary AFL fixture can draw double that. The Storm succeeded because they were good for two decades in a city that respects winning, not because Melbourne converted.
The current push is the largest since the war. A Perth club carrying the revived North Sydney Bears name enters in 2027, and a Papua New Guinea team follows in 2028. Perth is a straightforward attempt to cross the line into Australian rules country. Papua New Guinea is the opposite: an expansion into the one nation on earth where rugby league is the undisputed national sport. The reasoning behind both, and the entry fees and conditions attached, sit on our page on NRL expansion and new clubs.
- AFL total attendance8.25
- NRL total attendance4.39
Total season attendance across home and away and finals matches, in millions. The AFL plays fewer matches in larger stadiums, so this compares the total size of each stadium business rather than the popularity of each code per fixture.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| AFL total attendance | 8.25 |
| NRL total attendance | 4.39 |
The scoreboard: who is actually bigger
The AFL is the larger stadium and membership business by a distance that is not seriously contested.
In 2025 the AFL drew 8,253,649 across home and away and finals matches, the second highest aggregate in its history, at an average of 38,227 a match. Club membership hit an all-time record of 1,363,437, up 3.26 percent on the previous record of 1,319,687 set in 2024, with 14 of the 18 clubs setting their own club record. The NRL in the same year drew about 4.39 million at an average around 21,400, its own best figures on record, with membership across the competition somewhere near 400,000.
That is roughly triple the membership and close to double the total attendance. But the comparison flatters the AFL in ways worth naming. Australian rules is played in stadiums built for cricket, which means the smallest AFL venue is larger than most NRL venues. Melbourne alone has ten AFL clubs sharing a city of five million, which concentrates demand into a small number of very large fixtures. And the AFL's grand final is played at a 100,000-seat ground it effectively controls.
Television tells a different story. Rugby league is consistently competitive on total viewership and does particularly well in the 16-39 bracket and in digital engagement, partly because it plays more matches and partly because State of Origin delivers three of the largest television audiences in the Australian year, every year, without fail. The NRL's broadcast position is covered in NRL broadcast rights and the AFL's in AFL broadcast rights. If you looked only at the money each code extracts per match broadcast, the gap between them is much narrower than the crowd figures suggest.
The contested places
The line is clean on a map and messy on the ground. Four places matter.
Canberra is the genuine coin flip. Grassroots studies have found the two codes close to level in the ACT, which does not happen anywhere else. The territory sits almost exactly on the line, it was built by public servants who moved there from every state, and it has no inherited code. The Canberra Raiders are the dominant professional presence and their membership growth has outpaced the AFL's local base, but Canberra remains the only Australian city where the question is live.
The Riverina and the Murray are where Australian rules has actually gained ground. Southern New South Wales towns along the Murray look to Melbourne rather than Sydney, and always have. In 1946 rugby league authorities persuaded the New South Wales government to ban Australian rules in public schools, an extraordinary intervention aimed squarely at driving the code out of the Riverina. It did not work permanently. AFL academy programmes in the region have since pushed the effective line further north of the border, and the Riverina now produces a disproportionate number of elite Australian rules players.
Broken Hill is the clearest anomaly on the whole map. It is a New South Wales town that plays Australian rules, because its miners, capital and railway all came from South Australia rather than from Sydney. It demonstrates the underlying rule: the code follows the migration route, not the state boundary.
The NSW far south coast is where the line is currently bending. Tathra, a rugby league town for its whole existence, had Australian rules introduced by a publican in 1983 to open ridicule — locals called it aerial ping-pong — and now hosts Australian rules on a ground that used to be a rugby league field. The Sapphire Coast reported around 1,100 registered players and 7 percent participation growth in a recent season, driven substantially by Victorians who moved north and by women's football bringing whole families into clubs. Locals in the area now argue openly that the line should be redrawn further north.
| Place | Nominally | Actually | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Broken Hill, NSW | League country | Australian rules | Rail and migration ran to Adelaide, not Sydney |
| Riverina, NSW | League country | Contested, trending Australian rules | Murray towns face Melbourne; AFL academies invested |
| Canberra, ACT | On the line | Close to even at grassroots | No inherited code, national public service population |
| Far south coast, NSW | League country | Shifting to Australian rules | Victorian migration and women's football growth |
| Darwin, NT | Beyond the line | Strongly Australian rules | Post-war settlement from southern states |
| Gold Coast, Qld | League country | League, with a funded AFL club | Population growth without junior conversion |
Why 150 years of money has not moved it
Both codes have now spent enormous sums trying to cross the line, and the honest assessment is that the line is close to immovable by direct purchase. Three reasons.
The first is that codes are inherited, not chosen. A child plays what their parent played, at the club their parent played at, on the ground their parent's club has used for eighty years. A professional club arriving in a new city can win a television audience within a decade but cannot manufacture the second generation, and the second generation is the whole game.
The second is infrastructure. Ovals and rectangles are not interchangeable, and community grounds are owned by councils with no reason to reconfigure them. Every existing ground in a town is a vote for the incumbent code.
The third is that the professional competition is only the visible tip. Below the AFL sit the state leagues and hundreds of country leagues; below the NRL sit the Queensland Cup, the New South Wales Cup and the Group system described in our guide to country rugby league. Those structures employ people, hold property and organise social life in their towns. They do not surrender territory because a national body has bought a stadium naming right in the capital.
Where the line has moved, it has moved through population change rather than marketing. Victorians retiring to the New South Wales south coast brought their code with them. That is a slow, organic, unfundable process, and it is the only one that has ever worked.
Where the two codes meet
For all the separation, there are moments when the divide collapses.
State of Origin is the biggest. It is the only rugby league event that regularly commands national attention on the wrong side of the line, and the Melbourne matches are the proof: 91,671 at the MCG in 2026 for a New South Wales against Queensland fixture in a city that has no stake in either team. Australian rules does not have an equivalent — the state-of-origin concept died there in the 1990s — which is one of the few structural advantages rugby league holds. The event itself is explained in State of Origin explained, and its history in State of Origin history.
Grand final weekend is the other. The AFL and NRL deciders sit within a fortnight of each other at the end of September, and both are national television events regardless of where you live. The details of each are in the AFL grand final guide and the NRL grand final guide.
And there is a shared calendar problem that neither code discusses much: both compete against cricket for the summer, against football for junior registrations, and increasingly against each other for the same broadcast dollar. The divide is a truce over territory, not over money.
What the line means if you live here or are visiting
Practically, the line tells you what conversation you are walking into.
In Sydney, Newcastle, Wollongong, the Central Coast, Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Townsville and Cairns, the default winter conversation is rugby league. It is on the front of the newspaper, not the back. The clubs are listed in our NRL clubs guide, and if you want to go, the practical detail is in attending an NRL game.
In Melbourne, Geelong, Adelaide, Perth, Hobart and Darwin, the default is Australian rules, and in Melbourne the intensity is at a level rugby league does not match anywhere. The guide to attending an AFL game covers what that is like.
In Canberra you can have either conversation. On the far south coast and along the Murray you should ask first.
The territory on the rugby league side of the line — how far it extends, which towns anchor it, and why it hugs the coast — is the subject of our page on rugby league's heartland. The crowd figures behind the professional competition are broken down in NRL crowds and attendance.
Is the divide going anywhere
Probably not, but the pressure on it is real and it comes from an unexpected direction.
Neither code is now the biggest participation sport in either half of the country. Football, the round-ball kind, has more registered junior players than either in most states, and it is not constrained by ground shape or by geography. The Barassi Line describes which of two Australian codes is dominant in a region. It says nothing about whether either will still be dominant against everything else in forty years.
Within the divide itself, the movement is one-directional and slow. Australian rules has taken ground on the far south coast and in the Riverina, driven by migration and by the growth of women's football, which brought entire families into clubs in places where the men's game had never landed. Rugby league has taken essentially no permanent territory since 1998, and its 2027 and 2028 expansions are a bet that Perth and Port Moresby will behave differently from Perth in 1995 and Adelaide in 1995.
What has not changed at all is the map's basic shape. Fifty years after Ian Turner drew it as a joke, roughly 85 percent of the clubs in each code still sit on their own side of a line nobody surveyed, nobody enforces and nobody can move. That is the most Australian fact in Australian sport.
More on the codes and the calendar sits in the Australia hub, the sports section and the rugby pages.