AFL fans who watched last night’s TV news saw Kangaroos players, on a pre-season training camp at an army base, attacking the enemy with bayonettes attached to their mock assault rifles. After a good stabbing, the hostile timber cutout would spring back into position ready for the next player to kill.

Meanwhile in Melbourne, Kangaroos supporters are readying to fight plans to move their beloved club to the Gold Coast. They won’t be dressed in army fatigues nor will their weapon of choice be a sharpened steel blade, but their enemy, the AFL, is as impervious to their hostility as those wooden bad guys in the bush.

The protest is emblematic of what once passed for the heart and soul of football. That loyalty is why we pay ever-larger amounts to watch our boys run around each week. It’s why we put up with home games played away. It’s why we accept those humiliating away stripes. It’s why we stay tuned for the full 22 weeks even when our club is out of finals contention. And it’s part of a narrative for each of us that reaches back years, decades. But it’s also an anachronism. Footy today operates on a completely different set of values. If that’s news to some Kangaroos supporters, don’t shoot the messenger.

At the risk of appearing callous, here’s an inadequate list of what doesn’t matter to the AFL in moving the Kangaroos to the Gold Coast:

  • the 140 year history of your club;
  • your attendance at games regardless of the weather or the hostility of the home team’s supporters;
  • the money you’ve spent on memberships and beanies and scarves;
  • the stories you now tell your kids and grandkids about Malcolm Blight, Ross Glendenning, and Keith Greig after seeing them do miraculous things in the mud at Moorabbin or Princes Park;
  • that feeling of walking down a side street toward the MCG before a game with hundreds of other North supporters, all dressed in blue and white, waving flags and scarves;
  • the shinboner spirit.

The fact is, Andrew Demetriou can’t run a billion dollar sport on sentimentality. What businessman can? Of course it has a place, as we see fleetingly on grand final day, but his job is now about growth. It’s about providing a return on the investments of the AFL’s corporate partners, and the AFL can’t deliver growth to its partners (chiefly the television stations) without finding new markets, like the Gold Coast.

Unfortunately for North Melbourne fans, your department is the one getting restructured this time, but you are not the first to suffer through it.

Those of you planning to attend the protest concert organised by You Am I frontman Tim Rogers, go. Cry. Feel indignant. Shout in unison with your fellow supporters just like you do on winter weekends. Wear that old woolen jumper with the blue and white VFL badge over the heart.

Wear the cap that Glenn Archer signed. Tell the person standing next to you about grand final week in 1999, when Wayne Carey high-fived you as he jogged off the training track. But don’t imagine it’s going to save your club.

While pure of heart (to borrow a Tony Abbott-ism), the collective loyalty and passion Kangaroos supporters for their club now holds less bargaining power with the AFL than its own corporate responsibilities.

That’s the AFL 2007-style, and you, the supporters, are the ones who need to adjust. Take it from an ex-Fitzroy supporter.