The Australian Football League is a corporation that longs for global expansion. But in its greed and desperation, the league is undermining what makes the game great.
The Australian Football League (AFL) may be confusing for foreigners, but it is one of the nation’s most important contributions to sports. And if there was a documentary that plays to the Australian Football League’s dreams of global relevance, it’s Final Siren.
Broken into four episodes, Final Siren is meant to sell Australian rules to an international audience. Lavishly produced, with enough swearing to make a barkeep blush, Final Siren follows seven AFL players across the men’s 2025 season. Some are heading into finals (playoffs). Others seemed tortured by defeat. All are at the top of their game, and yet the prospect of failure follows them like a shadow. The mental — as well as physical — scars of this violent collision sport are foregrounded by both the players and their partners. This is undermined by seemingly scripted exchanges and banal lines of inquiry from the journalists involved.
Final Siren papers over the league’s parochial foundations, troubling labor relations, and systemic racism. As a result, the final product lacks the courage of its convictions. Rather than showcasing Australia’s cultural uniqueness to a global audience, Final Siren bears the fingerprints of corporate executives hamstrung by the cringe they feel toward the cultures they grew up with. In its desperation, the documentary evacuates the game of its meaning, working-class cultural roots, and historical complexity.
There is enough compelling material in Final Siren for those already invested in the game to stay the course for all four episodes. Others, however, may find the journey more challenging.
Local Roots
The beauty of Australian Rules football resides in its distinctive class-based relation to place — first to Melbourne, then to other parts of the Australian continent. But that has never been enough for those running the code.
Founded in 1835, almost fifty years after the British invasion and ensuing colonization of the continent, Melbourne grew slowly until gold was discovered inland in 1851. The subsequent rush for the precious metals quickly transformed Melbourne into a city of international renown. The city became famous for the riches flowing through it, as well as for leisure time won by the workers who leveraged the great demand for their labor into excellent conditions. It also became renowned for the sports that these workers played and watched in the city’s bountiful parks and gardens.
Notable among these sports was a game initially termed Melbourne Rules football. The first of the “modern” forms of football to be codified in the anglophone world in 1859, it was likely shaped by both the indigenous Gundjitmara football game Marngrook as well as English public school games. It became the only modern mass spectator sport that was intertwined with a city from the birth of that city.
As Melbourne grew, so did its football code. By the turn of the century, a mass of ardent supporters in the city sustained over twenty teams competing across two distinct elite leagues. These supporters were well-known for their intemperate working-class passions, and were pejoratively named “barrackers” for hurling abuse at umpires officiating the game.
In 1890, for example, a newspaper columnist using the pen name J. E. B. proclaimed:
For an Englishman to visit Australia, and go home without having seen an Australian football match, with its attendant multitude of ardent barrackers, would be as unintelligible as for a Colonial to see London and omit the tower. . .
For what an experience it is to be at one of the big matches! What a babel of sound! What a magnificent uproar! What a glorious cloud-shattering eruption of profanity!
The profusion of teams and passionate citizenry turned the game into Melbourne’s inner language. The ubiquity of “football-talk” was so great that in 1967 an Anti-Football League was formed to cater to those who wished to be able to converse about something else.
Yet the passionate relationship of Melbourne to its football code is not featured in Final Siren. There are no barrackers — be they grandmothers or children — speaking about what the game means to them. Instead, the documentary is part of the colonial legacy of the game, which must be unpacked.
Imperial Dreams
The development of Melbourne — and its football code — was fueled by a colonial desire to develop the perfect society for white men. Yet colonial fantasies of supremacy fostered anxieties of inferiority. For the labor movement, these anxieties led to fears of replacement by Chinese workers that resulted in systemic and structural racist discrimination. For those running Melbourne Rules football, their fears of inferiority would only be assuaged by international recognition that theirs was the greatest football code of them all.
As the Melbourne historian Graeme Davison suggested: “The habit of seeing ourselves through the eyes of the imaginary other is the most lasting mental relic of colonialism.” This habit helps explain the AFL’s quest for “applause” from colonial and global others, particularly in sports, even when playing a localized football code.
At first, league advocates desired to make the game into the primary football code in Australia. The name was changed from Melbourne Rules football to Victorian Rules football. Both options were anathema to the people of Sydney and their colony of New South Wales, which looked down at the southern upstarts in Melbourne. By the time the game was renamed Australian Rules football in the early 1900s, it was too late. Much of New South Wales and Queensland had already embraced the rugby codes.
This would not stop the Victorian Football League from later rebranding itself as the Australian Football League and spreading across the country. This expansion has been relatively successful. The AFL has become the most watched — and thus the richest — sport in Australia.
But financial success has not been enough to satisfy the expansionist yearnings of a game founded on continuing fears of inferiority. International applause is still required.
Sadly for the league, their long-standing quest for international recognition is littered with failures. A new sport combining Australian Rules football with American football was created during World War II, only to falter in the United States. The exposure of Australian Rules football at the Melbourne Olympics in 1956 did not lead to the hoped for global expansion of the code. A version intermixing AFL with Gaelic football has floundered. An expensive recent investment called AFLX lasted an embarrassing two years. Meanwhile, the AFL continues to pitch the sport as the best in the world in cringeworthy advertising campaigns.
It is this never-ending search for international approval that shapes the mediocre storytelling of Final Siren.
Telling Stories
In the 1970s, the United States’ National Football League (NFL) radically changed how it understands itself. Previously it had operated as a sports organization with binding social contracts with its loyal fans and the players. It now reimagined itself as a corporation that made and sold compelling sports stories. These changes have fueled the NFL’s development into a multibillion-dollar organization whose news cycle dominates the US calendar regardless of whether it is the preseason, regular season, or postseason.
The AFL has sought to follow suit. It has drawn on US salary cap and player draft models to encourage parity and the excitement of unpredictable contests. As a result of this corporatization, media revenues have increased dramatically, with the most recent deal for television broadcast rights totaling $3.15 billion over seven years. Although it remains dwarfed by NFL revenues, the AFL is now a multibillion-dollar industry — and players are crucial cogs in its wheel.
But what stories does it want to tell the world?
Final Siren could tell a story of intense local rivalries — centered on class divisions and Catholic-Protestant tensions — that fuel the passions of fans. It could speak to the ongoing issues of systemic racism that continue to trouble the code, as well as the nation. It could give voice to the precarity of the majority of players who cling to their careers as their lifeblood.
Instead, Final Siren’s primary story is of a national league that should already be internationally recognized. The AFL Grand Final is absurdly compared to the NFL’s Super Bowl — not as aspiration but reality. Yet, like the recurrent swearing that quickly loses its shock value, the storytelling is banal. For example, hearing players repeatedly opine “I’ve always wanted to be one of the best” adds little to a story that is literally about a competition. In cringing away from the specificity of the game and its unique culture, Final Siren has little to say about the heart and soul of a game that gives daily meaning to millions of Australians.
The most profound story the documentary tells is an unintentional one — that of the way the AFL continues to break the players whose labor it profits from.
Faustian Pacts
The men playing the game at the elite level have benefited greatly from the evolution of the AFL into a corporate behemoth. Like athletes in the United States, they have unionized and receive significant salaries. But the labor and dreams of glory are sold at the cost of losing control over their bodies and public selves.
Players’ minds and bodies are strictly regulated by an army of experts — nutritionists, sports scientists, biomechanists, and psychologists — all to meet the expectations and demands of their employer club. Players conform to processes of evaluation, surveillance, and regulation that profoundly shape their identities. As Final Siren reveals, it does not make them bulletproof. It only adds to their vulnerability.
This is the unwitting strength of Final Siren. It seeks to make a virtue out of the game’s brutality but fails. One decorated player, Fremantle’s Nat Fyfe, is declared among “the best midfielders that the game has ever seen.” But the toll on Fyfe’s body and mind has been immense. During his career, he suffered three major concussions, two broken legs and six shoulder injuries. He endured twenty-seven operations and details the depression and anxiety that accompanied his injuries. Football is all he had ever known, but his body and mind are now shot.
Fremantle are knocked out early in the playoffs and Fyfe retires a self-perceived failure, unable to celebrate his considerable achievements. Fyfe’s story is the ultimate Faustian pact. Final Siren frames his career as a noble sacrifice for unattainable on-field glory, but it has come at barbaric off-field costs. Fyfe’s partner Bridget Taylor is attuned to how his insatiable desire for football becomes self-destructive. She reminds him that there is life beyond football.
It is a devastating, compelling moment. But instead of building on such testimony, Final Siren desperately tries to package the AFL as a global commodity for digital streaming. In doing so, it strips the game of its actual significance, intricate history, and working-class origins. Indeed, for those not already interested in Australian Rules football, the actual final siren cannot come quickly enough for this awkward documentary.