Paul Asked Why Football Wasn’t on the News

Why Isn’t Football on the News?

Paul messaged me last night with a simple question.

“Why was there no football on the news tonight?”

It came at the end of a day when football had been everywhere.

Junior football had just kicked off for the season. Youth matches were continuing across Tasmania. Fields were full from morning until late afternoon. Children pulled on boots for their first games of the year. Parents stood on sidelines in coats and scarves. Coaches encouraged. Referees officiated. Volunteers set up grounds, packed away goals, lined fields and opened canteens.

Across the state, football was alive in every direction.

And yet, if you switched on the nightly news, you would have little sense that thousands of Tasmanians had just spent their day inside the game.

I had to make a small confession in reply.

In our house, we barely watch free-to-air television anymore.

Like many people now, we get our news elsewhere, through digital platforms, social media, independent outlets, ABC radio and the networks built around our own interests.

And that may be the irony: football may have outgrown television long before television noticed.

Because while football no longer depends on television to survive, television still helps decide which sports are treated as culturally important.

Football has already solved the visibility problem for itself

The first truth is this: football is no longer waiting for mainstream media to validate it.

The game has built its own media ecosystem.

NPL clubs now run increasingly sophisticated communications operations. Many have photographers, videographers, livestream crews, social media managers and match-day commentators. They produce player announcements, interviews, highlights packages, match reports and behind-the-scenes stories.

That did not happen by accident.

It happened because football learned that if it wanted its stories told consistently, it would have to tell them itself.

In many ways, mainstream television is no longer where football’s real audience lives.

For younger audiences especially, legitimacy is no longer granted by appearing on the six o’clock news. It is granted by digital visibility in the spaces where they already consume sport.

The storytellers who matter most are often outside mainstream media

Football’s media world is bigger than clubs alone.

Matthew Rhodes saw the gap in Tasmanian football reporting and created Tassie Football Central, which has become indispensable to the weekly life of the game.

Week after week it records the rhythms of Tasmanian football:
previews, results, ladders, transfers, youth competitions, grassroots developments.

And we must not forget Walter Pless.

Walter’s match reports, interviews and chronicling of Tasmanian football over many years are of enormous historical importance.

If television captures moments, Walter Pless preserves football’s collective memory.

Long after a nightly bulletin has disappeared into the ether, Walter’s written record remains.

That is not simply reporting.
That is preservation.

People care about stories close to home

One thing football understands better than mainstream media is this:

People like to read about people they know.

That is why local football storytelling resonates so strongly.

When I write interviews, they are often among the most widely read pieces I publish, not because they feature famous people, but because they tell stories about familiar lives:
the coach everyone recognises,
the volunteer who has quietly served for decades,
the young player emerging through the ranks.

These are stories rooted in community.

And they matter because they reflect us back to ourselves.

Mainstream television, by its nature, rarely captures that intimacy well.

The issue is not hostility. It is outdated media assumptions

This is important to say clearly.

Tasmanian editors are not anti-football.

Most are working within shrinking newsroom budgets, shorter bulletins, fewer camera crews and inherited assumptions about what audiences expect sport to look like.

And those assumptions are old.

Commercial television still defaults heavily toward legacy hierarchies, where AFL remains familiar, easy and institutionally embedded.

Football loses in that system not because it lacks relevance, but because legacy media structures are slow to recognise change.

The same pattern runs across the wider media landscape

This is not just a television issue.

Tasmania’s newspapers and radio outlets follow similar patterns.

Football appears episodically, cup finals, controversy, national team moments, major announcements, but rarely with the consistency given to sports long embedded in mainstream editorial culture.

That is the real problem.

The absence of football from the news is not a reflection of football’s place in Tasmanian life.

It is a reflection of how slowly traditional media adapts to cultural reality.

Should we still care?

This is where the contradiction becomes interesting.

Football may no longer need television.

But television still influences how institutions perceive importance.

Visibility affects:

• sponsorship recognition,

• political attention,

• infrastructure debates,

• funding decisions,

• public legitimacy.

If a sport is rarely visible in mainstream media, it becomes easier to overlook when resources are allocated.

Media invisibility can still become structural invisibility.

That part has not changed.

Perhaps the real story is not football’s absence

Paul’s question began as a simple observation.

But perhaps the real story is not that football is missing from the nightly news.

Perhaps the real story is that Tasmania’s media institutions still underestimate where football now lives.

Because football has not been waiting.

It has built its own parallel world of storytelling, livestreaming, reporting and community memory.

And in doing so, it has quietly created something remarkable:

A sport that no longer needs permission to matter.

The question now is whether mainstream media is willing to catch up.

Recently I posted a photograph of Ken Morton and Brett Pullen together, and it drew a remarkable amount of attention.

That response was not accidental.

These are two recognisable Tasmanian football figures, from different clubs, different pathways, different football histories, yet both deeply familiar to the wider football community.

People stopped because they knew who they were.

That is the point.

Local football is built on relationships, memory and recognition.
The stories that resonate most are often not about elite stars or national headlines, but about the people whose names and faces are woven into the everyday life of the game.

That is something mainstream television rarely understands well, but football people understand instinctively.