Convict Shirts — The Yard / AFL Slang & Culture
What Your AFL Club Says About You
A satirical cultural audit of every AFL club and the personality type that barracks for them. Fair dinkum analysis. Mostly.
Nobody chooses their AFL club. It chooses them — inherited from a parent, assigned by postcode, or in rare and slightly suspicious cases, genuinely selected as an adult based on jersey colours. What follows is an entirely unscientific but broadly accurate assessment of what your club says about you. Take it as intended: with the same affection and brutality Australians reserve for each other generally.
Collingwood
You have an opinion about everything and you will share it whether asked or not. You believe the world is against you and you have, on balance, some evidence for this. You’ve been called passionate by people who mean exhausting.
Carlton
You remember the 1995 premiership with a clarity that suggests it happened recently. It did not happen recently. You’re patient in the way someone is patient when they’re actually just tired.
Essendon
You’ve developed a very specific tolerance for disappointment, delivered with institutional regularity. You still talk about the 2000 team like it explains something about the present, which it does not.
Richmond
You went from believing in nothing to believing in everything within about eighteen months, and you have not fully recalibrated since. You own at least one item of merchandise purchased specifically during the 2017–20 period that you can no longer justify wearing in public.
Hawthorn
You have a quiet confidence that borders on insufferable, and you’ve earned it, which makes it worse. You refer to dynasties in the plural.
Geelong
You are extremely good at football and extremely tired of being told you should have won more. You’ve made peace with being respected rather than loved, which is itself a kind of maturity nobody asked for.
Melbourne
You waited fifty-seven years for something and got it, and you’re still not sure how to behave now that it’s happened. You have complicated feelings about premierships that other clubs simply do not understand.
St Kilda
You have a genuinely impressive capacity to absorb disappointment with grace, largely because you’ve had no other option since 1966. You speak about 2009–10 the way other people speak about a relationship that almost worked out.
North Melbourne
You have strong opinions about whether your club should be called the Kangaroos or by an older nickname, and this opinion tells people more about you than your actual football knowledge does.
Western Bulldogs
You cried in 2016 and you’re not embarrassed about it. You have a deep, almost spiritual relationship with the concept of the underdog, which has made you insufferable to people who barrack for more successful clubs.
Adelaide
You take football extremely seriously in a way that occasionally surprises people from interstate. You have a specific and detailed grievance about a Grand Final, and you will share it given the slightest opening.
Port Adelaide
You have genuine, justified pride in your club’s history that predates its AFL entry, and you will make sure everyone knows this, repeatedly, particularly people who barrack for Adelaide.
Brisbane Lions
You either remember the dynasty years with genuine reverence, or you started barracking more recently and have no idea what the fuss is about, and these two camps do not always get along.
Sydney Swans
You’ve made peace with explaining to interstate friends why you barrack for a team that used to be in Melbourne, and you’ve developed a remarkably efficient version of this story after years of practice.
West Coast Eagles
You’re deeply, justifiably proud of your club’s success and slightly tired of explaining it to people who think AFL only happens in Victoria. You’ve had to develop unusually thick skin about travel time to away games.
Fremantle
You have a complicated, slightly defensive relationship with the phrase “never won a flag,” and you bring it up before anyone else can, which is itself a kind of strategy.
Gold Coast Suns
You have remarkable patience and a genuinely positive attitude that other clubs’ supporters find both admirable and slightly suspicious, given the circumstances.
GWS Giants
You’ve had to actively choose your club as an adult in a market dominated by other codes, which makes you either the most genuine supporter in the competition or the easiest target for accusations of bandwagon-jumping, depending who you ask.
This is satire, conducted with the same irreverent affection Convict Shirts applies to every Australian institution worth taking seriously enough to make fun of. If your club isn’t represented here with sufficient brutality, that’s an oversight we’ll correct in the next edition.
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AFL Slang & Culture — The Complete Guide
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