Country Zoning
In the early days of Australian Rules football, metropolitan clubs were unable to buy players from rural leagues, but the growth of Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth due to urbanization in the 1950s meant that city clubs could offer much more money (even if not as direct payments) than country clubs could. This permitted wealthier clubs to circumvent the restrictions imposed by metropolitan zoning, as top country players tended to go to the club who was able to offer them most money.
From the mid 1960s, Carlton, Collingwood, Essendon (and to a lesser extent Geelong) perennially dominated the competition because their greater wealth allowed them to monopolise top country players and build up greater playing strength than was previously possible, while Footscray, St Kilda and Fitzroy were in grave danger of folding.
The VFL's response was to zone rural Victoria and the Riverina of New South Wales in a similar manner to metropolitan Melbourne. Because of the sparseness of Australia's rural population, the country zones related not to the player's address, but rather to the league in which he played. This difference made zone boundaries impossible to adjust and was a critical component of the failure of country zoning.
Because the VFL was aware that discrepancies existed in the strength of each zone, it was originally planned that the zones would be rotated every year so that each club would obtain a chance of receiving the best young country players. However, Carlton, Collingwood and Essendon had productive zones and were naturally unwilling to give them up for less productive ones, so the zones remained the same from the inception of country zoning until it was abolished in 1986. There was also no provision for demographic changes which occurred in the various country zones, which exacerbated the problems mentioned above.
Read more about this topic: Zoning (Australian Rules Football)
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