When the original Gallipoli veterans were still alive, one of the ways of respecting Anzac Day was not to play sport at all. This was the secular society's sacred day of mourning and remembrance. Of not forgetting. Sport, which transports the players and the fans into a brief fantasy, all about the bliss of forgetting, was therefore inimical to Anzac Day. Just for one day, we gave it a break.

Then came the AFL and its concept of the themed blockbuster. The Anzac Day clash between Essendon and Collingwood set the pattern for other "concept rounds", and the NRL duly followed. But indigenous, heritage and rivalry rounds all celebrate some contribution football has made to Australian life; with Anzac, the football codes are not giving but taking, or at least trying to borrow prestige from national symbolism. Ask who benefits most from this weekend's football jamboree.

Peter FitzSimons, in these pages on Thursday, said the silence of 90,000 football fans in the MCG when the Last Post is played is "one of the most impressive moments in Australian national and sporting life". He counselled restraint to commemorate a "desperately sombre occasion". But are the football codes capable, any longer, of restraint? With Anzac Day falling on a Saturday, the AFL and NRL are piling in with no fewer than five games each. Far from respecting Anzac with silence, both codes are clambering on board the Anzac bandwagon with a festival of noise.

In announcing a four-year partnership with the Australian War Memorial this week, NRL chief executive David Smith said, "This is one time in our season when the football merely plays a bit part and rightly so." A "bit part", with five matches on Anzac Day? I wonder if anyone at the league, when they were planning this day, put their hand up and said, "How about respecting the 100th anniversary of Anzac by not playing at all? The way the game respected the world wars when they were taking place? Isn't that how we merely play a bit part?" But that is not the way of corporate thinking, which is geared always to more.

This of all years, there is no call for sport to make a gesture of remembrance. It is arrogant, not to say redundant, for sporting codes to praise themselves for their recognition of the armed services. Silence – no games – would make us all stop in our tracks and possibly reflect a little. But the businesses that the AFL and NRL have become are now genetically incapable of silence.

In the 30 years since the regeneration of interest in Anzac, the major football codes have become ever larger, ever more corporatised and sophisticated, ever more likely to speak of themselves as businesses selling a product. Where is the line between what the football codes are selling this weekend and what Woolworths was trying to sell in its morally indefensible but business-logical "Fresh in our Memories" campaign? Rightly, Woolworths was condemned for exploiting Anzac to sell products. Aren't the NRL and AFL selling products too – tickets, commemorative merchandise, their own image? What makes them different from Woolworths?

The argument could be made that football is still primarily a community event and not a business, and that the benefit of tying Anzac to sport comes in programs such as the education the War Memorial is going to provide to NRL staff and players, in Smith's words, "so they gain a greater understanding of the Anzac centenary and the contributions rugby league made during the 100 years of service."

Good point. But if it's about education, Anzac sends a complicated message. What to tell the NRL's many indigenous players about how their forbears, as non-citizens, were officially banned from joining the armed forces in 1915? What to tell Maori players about the refusal of many of their forebears to fight and the discriminatory treatment of those who did? What to tell players of Turkish origin? (One measure of what David Gallop calls our "national sport's symbolic representation of multicultural Australia" is that the A-League does not make too big a deal of Anzac.)

If this day is to inspire footballers, there are conditions attached. Admirably, Roosters coach Trent Robinson is telling his players about Bob Tidyman, an Eastern Suburbs footballer who died near the Somme in 1916. A worthy idea, as long as the players respond in the prescribed way. But what if they don't? What if a player stands up and says, "What happened to Bob Tidyman is so sickening, so saddening, so horrifying, I can't come to the game plan meeting. Out of respect for Bob, I don't feel like playing this weekend." What if footballers were touched that deeply? What if fans were?

But remembrance is conditional upon inspiration. The Last Post is meant to put us in the mood for a contest, even if it doesn't.

In Neill's documentary, former soldier and now historian James Brown put the ebb and flow of Anzac into perspective: "Anzac doesn't exist on autopilot. It's shaped by decisions we make every day about how to commemorate it, what to focus on and what not to focus on. There is a danger that we might not get it right. Just as Anzac withered away in the sixties and seventies, it could go too far in the future, become too jingoistic. We have this incredibly powerful force … but we've got to make sure it's channelled in the right direction, in the most consequential way."

On Anzac Day, the most consequential form of recognition used to be silence. No games. What a shocking idea.

The reaction against Woolworths showed how deeply Australians resent their precious memories being exploited by corporations whose mission is to make everything bigger, more commercial, more uniform.

I don't know how far the football codes have to push it before they are seen as another Woolworths, but if they want to pull back, it will take more than just one minute's silence.