Early in its history, soccer was known as "The Simple Game" and – relative to sports like rugby union and Australian Football which seem to have more rules and are harder to explain – it still is. That's one reason it travels so well. Being the global game also gives it a constantly accumulating advantage.

After I got back to Melbourne, I turned on Foxtel to watch some sport and found three new stations belonging, in turn, to Manchester United, Chelsea and Liverpool.

This week, the Australian newspaper's rugby writer Wayne Smith wrote an interesting column on the future of his sport after the Australian Super Rugby teams had crashing defeats to New Zealand and South African teams.

Smith argued that Australian coach Michael Cheika is knowingly adhering to a tactically flawed philosophy of running rugby. Smith wrote: "There is no question that Cheika knows this game plan is not the reliable path to winning Test matches, but he and the ARU believe it's the only way Australian rugby can compete with the AFL and the NRL."

That is the larger game being played out in this country – four professional football codes, only 23 million people. Will one, or more, end up being voted off the island?

In arriving at a vision of the future, the AFL has borrowed slavishly from American professional sport.

Over the past few weeks, some of you will have seen or heard Gil Griffin, the African-American AFL enthusiast who has written a book, Jumping At The Chance, about Americans trying to make it in the AFL. In 2012, he wrote an article for the Footy Record that deserves to be much better known.

Etihad Stadium CEO Paul Sergeant had told the Herald Sun he was looking to pre-game and half-time entertainment at NBA games for inspiration. That is, wrote Griffin, he was looking at introducing "an American-style spectacle of hype and histrionics".

Griffin wrote: "Ever since a friend showed me a video of the 1990 grand final, I've loved the game for what it is: a relentlessly paced, action-packed war of attrition requiring incredible endurance, mental and physical toughness, courage, graceful athleticism – and, when needed, brute force. I love footy's uniquely Australian culture: its vocabulary and language I'm striving to master ... Hype and hoopla? No, thanks. I can get that anytime, at home." But there is another danger in confusing Australian football with American football. Earlier this year, I interviewed Melbourne ruckman Max Gawn who said he had a "cultural" difficulty when he first started playing in the AFL. "They were all private schoolboys. I'd been to a government high school," Gawn said.

American football has an enormously strong high school competition which attracts the support of whole towns. We have no high school competition to speak of. At the college level, American football commands a mass national audience. We have absolutely nothing to compare with that.

Leaving aside the issue of AFL academies, our game really has only two levels – elite and grassroots – and for some time I have been concerned that the grassroots game, like the barrier reef, is in sharp decline. This view was mainly based on what I knew about football in my home state of Tasmania, not from AFL statistics, but the testimony of volunteers working for the game.

What they were saying chimed with a recent article on the Foxfooty website by Alastair Lynch about the health of AFL football in Queensland. Lynch wrote, "I hear of the increasing numbers in junior AFL in south east Queensland but I don't see it. I see clubs struggling to field under 14 and under 16 teams and school competitions in one school system in Brisbane going from a three-game season to nothing at all."

In Tasmania, the profile of the local state-wide AFL competition had shrivelled to such an extent that last year when I visited Hobart and watched a news bulletin on the local commercial television station, the sport section led with soccer – not the EPL, not the A-league, not the European Cup, but Tasmanian soccer. One corollary of this was that, at a time when the AFL was winning record broadcast deals, the Tasmanian State-wide AFL competition could not attract a financial sponsor.

We have the idea that the body called the AFL is the game. It's not. It's a collection of individuals who are paid a lot of money to administer the game. The first people of the game are the volunteers out there working unpaid to make the game continue to function as a living organism.

I write all this because last week I met Rob Auld, the newly appointed CEO of AFL Tasmania. Chief among his credentials, from my point of view, is that he spent a decade playing with one country club, Tatura in the Goulburn Valley, and then went on to coach and be president of Nagambie in the Kyabram and District League. In his words, he knows what it's like to have to find a volunteer to run the boundary for the reserves. And that, I believe, is a step in the right direction.