Why the AFL brought in a top political pollster to warn clubs about their future

June 22, 2026 — 5:50pm

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Kos Samaras has spent much of his time lately explaining why Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has eaten into the voting bases of the major parties, identifying the demographic and social change behind the drift away from the Coalition and ALP and the fragmenting of the old order.

On Monday, Samaras made comparisons between the forces that have shaped Australian politics and the challenges facing the AFL and the clubs, and of the differences between Generation Z and Generation X in outlooks, and what this might mean for the AFL and the code.

Samaras, a former political operative for the ALP in Victoria who founded the polling/research company RedBridge, told club chief executives and AFL brass that, like the ALP and the Coalition, they can no longer count on what he called “inherited loyalty”.

Samaras offered the examples of those who, such as himself, who had grown up with allegiance to a particular political party (Labor in his case) and footy team.

Today, he posited, when one in three Australians had been born overseas,........

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