By Charles Happell from BackPageLead.com.au

The AFL will make its first serious foray overseas on Thursday - ANZAC Day - when St Kilda and Sydney play a match in Wellington, the first game contested outside Australia for premiership points.



A lot of money will be spent on the staging of the event, its marketing and promotion, and the transporting of teams, officials, television crews and sundry AFL hangers-on to New Zealand - hundreds of them in total. A lot of time and effort will also be devoted to ensuring the game's success. AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou will be wheeled out to talk of the close ties between the two countries on this historic and poignant occasion and the benefits of such a trans-Tasman sporting initiative.



But the questions have to be asked: Is it all worth it? What is the AFL trying to achieve here? And what will the return be on that million-dollar investment?



For those AFL clubs left back in Australia and continually beset by financial problems, for those struggling country leagues forever battling the population drain to the cities, for those Australian states who'd love to host more AFL footy, the New Zealand experiment is an expensive folly; a delusion the code doesn't need and can't afford.



Melbourne FC is the oldest sporting club in Australia and, as you might have read during its recent run of crises, has been around since 1858. And, sure, many of its current problems are entirely self-inflicted. But how the Dees - or St Kilda or Port Adelaide or the Western Bulldogs, for that matter - would love some of that promotional money, marketing effort and AFL love.



Similarly, Tasmania can't get enough of the indigenous code, yet that affection has hardly been reciprocated by AFL HQ in the past decade or two.



Australian Rules is an Australian game, just as sumo wrestling is Japanese, and no amount of marketing and slick TV advertising will make it universally popular.



To outsiders, it is seen largely as a curio, the kind of event you'd queue up to see at a circus freak show. The raw physical nature of the game and the courage and athleticism required to play it - in sleeveless jumpers, no less - will always inspire awe. And deservedly so.



But Aussie Rules isn't going to catch on elsewhere in the world, and it's time we faced up to that fact. If the code's attractions haven't established a toehold in the psyche of European, Asian or American sports fans by now, after 115 years, it's probably safe to assume they never will.



Besides, the game has enough problems to contend with at home without embarking on a new frontier overseas, and the drain on resources that involves. In fact, it's currently trying to establish a bulwark in its own backyard - Greater Western Sydney, to be precise - a new frontier which is already soaking up millions of dollars each year.



Officials are expecting 20,000 to turn up to Wellington's Westpac Stadium on Thursday. Some will be curious (and open-minded) locals wanting to get a look at another top-line sport; most will be expat Australians looking for their footy fix, supporters of the two clubs involved or those who've got their hands on freebie tickets.



The AFL has committed to playing two further games in New Zealand in 2014 and 2015, all in co-operation with the Wellington City Council. The league's national talent manager Kevin Sheehan said earlier this year the AFL wasn't trying to compete head-on with rugby union and league for talent in NZ.



Singing a remarkably similar tune to the code's western Sydney songsheet, Sheehan said the league was just looking to provide another choice for talented young Kiwis. 'We don't see ourselves as competition - we like to see ourselves as being on the menu, just an option,' he said.



Which is all well and good. But if the game's heartland isn't protected, secured and locked down, then any attempt to spread the Aussie Rules gospel to heathen outposts such as New Zealand is an extravagance that defies prudent management, and common sense.