Breaching the Representation Circle
Embracing curiosity and growth through diversity
September 9, 2024. The Jubilee YouTube channel releases the video: 1 Conservative vs. 25 Liberal College Students. It amasses 43 million views, and an inexhaustible content cow is born, to be milked forevermore. September 21, 2024 – 1 Liberal Teen vs. 20 Trump Supporters; 19.7 million views. April 14, 2025 – 1 Sports Analyst vs. 25 NBA/NFL Fans; 3.5 million views. July 21, 2025 – 1 Progressive vs. 20 Far-Right Conservatives; 16.6 million views. October 28, 2025 – 1 Premier League Hater vs. 20 Premier League Fans; 1.4 million views.
‘Surrounded’, as it is named, has become the pre-eminent debate format in our contemporary media landscape. I’ve provided links to 5 different iterations of the show, from its initial conception in September of 2024, to its variant formats between politics, culture and sport, as well as its imitations being produced by less-mainstream content creators. There are myriads of more videos across various sites, all of which you can find via YouTube. I’m not here to explain the format, nor do I think I need to for anyone reading this.
It is the imitation possibilities that brings us here today. It is the phenomenon that is Surrounded, its falsities, and its inevitable assimilation into Australian football discourse that has finally come to fruition. ‘Surrounded; AFL edition’ is officially coming, and it brings a chasm of problems with it. Our own iteration is being produced by the self-described media/news company ‘Back Chat’ and its subsidiary brand ‘the Footy Fan Network’, a seemingly hyper interactive and quasi-progressive social media page. AFL Surrounded will no doubt follow the same derivative methodology of the pre-existing videos of the same ilk. FFN, as I will from now refer to it as, claims to be the ‘voice of the fans’. A quick scroll of their page will tell you one thing; they are the voice of a very specific type of fan.
AFL Surrounded is bringing a contentification apocalypse along with it. As annoying as it will be, a far more harmful issue is pushing itself to the forefront here; where is the representation?
Representative Revenue
The main thesis of this substack is to insist on the importance of representation in media; that being, the prominence of diverse faces and voices to accurately represent a wider population. The ethos behind this assertion comes in two forms; content growth and validating social existence. Let’s look at the content part first, because I fear this will be the easier pill to swallow for those involved in the Surrounded project.
Representation mattering is a simple by-product of having an audience. This is true in every instance of fandom. Assuming that FFN is referring to footy fans when talking about being the ‘voice of fans’, we need to consider who footy fans are. If you only looked at the people who are visible on FFN, you reach a vexing, yet entirely unsurprising conclusion; apparently, all footy fans are white men (most of whom seemingly wear RM’s to the footy and work at Deloitte).
If it is in the best interest of FFN to grow its audience and become a mainstream apparatus for footy fans from all corners of the country, they simply must engage in representative and diversity practices. Could even call it DEI, or something. Otherwise, the growth is significantly capped. Transactionally speaking, representation is a crux that results in immense growth opportunities. You want to be successful? Invest in representation.
Without representation, you are shooting your content in the foot. You open the door to sampling errors, faulty premises, non-contextual answers, inadequate debate design, and ultimately unsatisfying sport analysis. If you seek to be a media brand that represents the voiceless fan, you need a diverse range of people both creating and participating in these sorts of videos, especially if you want any hope of your audience coming away with anything of real substance. Without diversity, your content is worthless. You have incorrectly defined the wider audience, and have not taken the necessary steps needed to fulfil the vital process of true sampling. Therefore, you have failed to have your sample group be truly representative of the overall audience, a crucial misdiagnosis for this content format. Why on earth should anyone want to tune into a debate-show that feels completely alien to how they consume the sport? It is a prioritisation of a small perspective while rejecting the wider totality of football fans that exist; It is plainly myopic. You are leaving audience members ostracised, and in doing so, serve your own stagnation. The data shows that 40% of AFL match attendees are women; that is a huge chunk of the audience. Why should that 40% tune into your content if you only represent one genre of fan? (This data stems from a University of Melbourne report that is over 10 years old. That 40% figure is no doubt larger now, a further inditement on this content production).
The capstone here is that representation builds audience. I want to make a footnote by saying that this entire section has been very focused on quite (grossly) capitalistic ideas when it comes to representation, but I thought it a necessary conversation to have before delving into the true importance of representation in media. To put a ribbon on it; if all you care about is building your audience and boosting metrics, you are a fool to ignore the importance of diversity.
Stop being Anti-Curious
The core of it all is that not being diverse, not considering the powerful potential for representation, is a recipe for anti-curiosity and a boring way of life.
I don’t want this to be a hit-piece, so I will say that is doubt FFN meant to present themselves as a very insular brand, nor curated the cast they did will ill-intent (it’s been said that they made contact with several ‘female content creators’, all of whom could not attend, but they still went ahead with the shoot anyway). However, this is a conversation of intention vs execution, and the circumstances that have occurred are based in a reality where the brand executed very poorly.
Representation matters on a societal and individualistic level for a multitude of reasons. A key reason, which I mentioned earlier, is that it works towards validating the lived experiences of huge portions of the total Australian population (we can whittle it down to just the total population of AFL fans, but the same context holds true). If you are going to brand yourself as the ‘footy fan network’ and only include a very specific genre of fan in your content, you are doing an incredibly poor job of representing the overall existence of footy fans you claim to be the ‘voice’ for. Without a shadow of a doubt, representation is beyond essential. This is true for every footy brand that exists, be it FFN, Daniel Gorringes endeavours, whatever is going on at Zero Hanger, all the way to the mainstream companies like Fox Footy and Channel 7. Not every footy fan is a white man! That’s just not reflective of reality. And because we live in a *society*, where each person exists both at the mercy of their own choices and the uncontrollable environment around them, each unique person who watches footy has their own perspective on it. The 78-year-old grandmother who immigrated to Australia in the 1960’s and fell in love with the weird and wacky sport that is Australian Rules Football will undeniably view the sport in a completely different way to the 22-year-old outback-born uni student who chooses to pay inner-city rent over a team membership. Both are footy fans, they are completely different humans, and both deserve to be represented by media companies seeking to prove themselves as a voice for fans. I recognise that the example I have just provided is a very simplistic instance, but that’s just how it is. Representation, in this case, does exist for the sake of representation. Allowing all Australians, of all demographics, to see people who look like them, talk like them, think like them, represented on large platforms, is just so crucial to communal values and togetherness that it does make me feel insane to know that there are people are don’t understand the importance of it. Without representation, you foster a culture of exclusivity that continues to enforce prejudiced social norms, leaving under-represented groups feeling deeply uncomfortable when it comes to participating in sports discourse.
The Surrounded video is one white man arguing with however many other white men. That’s the reality of this situation. If you filled the MCG with 100,000 real footy fans and selected 20 people at absolute random, the chances of selecting 20 white men is 0. If you want to make the case that the FFN video was only for content creators, then I declare you uncurious, given the plethora of awesome footy writers and ‘content creators’ out there that do not adhere to the white male status-quo. If you looked, you’d find. You need to represent as much of the wider audience as you can if you want to create content that is engaging, honest, and curious. Without diversity, you become anti-growth.
The objective likelihood of a debate-panel, or any discussion program, that lacks diversity is that the conclusions you reach are very likely to be wrong. I’ve emphasised the importance of representation on a socially progressive level (which is ultimately the most important level), but it also lends to another critical juncture; we aren’t just talking about ensuring many people are heard, we are talking about ensuring many perspectives are heard. If 20 people, all of whom represent the same demographic, come to a consensus conclusion over a certain topic that concerns the rest of the population, it is more-than-fair to assume that the conclusion is incorrect because the sample-size is too insular and non-representative. Diversity isn’t just a box to tick, it is critical tool for broadcasting people who think differently, offer personalised perspectives, and provide viewpoints that are of service to the audience (I have plainly ripped the wording of this point from a tweet by the brilliant Marnie Vinall). There are infinite takeaways any fan can have from any game; by limiting the type of person platformed, you cut-away the infinite possibilities in favour of a very selective group. It is, and forever will be, anti-curious.
Searching Down-Stream
Like all the Surrounded videos that came before it, the FNN edition exists purely for clips and clicks. Which, begrudgingly, is fine; Contemporary media is like that, and we mostly have to accept it to keep our collective sanities. This debate show has become the viralification of debate, a medium that propagates drama over substance. The sports version of Surrounded is not as innately harmful as the political version, where Jubilee has received significant backlash for their platforming of horrible people who spread horrible ideologies. This version is ostensibly just for yelling over how long a players contract should be, so whatever. Despite that, I think there is an interesting meta-reading into harmful downstream effects that may become prevalent should this show garner success, and form a new norm.
This does remain an issue of representation. At best, you can platform a wide range of interesting people to partake in a show that will just be a bit of fun and give some people a moment in the spotlight in an industry dominated by past-players and nepo babies. At worst, you get a boring, anti-curious, anti-sports show that leaves absolutely nothing to remember before being clipped into infinity for the rest of time. The lack of representation renders football analysis as a gatekept operation, something only accessible to a group of people who already reap societies greatest privileges. Sports discussion becomes redundant, non-intellectual, boring. If this medium becomes popular, in the same way its previous iterations have, it opens up an entire world for over-contentification, where opinions mean nothing more than the capacity to yell over the guy sitting in front of you. If everyone looks the same and talks the same and thinks the same, then that just really sucks, doesn’t it.
It is a vicious concoction of a narrow medium that is further typified by a lack of diversity. Would the Surrounded system work even if they had invited a more diverse range of participants? Probably not, given its natural pitfalls and eventual contentification. No doubt our timelines will be filled with a hundred different clips within a day of its full release. I suppose if you are going to use this format and create a nuisance social media drive, at least do it with cool people who don’t all look and talk the same! Be cool, just be cool.
I just can’t help but think; this is all going to be very annoying, harmful in its structure, and above all else, absolutely boring. Surrounded has been a blight on discourse ever since its internet conception 21 months ago, and if there’s anything the football adjacent world is good at, its making something worse than it already was. Maybe the show will get its 500,000 views and start daily discourse on Twitter that ruins my day, maybe the on-going backlash that the video is receiving before it even comes out will force the creators to delete and try again. The downstream harms of this sort of content existing in the unrepresentative way that it is presenting itself as highly apparent; I really hope things go differently.
Representation is about being curious. Don’t be afraid of different perspectives. Footy is great, everyone should be allowed to love it.
The problem is assuming more perspectives in a single format or show means better content.
If you have a bunch of stereotypical old white guys and a bunch of stereotypical young Greek women (I'm a Greek-Australian man) and arrange things like this:
- one show with half the white guys and half the young Greek women
- another show with the other half of the white guys and the other half of the young Greek women
vs
- one show with the old white guys
- one show with the young Greek women
I'd bet my house that the second configuration is much more likely to produce compelling content.
This is obviously not always true. But there is definitely a tendency whereby people are more likely to be less edgy and less interesting the more diverse a particular group is for fear of causing offence or just simple miscommunication.
Put me in a room with a conservative Christian who shudders at the thought of the Lord's name being taken in vain and I promise you the content will be far less compelling than if you put me in a room with Nick Giannopoulos.
If you want more perspectives AND more compelling content, often it's more likely to come out from watching multiple homogeneous groups rather than multiple heterogeneous ones.
Or to put it another way: the Japanese restaurant in Japan is going to give you more perspectives than an Australian-Japanese fusion in Melbourne that amounts to a watered down version of the original Japanese for local sensibilities.