Conduct Unbecoming: Masculinity and Punishment in Media Coverage of Homophobia in the Australian Football League (AFL)

Australian Rules Football’s (AFL) 2024 season saw multiple uses of on-field homophobic slurs receiving national media attention, with sanctions handed to coach Alastair Clarkson and player Jeremy Finlayson. This study analyses reportage on these incidents to consider how homophobia in the AFL is mediated. We identified the tribunal—the league’s pseudo-legal structure for reviewing on-field misconduct—to be of profound discursive significance, despite these matters being non-tribunal in nature. Reportage privileges discursive themes of ‘precedent’ and ‘fairness’, which work to construct homophobic abuse as a relative hierarchy so that harm and significance can be quantified into ‘weeks of suspension’. The context of the use of antigay slurs received outsized attention, which individualises the incidents and obscured the broader perception of an institutional culture of homophobia in the AFL. Mediating a cultural problem through such themes, we contend, ultimately imagines homophobia in the AFL as something to be fixed through punishment. This article therefore argues the discursive significance of the AFL tribunal on circulating media and considers how such reporting frameworks obscure cultural challenges while exonerating the League from meaningful accountability.