"AUSTRALIA'S GAME". The AFL's catchphrase is at the centre of a major rethink at AFL House - and reaffirms how the league is not taking its mantle as Australia's No. 1 domestic sport for granted. 
Soccer, the world's game, has more promise for growth in the next decade ... as Port Adelaide chief executive Keith Thomas learned at an international sports conference in New York 12 months ago.
And new AFL chief executive Gillon McLachlan knows it today. McLachlan's presentation to the Adelaide and Port Adelaide football clubs in Adelaide on Tuesday - another whistlestop in his nationwide tour of the 18 AFL franchises - highlighted just how great Australian football is doing on key performance indicators.
Record media rights. Rising membership figures that also are at record levels. Superb attendances. Fantastic television ratings. Enormous acceptance from the corporate world. And a well-established footprint in every state with AFL games played in every major Australian market every weekend.
It is "Australia's Game".
But, as McLachlan and his executive team at AFL House are noting, Australia is changing. Immigration - in contrast to the population explosion in the 1950s and 60s - is no longer based on Anglo-Saxons and white Europeans.
Their acceptance of Australian football, rather than soccer, on arrival as "new Australians" has made the AFL. But today immigration is Africa, Central Asia and parts of the Arabian peninsula. And these immigrants are more inclined to build the base of Australian soccer than Australian football.
If the AFL is to grow, and keep its status as "Australia's Game", then the AFL needs a new multicultural campaign.
It also needs new heroes to lure the new "new Australians" from the Western Sydney Wanderers of the A-League to the Greater Western Sydney Giants of the AFL.
The message McLachlan left at Alberton and West Lakes on Tuesday was of a game in great shape - and with inspiring prospects for growth, particularly with digital media allowing the AFL to take its image to places once out of reach to conventional television that was so powerful in converting the "new Australians" of the 1950s and 60s to Australian football.
As one of the senior Crows players noted on leaving the presentation, the vision - the dream to keep growing as Australia's major winter sport - is beyond question. But he is still asking how Gil is going to deliver. Visions need plans.
The AFL has clearly understood - as SANFL chief executive Jake Parkinson has said so well in the past 12 months - that there is strength in diversity.
McLachlan last year put his neck on the line by setting a deadline of 2017 for a national women's AFL.
This year he has put new multicultural acceptance of Australian football on the agenda.
"Australia's Game" is to get a new look - one that reflects the new Australia.michelangelo.rucci@news.com.au