To hear Roger McGuinn sing it, to everything, turn, turn, turn, there is a season, turn, turn, turn. But with AFLX, the “fast-paced, scaled down version of traditional football” played by teams of seven on a rectangular field, the AFL is not for turning, nor is it for the antiquated notion of seasons. The alternate version of the game – initially slated to fill the gap created by the bye leading into week one of the finals – would likely to be rolled out to colour in those few squares of the calendar yet occupied by the AFL.
Launched last month by former football operations chief Simon Lethlean, AFLX was revived this week when his replacement Andrew Dillon told SEN Breakfast that the AFL would meet with all 18 clubs to sound out their interest in participating. Given the AFL is looking at measures to slow the pace of the game through means such as reduced interchange rotations, he may want to re-work the “fast-paced, high-octane” pitch that Lethlean tried on with The Footy Show, particularly when those clubs at the foot of the ladder are looking to make it through to the pre-season with an at least half-healthy list.
Regardless, the risk of injury to key players in what is effectively a sideshow will likely see those teams who participate do so half-heartedly, fielding rookies and the recently retired, further dismissing AFLX’s appeal to purists. One (unnamed) senior player has already told SEN that the risk of injury meant the concept wasn’t for him. Setting aside the posturing of a highly-paid employee carping his employer for looking to grow its revenue, he also dismissed the concept as “a grab for money and publicity, like most of what the AFL does”.
But we are in an age where the seduction of pop will invariably win out over the greater demands of art. And just like pop, nothing in consumer capitalism is ever really new. Like Twenty20 cricket before it, it will be argued that AFLX was made not for the critics but for the fans, and the league will be looking to turn the alternate version of the game into a profit by satisfying an audience that is hungry for the thrill of novelty, but with the comforts of the familiar.
Despite its efforts to prove otherwise, the AFL is no different to all other major sports in that other values don’t quite cut it as much as market values. And while it’s inherently sensible for the league to try and expand its reach and revenue in a crowded market, flooding it with an inferior product may in the end do more harm than good.
As part of the same conversation with SEN, Dillion said the league was always investigating ways to keep all games “meaningful” throughout the season, failing to expand on how a theme park training exercise is by any definition meaningful. Its lack of meaning is only enhanced now that 30 years after the introduction of the salary cap, the AFL’s work to equalise the competition appears to be paying off, with the remaining five rounds of the 2017 season having the potential to be one of the most riveting months of football in recent memory.
But as there is a time to gather stones together (and pitch them at AFL House), there is also a time to cast away stones – and that may be in the game’s potential to develop Australian football internationally, where two of the largest barriers are the number of players required and the availability of an oval field.
Port Adelaide chairman David Koch has backed the AFLX model to help the league’s push into China, largely because of the rectangular field. “There are lots of soccer pitches and there’s a massive move in China to win the soccer World Cup in the late 2020s so they’re building all these soccer stadiums over there,” he told the Herald Sun in February.
But even this can be read in one of two ways – wisdom or wilful ignorance. Wisdom in that it makes sense to tap into an existing and growing infrastructure, wilful ignorance in that the availability of rectangular pitches for an Australian curio that is currently played in 14 Chinese schools may be limited under the long shadow cast by Chinese President Xi Jinping’s desire to turn China into a round ball powerhouse through 50,000 football schools by 2025. If you’re banking on the game’s success in our largest export market, it may be a time not to laugh, but to weep.
