The Age’s exclusive this week on a proposed mid-season competition was quickly torpedoed in the race for readership by the guilty verdict in the mushroom murder trial.
The AFL usually saves its strategic leaks and thought bubbles for the middle of summer. Several years ago, they dropped their fixture at 6am as the Socceroos prepared to take on Argentina. There’s nothing like a code war at the crack of dawn while Lionel Messi is slicing through your defence.
This announcement came on the back of the most lacklustre round of the season and talk of a two-speed competition. Some of it was fanciful. Some of it was the AFL’s way of “starting a conversation”. But some of it was a good indication of where the sport is headed and what the concerns of the governing body and its broadcasters are.
A certain degree of cynicism is a good starting point with such things, and several of the ideas floated are simply not going to happen. It would be hard to take any competition seriously where former champions are drafted in for a month. The idea of the FA Cup-style competition is ridiculous. It smacked of a few notes jotted down after an overseas junket, or of ideas thrashed around after a few reds at Gather Round. It smacked of an administration obsessed with replicating the NBA and English Premier League. Perhaps surprisingly, it smacked of a governing body spooked by the NRL, especially on the eve of its third and deciding State of Origin game.
It was a good reminder however, of who really runs this competition. At the 2022 grand final, the outgoing CEO Gil McLachlan was seated next to Lachlan Murdoch and Kerry Stokes. Any analysis of these news stories, and of the AFL in general, should start with that image and work backwards. Most analysts agree that the media companies paid well over the odds for the broadcasting rights, and that McLachlan played them like a harp. The boss of SEN, Craig Hutchison, recently said that if the deal was negotiated in 2025, it would be about half of what they landed on three years ago.
It’s no surprise that the media companies are jittery, and that the AFL is determined to do things differently. One sentence in Sam McClure’s column jumped out – “a focus on creating more content and marquee moments across a season”. It echoes a phrase Hutchison used on Tuesday – “you need to throw energy at your sport”. The broadcasters don’t want dead games in winter. They don’t want half an Essendon VFL team playing on Thursday and Friday nights. They want every game to rate, and every game to have some sort of consequence.
It’s not as though there’s a Premier League-type inevitability to the AFL competition. This time last year, Sydney was two games and 25 percentage points clear of the second-placed team, which happened to be Carlton. The top four at the end of round 17 last year all currently sit well outside the eight.
But what’s clear, and what most fans would agree with, is that the AFL thinks the current fixture is totally inadequate. The AFL and its 18 clubs clearly think a 25-round fixture creates too many redundant games, and that the season is now a war of attrition. Stripping back the season so that each team plays another once, as well as a Gather Round and a Rivalry Round, would ensure significant improvements in the standard of play, in injury management, in fan engagement and ensuring each game has significant interest and meaning.
But that still leaves five weeks to fill. I’m sure most footy fans, if not the broadcasters, could live without Opening Round a week out from summer. I’m sure most fans would embrace a weekend of State of Origin football if the players were fresh, if it actually meant something, and if it wasn’t just another tack on to a bloated fixture. I’m not sure fans care if their club collects a $5m cheque for a competition that is little more than a marketing construct.
All this is a problem for the end of the decade, when (or if) the new Tasmanian team comes in and when the next broadcast rights deal is negotiated. It will be a big test for the league, for the broadcasters and for the AFLPA – can they countenance the concept of less is better? What do they actually want – more content? Or by trimming back the season a few weeks, can we finally get a competition that is fairer, that has more meaning, and that is better placed to showcase the sport at its best?
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