The League That Couldn't Say No

A foundational rule of improv comedy is “yes, and”. Never reject a premise, never overrule developments. If your scene partner says your liferaft is sinking, it’s time to start bailing out imaginary water.

Well, improv comedy sucks and everybody hates it.

The AFL can only say “yes, and” and it is breaking the league. There is no clearer example of this than the botch-job of “Opening Round”: the stewing resentment when your team doesn’t get to play; the Newspeak “round zero” terminology; the broken ladder; the disadvantages imposed on non-participants who face a team that has already shaken off the cobwebs, then miss out on a free early-season bye.

How did we end up with the mutated Eraserhead baby that is Opening Round?

The AFL’s institutional role is theoretically supposed to be an impartial arbiter: balancing competing interests, ensuring a competitive balance. The organisational ambit is making the tricky decisions to grow league participation and viewership, while remaining profitable enough to reinvest revenue into growth areas that are not yet financially self-sustaining. Balancing pure, on-the-page profit against the health of the game as a whole.

Auskick is a clearcut example of funding the future. It isn’t going to make a cent for the AFL (at least until Kalshi opens up line betting on kindergarteners); but without Auskick available to kids, participation drops and potential AFL players are lost to other sports such as cricket, or, god forfend, rugby. AFL revenue goes into Auskick and shores up the future.

The Northern Academy system is another example: taking tiny little rugby players and turning them into blonde Swans midfielders who are called something like “Kyle”. But here’s the rub: the Northern Academies favours certain interest groups within the league. An academy (with attached draft concessions) that only certain teams can access is definitional inequity.

What sets the AFL apart from many other leagues worldwide—and makes it so consistently engaging for fans—is effective, baked-in mechanisms of equalisation: the salary cap for players; the soft cap for club personnel; the redistributive funding system where struggling clubs are paid out more than financially successful clubs; additional assistance for the truly lamentable; and, most crucially, the reverse order draft wherein the best talent reaches the worst clubs.

Equalisation isn’t just wishy-washy egalitarian idealism. It creates a more exciting product both in-game (no neutral wants to watch a thrashing) and on the ladder. Last year’s low-variance W-L record across the top 2/3rds of the competition created a constantly reshuffling ladder, rendering nearly every game in the last 5 rounds a high-stakes must-watch.

So, how do you square competitive balance with academies interfering with the reverse order draft, one of the most essential tools in keeping the league broadly competitive?

…well, you can’t.

This is an unresolvable tension between the AFL’s Putin-level expansionist lust and the even playing field that makes this game great. While Northern Academies specifically have been most disruptive to recent drafts, the reverse order draft is also compromised by father-son picks and Next Generation Academies.

These concessions have lingered long after it became clear that they were damaging the competition’s competitive balance. The AFL is an overpermissive parent, unable to cope with the tantrums of their lolly-addicted toddlers. Now we have cavities.

I’d better reign in my anti-Academy invective, and return to the ostensible topic of this substack: Opening Round.

Here is how you get to the bizarre “half the league plays in northern states oh and there’s also one random game at the MCG and we’re calling it round zero instead of round one and then we’ll have a bunch of byes to sort it all out” Opening Round: by never saying no.

The South Australian Tourism Commission pitches a footy festival, with the charmingly saccharine name Gather Round (pitching in a taxpayer-funded $16-20 million). Football-addicted South Australians luxuriate in the previously unthinkable fantasy of multiple AFL games in one city over one weekend—a fantasy regularly available to anyone who happens to live in Melbourne. The AFL hands over two technically-neutral-but-actually-home-games to the South Australian teams. “Yes, and” we’ll make a future adjudication about where Gather Round goes next, so nobody complains too loudly about the free home advantage.

Gather Round is fun as hell and non-Vic states immediately want in. The cost is hardly prohibitive: that $16-20m from the SATC is pocket change compared to AFL-related outlays like stadiums, AFL-specific public transport, grants for facilities. But if there were WA, NSW, Queensland, and SA Gather Rounds in one season, it would mean multiple weeks in-season with no football games in Victoria, the most important state in Australia—so that’s a non-starter. (Victorians, to their credit, broadly seem to realise that too much grousing about South Australia’s Gather Round might prompt a riposte such as the Grand Final being played exclusively in their home state.)

To head off the other non-Vics, South Australia lobbies aggressively—read, coughs up more dosh—for the Gather Round rights until 2026. The AFL says “yes, and” alludes to some kind of equivalent coming the way of the disgruntled WA, NSW, and Queensland teams.

The kind-of-equivalent is announced only months later: in 2024, the AFL season will open with four games in the northern states. These will be regular home and away matches (so there’s no Gather Round home game freebies) but northern state clubs will get a chance to soak up the spotlight, not to mention tourism dollars from footy enthusiasts travelling up.

Why the hell would you kick off a season with only four games, with the majority of fans excluded from watching their own team? Here, we have run into the problem of never saying no.

There are only four northern teams; any further games taking place in northern states would require non-northern teams to surrender their own home games, or add another game to the season total to produce another “neutral” round.

(WA teams in particular, hypervigilant of the travel burden inevitable with being the wrong side of the Nullarbor, are not going to be compelled to surrender one of their closely guarded home games, nor accept another “neutral” game at the other end of the country.)

This splitting of the competition is a fatal flaw. Opening Round breaks the ladder until, sigh, Gather Round. File this one under “mild annoyance”.

There are much more severe inequities created by the uneven season start. To square away the extra game, all Opening Round participants have an additional early season bye. The league-wide mid-season byes have mixed outcome in terms of immediate W-L advantages, but everyone understands that having a week off will help longer-term load management, and ameliorate the wear-and-tear of in-season injury concerns. For non-Vics, the guaranteed lack of travel makes byes especially invaluable. But the teams who value byes the most, namely the WA teams, are all excluded from Opening Round geographically. Every team in the league would like an extra bye—and some teams get them.

There’s also the strange situation in r1 where some teams have had a tune-up game, and some teams have not. Justin Longmuir certainly believes this imposes a competitive disadvantage upon non-Opening Round participants. I’m sure some much smarter data nerd will decide whether Longmuir’s assessment is borne out; it seems fairly intuitive to me. I would rather be the non-rusty team playing a rusty team.

Then there’s this “round zero” nonsense. Terminological legerdemain isn’t relevant to the league’s competitive balance, but it does nicely demonstrate my point. The AFL won’t take away Richmond and Carlton’s season opener marquee game because this league is incapable of saying “no”. Instead, they employ the nonsensical “round zero” to circumlocute around the obvious: that the Carlton vs. Richmond game is no longer a season opener. (In 2024, the “season opener” wasn’t even the opener of Carlton or Richmond’s seasons.)

(We have since progressed to one Opening Round game at the MCG. This does not fix the above problems—but someone asked and so the AFL said “yes”.)

Some of the AFL’s problems are inevitable: any organisation with multiple stakeholders faces competing interests. But problems such as Opening Round are self-inflicted.

Trigger-happy top brass unilaterally approve lopsided gimmicks to improve engagement (without lowering the paywall on televised games that constitutes the major barrier to fan engagement). But once these competitive advantages are entrenched—be it Opening Round, Gather Round, marquee games such as Anzac Day, the MCG Grand Final, Northern Academies, F/S, NGAs—the process of clawing them back becomes just too difficult for the AFL. New innovations come with fanfare and photo ops; repealing systemic advantages is a grinding bureaucratic slog of attempting to reach quasi-democratic consensus across the entire competition. Every attempt to fix any inequity becomes a squabble about every other teams’ competitive advantages. Those solid building blocks of equalisation—the salary cap, redistributive funding, the reverse order draft—are overshadowed by a tottering Jenga tower of interlocked kickbacks. And when the AFL wants to make things more fair? Well, they just balance a few more blocks on to the top of the tower. The blindingly obvious advantage of the Northern Academies was left untouched for season after season of additional damage to competitive balance—the AFL’s first attempt at recourse was simply loosening NGA restrictions.

It feels like we’re in the death throes of a Tetris game: keep adding and adding and pray that we’ll build ourselves back to an even field.

Here is where I reveal myself to be an enlightened, impartial critic: North selling one of their home games to Freo is really bad for the game. The AFL rubber-stamped this because WA teams are always complaining about travel burdens, and they didn’t have another Gather Round/Opening Round freebie to throw our way.

Obviously, allowing less successful, less financially secure teams to sell home games to more successful, more financially secure teams (or in the case of the sale to West Coast, just the latter) is anathematic to competitive balance. All clubs should play the same number of H&A games. Freo should not get another bonus home game—and certainly not at the expense of a bottom 4 side.

But that’s the quagmire: pulling at a single advantage, one Jenga block amongst the teetering pile isn’t going to restore balance. Policies this detrimental to equalisation need to be culled, irrespective of the lobbying of interest groups. Stacking more and more inequities is never going to create fairness—it means success will be arbitrary luck-of-the-draw for whichever club happens to be the beneficiary of the most egregious AFL-granted kickbacks.

Opening Round needs someone to say no. We tried it; it didn’t work. Not every idea is a winner. It’s time to abort the Eraserhead baby.