The ’17-5 model’ is getting it all wrong. I propose an alternative solution to the AFL’s scheduling worries: a season complete with premium product, mid-season trades and all the best of the hallowed North American made-for-television traditions.
Oh, and more match-day experience than you imagined possible.
We start the season in February with the first of 17 rounds of home-and-away games. No more will we listen to the whining objections of inequity, everyone plays everyone else once per season. Home one year, away the next. This immediately does away with many of the concerns with the current system and avoids the mind-bending complexities of the 17-5 model recently mooted.
There will also be a mid-season trades week. But it will be different to the neverending dullness of the current October trade season. For this, the clubs will need to show up with the players they’re willing to trade on hand, and physically trade them across a giant showroom floor in real time, with corporate boxes and TV cameras watching on gleefully.
Just imagine the spectacle of Bryce Gibbs being shoved unceremoniously over to Greater Western Sydney in return for a handful of untried youngsters. The fans would love it.
But back to the schedule. Now, the AFL has long coveted the business plan of the NFL. But they’ve become blinkered to the other gold in North America: the months-long playoff systems of the NBA and NHL. And so, after our top eight is decided in 17 rounds, we go into the first round of the finals: best of three.
The second round is best of five and the action really heats up as the best meet the best. The teams who can clean sweep their fixtures and have a few weeks off will be at an enormous benefit, so all the incentives are there.
With four teams left, it’s time for another round of trades, where players at the tail-end of their unfulfilling careers can prostitute themselves out to any club in contention for that one last shot at an elusive flag.
In the grand tradition of basketball and ice hockey, the preliminary finals will be rebranded as the semi-finals and will be played in a best of seven format. Football fans the country over have always argued that the prelims are the best matches of the season. So then, we’ll have at least eight of them in total. Premium product.
And as summer draws near, and the AFL continues to banish every other sport to the margins, we come to the showpiece event. The grand final in a best of nine series. Perfect. And plenty of tickets for every club member across the series.
The fringe benefit of course, is that the players who make it that far will be so broken that the top teams will need to completely refresh their playing stocks for the following season, and the AFL’s dream of a level playing field will be realised.
After that, there will be ten weeks for the cricket, soccer, tennis, and horses to share the limelight. And then back to the premium product to do it all over again.
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