Since you asked: a shorter AFL season?

Over the past week, a number of AFL figures discussed publicly the virtues of the AFL home-and-away season shifting to a 20-round format, from the current 22-round format.

North Melbourne President and media personality, James Brayshaw, got the ball rolling on Triple M radio on Saturday.

The schedule. Again. Really?

It has been a bit contentious this year, hasn’t it? Early on it was the low key Round 1, then the role of the fixture in crowd numbers. It was even the New Guy’s first order of business, saying he’ll listen to the fans and ditch poor performing timeslots from the schedule in 2015.

But really, we’re talking about the fixture again?

Yes I guess we are when it comes down to it. Sections of the AFL community came together in a bit of a united, if uncoordinated, voice this week to raise the potential of footy’s regular season losing a couple of games.

We’ve had the players, in 300 game veteran and AFL Players Association vice president Matthew Pavlich coming out in the name of player wellbeing; as well as the prospect of representative footy.

Richmond Coach Damien Hardwick also pursued the health and safety argument in his support of the idea on Tuesday.

It was a major discussion point on a number of Melbourne radio shows on Tuesday evening, too.

And, of course, North Melbourne President James Brayshaw got the fire started on Saturday. So that’s the clubs, players and coaches who, in varying degrees, have not said no to the thought. Obviously not everyone’s views on this will be uniform, and we haven’t heard from all of the stakeholders, but, well, there may be something happening here.

We’ve been here before though haven’t we?

Yeah indirectly I guess. The AFL orchestrates a review of the fixturing of the competition once every couple of years, canvassing the views of a range of AFL stakeholders. The last such review was for this year, actually, which resulted in the taking of two ‘byes’ at the roughly third-of-the-way and two-thirds-of-the-way marks of the regular season.

The AFL Player Association has been fairly strong on this issue in the past, even calling for an 18-game season and the introduction of three or even four off weeks to help players recover and have a bit more of a balanced life during the season.

There’s an ‘equal draw’ argument here too, right?

That’s the other main thread, yes. Big sections of the AFL fan-base reckon that we need an 18-game season to make sure the draw is ‘fair’. The line of thinking is that each team plays every other team once every season, with the ’18th game’ played against a traditional rival or something like that. So you’d have, for example, Hawthorn play each of the 17 other teams once, and perhaps Geelong a second time.

At face value it seems more ‘fair’ than the current situation, where a team plays 12 teams once and five teams twice. To its credit the AFL addressed this somewhat in this year’s fixture by splitting the ladder up into three 6-team segments based on finishing positions in 2013 for fixturing purposes.

So most teams play everyone within their ‘bracket’ twice. However, there are still some slight manipulations; West Coast play Fremantle twice – for obvious reasons – despite finishing in different brackets.

So an ’18-game’ season would rectify this in the eyes of some. But this doesn’t quite stand up to scrutiny.

Which teams do you play at home versus away for purposes of equality? Does Collingwood still travel four times a year? What if your ‘traditional rival’ is GWS, or St Kilda, and you get to pump up your percentage through being the only team to play them twice? Pursuing a fair fixture isn’t the argument to pursue when thinking about the length of the season.

So there’s been a lot of talk, and for some time. And yet, the home-and-away season has been 22 games for pretty much half a century now.

What are you suggesting?

That there must be a reason why.

These things are very hard to change. The AFL season has always been 22 rounds. Always. Shifting from that would be like not playing Test Match Cricket at the WACA.

Ahem.

Oh, right. More importantly, there’s a lot that gets built around a schedule, and not just the diaries of AFL club presidents.

Clubs have 11 homes games per year that they sell tickets to. Melbourne grounds expect to get their 40 to 50 games worth of captive market every season. Players, deep down, would want to play as much football as they can physically handle – they are professionals at the end of the day.

But most importantly, the AFL’s biggest paymaster, the broadcasters, have paid for their right to broadcast 22 rounds of AFL football every season. And they paid handsomely for it, too, so its not the kind of thing that the AFL executive can unilaterally change.

It’s one of the downsides of footy continuing its evolution into sports entertainment. We’re already a long way down the road, and it creates an inflexibility that, say, the National Basketball League can overcome because of its relatively low profile and therefore relatively loose expectations from a broadcaster’s point of view.

So what you’re saying is that money is getting in the way?

If you want to put it that way, yes money is getting in the way. $1.25 billion is a lot of money in anyone’s language.

I mean there’s contracts and all of that kind of thing that the AFL would have entered into with Channel Seven, Foxtel and Telstra in the current broadcasting agreement.

Keeping Telstra to the side for a second, Channel Seven use their four games a week to basically anchor their schedule over the winter months. It’s a guaranteed eye-drawer in key timeslots like Friday and Saturday night.

It’s live, and so is – reasonably – immune to the DVR revolution. And Seven build a lot around it. Think Game Day, Talking Footy, ‘exclusives’ with players and coaches. Not to mention the recent move to build ‘local’ footy shows, like the Footy Fix in WA.

And Foxtel, well, they’ve built a whole channel around it. A brilliant channel, too. It sells Foxtel subscriptions. They’ve got the highest rating sports show – that isn’t an actual sport, mind – in the country.

Basically, the AFL broadcasting contract is one of the more valuable commodities in Australian television. It brings riches to footy that it couldn’t hope to otherwise receive; it also creates expectations that the AFL must live up to.

AFL Football Operations Manager Mark Evans said on Melbourne radio that a move to a 20-game home-and-away season would be akin to the industry taking a ’10 per cent pay cut’. Is that what you’re talking about?

More or less. Although that 10 per cent figure is a gross simplification. A move to a 20-game home-and-away season would see 18 less games played throughout the year; 189 games as oppose to the 207 that we see now. So that’s only an 8.7 per cent fall – not quite the 10 per cent quoted. But that’s a bit of a nitpick.

But the whole ‘pay cut’ argument is built around the idea that you couldn’t give the broadcasters a product that lasted the full length of the current ‘season’, which, lets face it, stretches from March to pretty much November now with free agency, the draft and the like. Sure, there may be fewer actual games to be broadcast on the TV, but it doesn’t mean the product you’re selling is all of a sudden 10 per cent smaller than it otherwise would have been. It’s not as though Channel Seven is buying the AFL by the kilo.

To be sure there would be a hit to the AFL’s overall attendance; that’s probably where the biggest hit would occur. But there’s something to be said for creating more scarcity around access to AFL games – particularly in Melbourne. Aggregate crowds may fall, but average crowds may rise and that would help one of the AFL’s other big problems – high fixed stadium costs.

Ok so what you’re saying is that it isn’t as impossible as everyone is assuming?

Don’t get me wrong it would be difficult to pull off. As I said earlier, the AFL has entered into contracts with a number of parties, and these contracts will tend to have ‘break clauses’ which make it really hard for one party to opt out or change the conditions.

But you know, the AFL only has two more seasons to run on its current contract with Seven, Foxtel and Telstra.

I sense a crazy idea coming…

You know me too well.

We know live sport is a valuable commodity in broadcasting. And we know the sharks are circling, with Channel Nine and Channel Ten both hinting at various stages this year that they expect to be at the table when it comes to footy’s next round of negotiations. Channel Seven and Foxtel will no doubt want to retain what they’ve already got.

So the AFL has a real opportunity to show some leadership, listen to its internal stakeholders, and help address some of the concerns various groups have raised in recent years.

Put it this way, the broadcast contract is going to be worth more than it is now without even trying. Some estimates have a figure of $1.6 billion over five years as their expectations. That could be low balling, for mine, particularly if all of the major broadcasters are involved.

The AFL could suck in a couple of big ones and restructure its season around the ’20 games’ marker, and simply see its broadcast revenue ‘growth’ come in a touch lower than it would’ve been in the case of a 22 game season.

Basically, giving up revenue they haven’t earned and haven’t banked on, anyway.

That’s not very crazy at all.

Let me finish!

People aren’t very good at rationalising that kind of decision – and so it’s not likely to happen. So can we do something to address the equity concerns, address the health concerns, while simultaneously enhancing the product and making the AFL even better than it already is? I reckon we can.

Here it is…

Why not have what would amount to a three-stage season?

A 17 game, effectively round robin tournament, where every team plays the other once.

A five game ‘Run Home’, where the draw is split into three groups: the top six, middle six and bottom six. Everyone plays each other once.

The top six are playing for positions in the top six – naturally.

The middle six are playing for the last two spots in the Top eight

The bottom six are playing for…ok that one I haven’t quite worked out yet. Maybe playing for some kind of position in the draft? Where the winner of the ‘run home’ gets a better chance at winning a top draft pick?

The finals continue as usual, with a top eight system like the one we have now. Teams could have a bye in the middle of the round robin stage of the season, and one at some stage before, during or after ‘The Run Home’.

Ummmm…

Just think about it for a second. What are the games we all look forward to in the final rounds of the AFL season? The inevitable ‘wooden spoon’ game. Games that shape the top four. Games that result in one side making the Top eight and the other not. You would be ensuring that more of these happen, every single year, without fail.

The AFL suffers from a crisis of context towards the middle-to-latter stages of the year. For every Collingwood vs Port Adelaide, we have a Richmond vs GWS and a Melbourne vs Brisbane.

My system would give pretty much every game in the final rounds of the season context. All of a sudden Melbourne and Brisbane are playing for a better chance at the Next Big Thing; Port and the Pies are playing off for the double chance.

All of a sudden, the last 45 games of the season become even more valuable to a broadcaster, and even more exciting for the punters at the ground. The AFL and its paymasters get the 22 games they want, but we get more meaning.

Indeed.

I mean, good luck implementing it. And this kind of fixture structure creates all kinds of strange incentives.

It doesn’t reduce the length of the season, so maybe it is accompanied with some concessions to the clubs around the size of playing lists and the like. The broadcasting pay day will more than cover some of the additional spending needed to do that.

Footy is lurching ever further towards becoming a sports entertainment product, ala the NBA. It retains all of the great things about the competition, but goes some way to not only solving the AFL’s crisis of context and fixing some of the fixture equity issues that irk the fans.

I think you’re nuts.