Dillon’s Opening Round Reversal Is a Rare Admission of Error
There is a particular species of AFL announcement that arrives dressed as a minor scheduling update but is, on closer inspection, a small confession. Andrew Dillon’s revelation that 2027 will return to all eighteen clubs playing in Round One is one of those moments, and it deserves more attention than the mild press conference in which it was delivered.
For those who have not followed the saga closely, Opening Round was introduced with some fanfare as a standalone week in which two or three matches, often featuring marquee fixtures or novelty locations, kicked off the season ahead of the main draw. The pitch was reasonable enough on paper: build anticipation, give broadcasters a clean week of exclusive content, and manufacture a sense of occasion before the competition proper got underway. In practice, it has never sat comfortably with the football public, and Dillon’s move to quietly retire it tells you the game’s administrators have finally accepted as much.
A Concept That Never Won the Room
I have written before that Opening Round always felt like a broadcast-driven solution to a problem the fans never actually had. Supporters wanted the season to start, all of it, everywhere, at once. What they got instead was a staggered rollout that left thirteen or fourteen clubs sitting idle while two teams enjoyed a week in the spotlight, often in a market with no natural connection to either side. It was clever from a commercial standpoint and underwhelming from a football one, and those two things are not always compatible, no matter how persuasively the competition’s schedulers argue otherwise.
To be fair to the AFL, professional sporting leagues around the world tinker with formats constantly, and not every experiment needs to be permanent to have been worthwhile. Opening Round generated genuine buzz in isolated years, particularly when a blockbuster fixture landed in it. But the broader sentiment, reflected in ratings data, crowd figures and the tenor of talkback since its introduction, has been persistently lukewarm. When an innovation requires this much explaining nearly every year it runs, that is usually a sign it was solving the administration’s problem rather than the public’s.
Dillon’s Political Calculation
What is notable here is not simply that the concept has been shelved, but who has shelved it. Dillon inherited Opening Round from the Gillon McLachlan era and, until recently, defended it with the sort of measured conviction chief executives are trained to project regardless of their private reservations. That he has now reversed course so directly suggests either that the internal data has become impossible to argue against, or that the political cost of persisting with an unloved format outweighed whatever commercial upside it still offered broadcasters.
Either explanation reflects reasonably well on him, in my view. There is a tendency in modern sports administration to treat any reversal as weakness, as though changing your mind is itself the scandal rather than the original decision. I would argue the opposite. A competition administrator who cannot admit a structural experiment has run its course, particularly one imposed with minimal genuine consultation with the football public, is a more concerning proposition than one who is willing to correct course when the evidence points that way. Dillon deserves some credit for reading the room, even a room he was previously trying to convince of something else entirely.
What This Says About the Fixture-Making Process
The more interesting question for those of us who follow the Commission’s workings closely is what this reversal reveals about how fixtures are actually built. Opening Round was sold at launch as a considered structural addition to the season, not a trial balloon, yet it has now been abandoned after a relatively short run once the broadcast and membership feedback made its unpopularity difficult to ignore. That timeline suggests the original decision was made with less certainty, and perhaps less consultation with clubs and supporter bases, than the initial announcement implied.
This matters beyond the specifics of one round’s numbering. The AFL fixture is arguably the single most consequential document the competition produces each year, shaping travel burdens, member experience, free-to-air exposure and, ultimately, competitive fairness. Clubs like Adelaide, along with the other South Australian and interstate sides, have long argued that fixturing decisions carry real weight for supporters who plan season-long travel and rostering around them. When an experiment of this scale can be introduced and then wound back within a handful of years, it is fair to ask how rigorously these calls are tested before they reach the public.
The Broadcast Deal Undercurrent
None of this happens in a vacuum, of course. The AFL’s broadcast arrangements remain the financial engine of the entire competition, and any fixture change of this magnitude inevitably reflects negotiations happening well away from public view. Opening Round’s staggered structure suited a broadcast partner keen on a clean, uncluttered opening weekend for premium content. Its removal for 2027 may say as much about where those conversations currently sit as it does about supporter sentiment, though the AFL is unlikely to frame it that way publicly.
It would be naive to assume fan feedback alone drove this decision, however welcome the outcome. The cynical read is that Opening Round’s commercial value to broadcasters has simply diminished relative to the goodwill cost of persisting with it. The more generous read is that Dillon and his fixturing team have genuinely listened to years of criticism and decided the format was not worth defending further. Most likely, as with most decisions of this scale, the truth sits somewhere between the two.
A Sensible, If Overdue, Correction
From where Crows supporters sit, and I suspect this view is shared broadly across the competition, the return to a full eighteen-team Round One is simply a return to something that always made more sense. Football, at its best, is a communal experience shared by every club and every supporter base at the same moment, not a rolling release schedule dictated by which markets a broadcaster wants to feature first. Round One should feel like the whole competition exhaling together after a long pre-season, not a slow drip of appetisers before the real meal arrives.
Dillon’s willingness to scrap an experiment he once defended is, on balance, a point in his favour rather than against it. The AFL Commission does not always get fixturing right on the first attempt, and pretending otherwise would do the competition no favours. What matters more is whether lessons from this episode inform how future changes, particularly ones with real financial and logistical implications for clubs, are tested and communicated before they are locked into the calendar. On that front, the jury remains out, but at least for 2027, the season will start the way most of us always wanted it to: all eighteen clubs, one weekend, together.
