Ten years in, AFLW still deserves better than bargain-bin venues

Roughly a decade ago the AFL told us the women’s game was here to stay. So why are we still arguing about where it gets played?

This season the AFL introduced four double-headers, pairing AFLW matches with men’s games at bigger venues like Marvel Stadium and the Gabba. The move has been welcomed in a lot of circles, and honestly, I get it. Bigger crowds, better broadcast optics, more eyes on the product. But it also, quietly, throws a very bright light on a tension that has been simmering since round one of 2017: the league still defaults to boutique, second-tier venues for standalone AFLW fixtures, and after ten years the logic for that is wearing increasingly thin.

What the double-header experiment actually tells us

The AFL’s position, as they’ve articulated it publicly through competition chief Laura Kane and others, is that boutique grounds create atmosphere, intimacy, and community connection. And look, there’s something to that. A sold-out Hickey Park or Trevor Barker Oval does have a kind of electric, close-to-the-action feel you don’t get in a stadium designed for 60,000 people when only 3,000 turn up.

But here’s the thing. The double-header model exists precisely because the AFL knows a full-sized stadium with a full-sized crowd actually works for AFLW. The Gabba double-headers in Brisbane have drawn serious numbers. Fans who might not have trekked to a boutique ground on a Tuesday night will absolutely rock up to a Saturday afternoon double at a major venue. The AFL’s own scheduling is making the argument against itself.

The Brisbane picture, up close

I watch the Lions women every chance I get. I was at the Gabba last season when the Lions AFLW side ran out on the main deck and the crowd was genuinely buzzing — that kind of energy does something to a young player, and it does something to a young fan watching from the stands too. When I’ve made the trek to Brighton Homes Arena at Ipswich for standalone games, it’s a different vibe entirely. Not bad, not unwelcoming, but different. Smaller. Quieter. Less visible.

Ipswich is a growing AFLW market and Brighton Homes Arena is a perfectly fine community facility. But if we’re serious about growing the women’s game in South-East Queensland, the flagship club in the competition deserves to play flagship games at flagship venues more than a handful of times a season. That’s not me being precious about it, that’s just basic brand logic.

The atmosphere argument is real, but it’s also a bit convenient

Here’s my mild contrarian take: the “boutique grounds create atmosphere” line has been used by administrators for a decade now, and I think it’s time we pushed back on it a little. Because the same logic could’ve been applied to the men’s game at any point. Nobody argued that Richmond should play finals at Punt Road Oval because the intimacy was better. The atmospheire argument is, in part, a way of managing expectations about crowd sizes without having to say “we’re not confident enough in crowd numbers to commit to big venues”.

And if that was the honest position in 2017, fine. The competition was brand new. But in 2024, going into 2025, we have proven crowds, proven broadcast audiences, and a product that has improved at an extraordinary rate. The AFL’s own numbers from the 2024 AFLW season showed average crowds up year-on-year for the third straight year. The data supports the ambition.

What the players deserve

Ash Brazill, Erin Phillips, Tayla Harris — the names who built this competition into what it is — they spent years playing on grounds where the facilities were, to put it diplomatically, not quite up to scratch. Changerooms that were an afterthought. Surfaces that would never have been cleared for a men’s game. The AFL has addressed a lot of that, and credit where it’s due. But venue quality and venue prestige are two different things.

The current Lions squad, players like Ally Anderson and Charlie Rowbottom, are as good as any women’s footballers on the planet right now. No notes on their quality. They deserve to be running through banner in front of 20,000 people on a regular basis, not as a twice-a-season treat when the scheduling gods align a double-header.

The scheduling piece matters more than people admit

Part of the venue problem is actually a scheduling problem in disguise. Standalone AFLW games still skew heavily toward midweek timeslots or low-traffic weekend windows. When you put a competition on at 4:05pm on a Wednesday at a ground that holds 6,000, you’re not setting it up to succeed on the crowd metric, and then you use that crowd metric to justify keeping it at smaller venues. It’s circular.

The four double-headers this season are a start. But they’re still four. Out of a full home-and-away season. The AFL men’s competition plays at major venues every single weekend, because the AFL believes in the value of that visibility. Extending genuine prime-time, prime-venue treatment to AFLW more consistently isn’t charity. It’s investment in an asset the AFL itself spent millions building.

Ten years is long enough to stop calling it an experiment

The AFLW turns ten this year. That is not a minor milestone. A competition that was described as a “pilot” and a “leap of faith” when it launched in February 2017 at Epsomn (now known as Ikon Park) has survived, evolved, expanded to eighteen clubs, and produced some of the most watched moments in Australian women’s sport. It is not a trial anymore. It is a permanent, meaningful part of the Australian football landscape.

Which means it’s time for the infrastructure conversation to shift. Not every game needs the MCG. Not every round needs a massive production. But the default should be changing. The double-headers are good. Four is not enough. Bigger venues for standalone marquee matches should be the rule, not the exception. And the league’s continued insistence that boutique grounds are the right long-term model for most games is, at this point, a position that deserves to be seriously challenged by fans, clubs, and frankly the players themselves.

I’ll be back at the Gabba every time the Lions AFLW side runs out there. But I want that to be the baseline, not the highlight reel.

— Tia Nguyen, AFLW Columnist