Time to Fix the Fixture: A Coach Speaks Plain Sense

When an experienced football coach — someone who has sat in both the winning and losing dressing rooms and understands the machinery of the competition from the inside — raises the matter of fixture equity, it is worth pausing to listen carefully. The AFL fixture debate is not new, but voices from within the industry carry a different weight to those of us who merely watch from the outer.

The Fixture Problem Has Never Really Gone Away

For as long as the AFL has operated with eighteen clubs in a home-and-away season that does not allow every team to play every other team twice, there has been an inherent structural tension in how the draw is constructed. Some clubs play more games against top-eight sides. Some clubs are granted home games in peak rounds when rival broadcasters are desperate for marquee content. Some clubs — and supporters of the Adelaide Crows will not need reminding of this — spend considerable stretches of their season flying across the continent for games that opponents play in their own backyard.

The counter-argument, usually offered with a shrug from those in Melbourne, is that the AFL does its best under the constraints of venues, broadcast windows, travel logistics and club preferences. That is a fair acknowledgment of complexity. It is not, however, a sufficient defence of a system that can see two clubs enter September having played materially different schedules.

What an Experienced Coach Brings to the Conversation

The significance of a senior coach raising this issue publicly should not be underestimated. Coaches are, by professional necessity, cautious about criticising the competition’s administration. The AFL controls their club’s list points, their salary cap, their draft access and a dozen other levers. Speaking out carries a cost. So when someone with genuine experience in the system steps forward and says, in effect, that the draw is not equitable and something should be done about it, that is a considered statement — not a media heat-of-the-moment take.

The argument for a more equitable draw is fundamentally one about competitive integrity. If we accept — as the AFL’s stated philosophy demands — that every club should have a genuine opportunity to compete for a premiership, then the scheduling of the home-and-away season is not a peripheral administrative matter. It is central to the whole enterprise. A club that faces a materially harder schedule across a season is not operating on the same footing as one that has been gifted a run of winnable games in the back half of the year.

The Contact Training Dimension

The coach also touched on the matter of limiting contact training, which is perhaps less discussed in the broader football conversation but connects to the same underlying theme: are all clubs genuinely competing on equal terms? The push to reduce full-contact training sessions has been driven largely by player welfare considerations — admirable in themselves — but it does carry practical implications that fall unevenly across the competition.

Younger, less experienced lists may depend more heavily on contact training to develop the physical preparation and game-sense that veteran groups have already internalised. A blanket restriction that applies equally to a team of seasoned finals campaigners and a group of developing twenty-year-olds is, in a sense, another equity question wearing different clothes. The Commission would do well to consider whether its player welfare policies, however well-intentioned, inadvertently disadvantage clubs that are already behind the eight-ball in list quality.

This is not an argument against protecting players. It is an argument for thinking carefully about the second-order effects of policies that look uniform on the surface but land differnently depending on where your club sits in the competition cycle.

Adelaide’s Perspective Is Not Unique — But It Is Instructive

As an Adelaide supporter, I will be accused of motivated reasoning here, and I acknowledge that charge honestly. The Crows and Port Adelaide have long been the loudest voices on travel equity, and it is true that interstate clubs have an obvious interest in pushing this barrow. But the argument stands on its own merits regardless of who is making it.

Consider the data that has been compiled over various seasons: the number of games played at genuinely neutral venues, the distribution of Friday night slots, the frequency with which clubs from outside Victoria are asked to play road games in consecutive weeks. The numbers are not flattering to a competition that markets itself on the principle of equal opportunity. When you strip away the anecdote and look at the scheduling patterns over a decade, the structural advantages built into the fixture for certain clubs are difficult to dismiss.

The AFL Commission has the power to address this. It requires genuine political will and a preparedness to override the preferences of powerful clubs who benefit from the current arrangement. That is the part of the conversation that tends to get very quiet, very quickly.

What a Fairer Fixture Would Actually Look Like

The good news is that the solutions are not technically mysterious. A more equitable draw would:

• Ensure that over a rolling two or three-year cycle, every club plays every other club at least once at home and once away, with adjustments tracked and balanced systematically.
• Apply a transparent algorithm to the distribution of premium broadcast rounds — Friday nights, Anzac Day, Queen’s Birthday equivalents in other states — so that no club is perpetually advantaged in access to those games.
• Build genuine travel offsets into the scheduling model, not merely as a concession to interstate clubs but as a recognised performance factor that is compensated in fixture construction.
• Publish the fixture criteria openly, so that clubs, fans and the media can hold the AFL accountable to its own stated principles.

None of this is radical. It is the kind of governance hygiene that any well-run competition should already have in place. The fact that we are still having this conversation in 2024 suggests that the will to implement it has always been the limiting factor, not the technical capacity.

Why the Commission Should Take This Seriously

The AFL’s social licence — its claim to be the national game, the sport of every Australian community — depends in part on the perception that the competition is fair. When supporters in Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane or the Gold Coast believe, with reasonable justification, that the fixture is structured to serve the interests of a Melbourne-centric broadcast market at the expense of their club’s competitive standing, that erodes trust. It does not erode it dramatically or immediately, but it erodes it steadily, season by season, grievance by grievance.

An experienced coach raising this issue publicly is an invitation to the Commission to take the matter seriously rather than managing it quietly. The response to that invitation will tell us a great deal about whether the AFL’s commitment to competitive integrity is substantive or merely rhetorical.

The Longer View

Football governance at the elite level is always a negotiation between competing interests. There is no perfectly neutral fixture, and anyone who claims otherwise has not spent much time thinking about the practical constraints involved. But the gap between what is achievable and what currently exists is wider than it needs to be, and it has been that way for long enough that the status quo now looks less like an unavoidable compromise and more like a settled preference.

That coach’s voice deserves to be part of the formal consultation when the AFL next reviews its fixture model. Goodness knows the Commission has convened working groups on far less consequential matters. The equitable draw question affects every club, every supporter base, and the long-term credibility of the competition itself. It warrants more than another season of polite deferral.