The recent media hysteria surrounding the alleged unfairness of the AFL fixture poses some interesting questions about how modern pro sports leagues should handle the balance between the integrity of the competition and the need to maximise commercial returns.
Consider the following headlines:
Interestingly, that last headline was actually from the AFL’s own website, which raises the question of just how critical a league site should be of its own competition... but that’s fodder for a future blog.
The point is there has been widespread media condemnation of the AFL’s fixturing in the wake of a couple of 100-plus point wins by power teams Collingwood and Geelong. Players, coaches, legends and even academics came out of the wordwork to revile the AFL scheduling.
Just how any schedule, no matter how unfair, can really lead to the Cats recording a pair of 150-point wins is mystifying. Perhaps the better question to ask is whether the AFL’s recent expansion has diluted football’s talent pool. Or whether the AFL’s Draft and Salary Cap systems are really effectively allowing talent to be spread evenly amongst its teams.
The hue and cry that has followed those lopsided results however has been nothing short of a witch-hunt, with AFL supremo Andrew Demetriou cast as the chief warlock.
The league bosses were portrayed in general as money-hungry bureaucrats who had allowed their greed to impair the integrity of the game.
Yet it is those same league bosses that hand out millions of dollars annually to the AFL clubs, dollars which have been generated on the back of the TV and sponsorship revenue that the self-same fixture had helped to bring in.
As someone who works for a league office, I know only too well how often the need to make commercially sound decisions for the future of the competition can seem to come at odds with maintaining a fair and balanced competition.
There were plenty of fans in Far North Queensland last season who expressed their disappointment in no uncertain terms at the small number of Cairns and Townsville games that appeared on the ONE fixture.
They pointed to the blanket coverage of games involving the Sydney Kings and Melbourne Tigers and talked of “big city biases”. Yet the reality was that the NBL was back on free-to-air TV for the first time in years with a new partner and there was a pressing need to repay ONE’s faith in the NBL with the best possible viewership figures. Say what you like about big cities, but they do come with big potential viewing audiences, even when their teams are losing.
For the first time in years, the NBL didn’t try to make the TV schedule an even affair and unashamedly featured the major metro markets more prominently than those of our regional teams.
The result was our highest viewing audience in years.
For a league that went close to the brink two years ago, the need for this sort of exposure is obvious. It makes those sponsorship meetings that little bit easier and gives the NBL added visibility.
So is it right for the AFL, a code which earned a billion dollars for their TV rights recently, to have unbalanced scheduling in the name of commercial returns?
The answer to that is complicated but in order to come to a conclusion, it’s important to understand one simple fact – there really is no such thing as a balanced draw.
Sure, when you’re scheduling your local under 14 competition, you can make certain that each team plays each other the same number of times. But just try doing that in a pro league.
The commercial realities of teams trying to make a buck, or more likely just break even, inevitably intrude on any attempts to install a truly balanced draw.
The NBL league office has tried a number of times to convince clubs to play an even and balanced fixture, with teams facing each other once at home and once away. Those efforts have continually come to naught as the NBL clubs have steadfastly declined to reduce their number of home games each season below the current 14 they currently host.
For those teams that make a profit every time their players run out on the floor at a home game, that is perfectly understandable. Yet given the high percentage of NBL teams in recent years who have taken a loss on their home dates, it is less so.
Regardless, you are automatically left with an unbalanced draw. That is, of course, before you even throw in the factors of venue availability, travel schedules and broadcast partner needs, let alone team preferences for playing on specific nights.
Given all of this, the chances of actually putting in place a balanced draw are literally zero. The best any league can do is to minimise the necessary inequalities in their fixture.
I know that the NBL season tip-off is imminent each year when the first coach calls me to complain that they are getting shafted by the league by their schedule in the first few rounds. It’s kind of like the league office equivalent of the first swallow of Spring.
Funnily enough, during the course of the season I will normally field a call from just about every coach in the league with pretty much the same complaint. The reality is that every team goes through difficult patches in the draw at some stage. If that team happens to be hanging on to their playoff hopes by a thread when that happens, then you can be assured that the complaints will come thick and fast.
So back to the question at hand; is the AFL draw really unfair? In all likelihood, yes it is.
If fans do start to believe that their team really is so unfairly disadvantaged by the draw as to not even be legitimate contenders however, they will undoubtedly vote with their feet and their wallets. There is certainly no sign of that yet.
The AFL makes no apologies for scheduling games to maximise audiences, both at games and on TV, and that model has helped them drive the game to a whole new level of profitability
As such, it is a model to be copied, not criticised.
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