Almanac Footy Comment: Gather Round is the solution

 

 

by Miles Wilks

 

AFL’s Gather Round is the Solution

 

The AFL’s introduction of a Wildcard Round for 2026 does not solve the underlying issue facing the AFL with the fixture. The real issue is the lack of premiership winning moments for most club supporters due to the large number of teams in the competition. As there are 18 teams in the comp, if based on purely mathematical terms, your team technically has a 1 in 18% or 5.55% chance of winning the premiership.

A better solution to the problems with the fixture is to make proper use of the Gather Round by having a lightning premiership awarded during that round of matches. This will solve the underlying issue facing the AFL.

 

What is the REAL problem that needs to be solved?

The real problem the AFL should be attempting to solve is not how many teams make the finals, whether it is eight teams, 10 teams or 12 teams, but instead how many trophies are on offer.

It is rare for the majority of the supporters in the competition to have moments of joy as there is only one cup-winning moment in an 18-team competition. And with the compromised drafts due to father-son picks, academy picks and other levers, this situation isn’t likely to change quickly for supporters of certain teams.

 

A competitive marketplace

The first and most obvious point is that Australian football is right now in a competitive marketplace. Forty years ago the options for children in most states of Australia were – Australian football in winter, cricket in summer. There were basically no other sports offered to school children for the most part. Yet today there is a competitive marketplace where a myriad of sporting options are provided, whether it is soccer, rugby, basketball, baseball, volleyball, hockey and on and on it goes.

Nowadays, due to the pervasiveness of international media, youngsters are exposed to a wide variety of sporting options. Some kids will support an English soccer or an American basketball team that they will never see live, but the passion they have for these teams is far beyond what they have for Australian football teams.

If the marketplace wasn’t competitive then it would not really be imperative for the AFL management to adapt, change and offer solutions to problems. So if your team hasn’t got close to winning an AFL premiership in 20-30 years, it is only logical that for many people their passion for their team and the game in general will wane. English football/soccer, in contrast, offers four proper domestic trophies every season. Sure they have a sliding scale in worth, but winning each trophy still holds merit.

 

Let’s look at the last time these EPL soccer teams won trophies (ignoring European competitions) and compare it to some AFL clubs.

Chelsea                            2017/18                  FA Cup

Manchester United            2023/24                  FA Cup

Liverpool                           2024/25                  Premier League trophy

Even a relatively unfashionable team such as Newcastle United have won some silverware within the last decade. They won the League Cup in 2025. Other lesser known teams such as Leicester City won the FA Cup in 2020-21 and Crystal Palace won that trophy in 2024/25.

 

Now let’s look at some AFL clubs and their last piece of premiership silverware.

Adelaide                           1998

Carlton                             1995

Essendon                         2000

 

Introducing a second competition does not take away from the all-consuming joy of the premiership trophy, but a second trophy provides some respite, an oasis of joy, on a long trek out of a desert so to speak. If the trek out of a desert to premiership success requires a 1,000 kilometres trek with no water on offer until you get to the end (metaphorically speaking, let’s assume that is a 20-year wait between premiership trophies), then most people won’t make the 1,000 kilometre walk through scorching heat successfully; but if it is only 500 kilometres and there is the slight sustenance with a Gather Round premiership half way in, then that 1,000 kilometre journey doesn’t seem so daunting. The point is that AFL supporters need some moments of joy between the 20, 30 or even 40-year wait for premiership success. In contrast, what the AFL has offered to supporters is the possibility of their team making the Wildcard Round in the AFL season proper. This does not offer any real sustenance.

 

The peculiarity of the AFL

The fact of the matter is that there is no major sporting competition in the world that has 18 or more teams in it and just one trophy winning moment. Go through the list – all the major soccer competitions whether English, Spanish, German or any of them in Europe have at least one knock-out cup competition as well as their most esteemed trophy that is won at the end of the season.

In the MLB, there are three trophies awarded with the winner of the American League and the National League competitions both being awarded a trophy before they go onto the World Series competition. A similar system works with the NFL.

 

The proposal

The proposal, therefore, is to solve this issue during the Gather Round. One option is to divide teams into knock-out groups of four in which they play three round robin games of approximately 30 or 40 minutes. The highest placed team in each group would then go onto the next round. The two grand final teams from the previous year would sit out the first round robin games. Presumably more knock-out games would be played on the Sunday and then the final game would be played the following Wednesday as a stand alone event and would maybe go for 60 minutes…still well short of a proper AFL game.

 

Changing locations

One of the key aspects to this proposal is to ensure that the Gather Round premiership matches are played at different locations every year. The quality of the football infrastructure in Cairns, for example, is impressive. Cazaly Stadium is a top notch venue that can hold approximately 13,000 people. Obviously you can’t have all matches in Cairns, so if the Gather Round matches were played in Northern Queensland you would need to have a joint Townsville/Cairns operation with Riverway Stadium in Townsville being the other major venue. It can hold about 10,000 people. Then perhaps a suburban ground in Cairns, such as Griffiths Park holding about 5,000 people, would be a third venue alternative.

 

The year after that the matches could be jointly played in WA at Albany (Collingwood Park) and Bunbury (Hands Oval) which can accommodate 14,000 people. The year after that it could be played in NSW at Albury and Wagga….and so on. Australian football is the ‘Australian game’ so it would seem only logical to get the game out to different locations in Australia.

 

 The rewards

Let’s assume there is a general disquiet about a 2^nd premiership (The Gather Round premiership). You can hear the comments already, “It’s a Mickey Mouse competition that doesn’t mean anything!” Then you up the ante, as in you up the rewards of winning this competition so that it is taken seriously. Some possible options include: giving the team that wins the competition the 10^th pick in the following year’s draft, or give the players a financial reward, or give the winning team a home final at the end of the year (if they qualify for finals). They are just some of the incentives to ensure it isn’t treated like the pre-season competition was before it was disbanded.

This concept isn’t about ‘handing out participation trophies’, it is instead about ensuring that the interest in the game is sustained for more supporters. Having Wildcard rounds in the AFL season proper does not solve the underlying problem facing the game. It just masks the issues and leaves it for others to solve.

 

Miles’ book Champions of Carlton can be purchased HERE, and at all good bookstores.

 

 

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