The AFL’s wildcard finals delivered everything the AFL wanted, but is the experiment good for the game?
The numbers will tell you wildcard weekend was a roaring success. For the AFL that is all that matters.
The league’s case for the wildcard round is a business one. As a business case, it was a phenomenal success. As a sporting case, where integrity, fairness and finding the best teams remain important – flimsy imperatives in a competition with a fixture where compromise is the rule, not the exception – the justification remains doubtful.
As a case of theatre, the wildcard was box-office drama and the most compelling argument the AFL could have hoped for.
The numbers will say that on both nights the footy was the third-top program viewed nationally after channels Seven and Nine’s news bulletins.
About one million people watched on Friday night – 800,000 on free to air TV, another 166,000 streaming and an untold number watching on Foxtel (untold that is because they won’t tell us. Fox is cagey about these things).
On Saturday night, there were 720,000 watching free on TV and another 153,000 streaming.
On Friday night more than 81,000 people were at the MCG; on Saturday night 91,000 squeezed in.
In recent years, there would have been no men’s footy on this weekend at all. Instead, 172,000 people went along and millions more watched on TV. This is actually a flimsier argument than it sounds. The AFL created the bye weekend a few years ago, and now it uses the wildcard as an answer to fixing the problem of having that bye. Groucho Marx might be consulting.
The business case says the raw numbers, the money generated, the people attracted to watch the game make wildcard an overwhelming success. Clearly the biggest wildcard round they’ve ever had!
Wildcard crowds
- Western Bulldogs vs Collingwood (Friday night): 81,036
- Melbourne vs Carlton (Saturday night): 91,733
By comparison, the NRL this week had viewing numbers about half the AFL’s. Cute.
So the reasoning is the eyeballs are on the AFL and not drifting to other things, and those huge crowds engendered excitement when otherwise (for male football, there is still the AFLW) there would have been the high drama of … a legends’ match.
But this year they had Collingwood one night and Carlton the next. Of course they got crowds and TV numbers like that.
If next year’s wildcard round is North Melbourne v Gold Coast and GWS v Port Adelaide, and the numbers are barely a fraction of this year’s, will the AFL say “well that didn’t work, look at the crowds”?
For the team that finishes 10th in a competition of 18 to be rewarded with a chance to play finals remains illogical.
Melbourne, who finished the regular season 10 points – two and a half wins – ahead of Carlton had to play a side that was rewarded for two thirds of a great season.
The football on Friday night was tense and tight and a cracking game that finished after the siren. But it also had the feel of eighth playing ninth.
The argument to counter the idea of a lack of integrity inherent in rewarding mediocre teams is that wildcard is another AFL retrofit to fix other fixturing problems.
Maybe it is fair to give a chance to two sides that might have finished outside the old final eight only by virtue of the compromised fixture. Maybe that compromised fixture punished them more than the teams above them with short breaks, cross-country travel (clearly not Collingwood’s reason for finishing ninth), the number of terrible versus terrific teams they played … or coaches they had to sack mid-year.
Wildcard round will continue because it was high drama. The football was thrilling, tight throughout both games, intense, pressured and great theatre. One bloke hit the post four times, the best small forward in the game missed shots he would usually kick, the two best players in the competition went head-to-head and both played well.
Carlton and Collingwood are box-office teams, so drama follows them. But when one plays in a game decided after the siren and the other is riding a wave and in-season turnaround unseen in football, then that drama captivates everyone.
The wildcard round meant Carlton’s ride was not forced to end this year in Shakespearean (wispy half-back, good on his left, played at the Globe) drama, achingly short of finals.
The greatest gift the wildcard gave was keeping alive the best storyline of the year. No one – save for Melbourne who, were enjoying an extraordinary turnaround under a new coach of their own (and OK probably also a lot of people who just hate Carlton) – wanted to see the Josh Fraser transformation stop here. Now the Blues play Geelong, a team they have beaten the past three times.
Carlton’s story has delivered the AFL the narrative to go with the economics.
Friday night was a close, tough game where it felt like Bulldogs should be five goals clear for most of the night, but Craig McRae’s Collingwood have a gift for competing and staying in touch. It ended in a missed shot at goal after the siren. This actually shouldn’t have been a surprise, it was the fourth Collingwood game this year decided by a kick on or after the siren.
Football likes to present itself as romantic (there is no other reason to have the father-son rule), but business pragmatism is always more compelling. Without getting into the weeds, romance delivered Tasmania a team, but business delivered Tasmania a roofed-stadium-or-bust ultimatum that was not demanded of either Gold Coast or GWS in the states the AFL’s marketeers coveted. Romance only goes so far.
This wildcard round of quasi-finals, or round 25 if you’re Ed Richards, has given the AFL the most perfect weekend it could have hoped for. It doesn’t necessarily make it the right thing for football, but it makes it the concept that is here to say.
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Michael Gleeson is an award-winning senior sports writer specialising in AFL and athletics.Connect via X or email.