Yes, the SANFL didn’t play it right but they were also guided by the clubs who had the power. The delegates from the clubs held sway over the SANFL at the time.
History shows they got it wrong and now we are stuck with what we have got. The Norwood in the AFL ship has sailed and i certainly have no interest in seeing it happen.
omg, this wiki page is amazeballs.
Proposed VFL/AFL clubs - Wikipedia
Some highlights:
In 1980 East Perth of the West Australian Football League applied to join the VFL as the League’s first non-Victorian club. Nothing came of this application
Canberra / Australian Capital Territory (1981, 1986, 1988, 1990, 1993)
Norwood Redlegs (1982, 1985, 1986, 1990, 1994)
Oh well, bugger it. They won’t let us in. Then how about we…
Norwood Crows (1995)[edit]
During 1995 the Norwood Football Club, with the assistance of Wolf Blass, attempted to buy the Adelaide Crows and have them relocated to the Parade.[31]
Los Angeles Crocodiles (1987)[edit]
See also: Australian rules football in the United States
In 1987 a $10 million proposal from Perth magnate Errol Marron was put forward for a VFL expansion club based partly in Los Angeles (and partly in Melbourne) named the Los Angeles Crocodiles with profits from increased television rights to fund a local league. Stadiums in the proposal included the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. In October 1987 Ross Oakley announced that the VFL had officially rejected the bid.
The AFL has stated Auckland is its next expansion priority pending construction of a suitable stadium, possibly by 2028.
Darwin
Entry proposed for 2027-2030.[45][46][47] Official bid launched in 2021 after feasibility study completed in 2018. Business case continues to be developed along with stadium proposals. Former Collingwood president Eddie McGuire supports this bid as the 20th club.
And finally, boooooo!
In 1954 there was discussion within the VFL to expand the competition to include both Ballarat and Bendigo sides.[64] In 1955 the Ballarat Football Club officially applied to join the VFL. Although the application was referred to a special sub-committee that was to meet and make a recommendation, there is no evidence that the application was ever acted on by the VFL.
2 Likes
If the AFL want to blow up the sport and turn it into a multi billion $$$ league this is where investment needs to be spent;
Indian economy is going to go crazy over the next 15/20 years lifting huge amounts of population out of poverty…
Locally, the investment for this would be relatively easy to find
To come on co-incidentally and franchised
19th team Mumbai Cobras
20th team Delhi Jackals
Players contracts can only be max 2 years and come with a 20% COLA loading (afl investment) with a 1.5x allowance for salary cap
Free tickets to all home games for 1st and or 2nd season to arouse interest. There’s no value in gate anyway, value is in Indian company’s/manufacturers wanting to expose themselves to an Australian audience paying a premium for sponsorships
Each Aussie team spends 2 weeks in a row in india on away games once a year (excluding a away final if were to happen)
Each Indian team spends 2 / 4 weeks in Aus in a row on away games but
Within 3 years there’s local leagues establishing in Delhi and mumbai
and 200,000 Auskick participants
Within 5 years local leagues nation wide
And 1,0million Auskick participants
10 years, a National Amateur league
With 3 million Auskick participants
Within 20 years there’s a professional Indian national league licensing the rights from the AFL for 100s of million a season
Auskick has 5 million active participants
Footy Season runs from June to December (against cricket )
AFL Clubs are licensing branding, leasing players through the off season and international memberships are skyrockets making afl clubs 10s of millions a year and the AFL 350M+ Completely propping up the league.
30 years
With the vast spread of Indians globally there are local sophisticated amateur leagues across most countries on the planet
Forget LA, forget Norwood, forget Auckland, forget Tassie & forget WA3, India is $$$$$
Whats the benefit of it being 2 divisions?
Two final fives and pre finals.
More excitinger.
Plus, twenty teams is way too many to be thinking about.
Ive never understood the multiple division thing, just means my team might not play my friends/relatives teams and its harder to judge which teams are best between divisions.
You definitely get to find out at the end of the year.
Oh, and you can brag about being top of your division.
And of course making it harder to judge which teams are best between divisions makes finals more exciting.
It also messes with form/stats in that players arent playing the same division which means they may look better/worse then players in a stronger/weaker division. If it was up to me I would be aiming to have the fixture be as even as possible, every team plays each other once and then finals. Anything else just seems to complicate things for no good reason.
1 Like
I’m not talking about having a top and bottom division.
Edit: but fine, I assume you’re talking about a 20 team league with a final ten?
I don’t know how I’d feel going into a season wondering if we could go up a division rather than if we could make finals.
I’m not sure it could or should be considered for the afl largely because we see a consistent trend of teams rebounding up the ladder like Collingwood and Freo last year. Could you imagine last year with us and the Giants stuck in Div1 and the Pies stuck in Div2?
Also, our draft pick would be worse as a result
1 Like
Again, not talking about upper and lower divisions.
That would be a whole other thing with whole other problems.
The draft is a tricky one, though.
Eh. Might be just simpler to make it one way too big division, then.
23 rounds including a bye, play every team plus three double ups.
Final ten over five weeks.
And it will need to be a final ten, or way too many teams’ supporters will lose interest in the season way too early.
I know but you will still probably have a better and worse division just by chance, because teams get better or worse over the off season in unpredictable ways. Yes 20 team league with final 10 would be fine by me. Generally I prefer more footy then less so I wont really complain about a few double ups even though its not perfectly fair.
And teams will fold. Or probably merge.
I mean…they’re going to have to.
The difference between the strongest and weakest teams is already stark. Imagine bringing in two more.
Clubs are going to be stuck in the mid-lower half of the ladder for a decade, never contending, never being quite bad enough to get the best talent.
Those clubs with small support will die.
It’s true that one division would naturally be stronger than the other, perhaps not by a lot and mostly through chance, but to me that would just be another point of interest.
And you’d expect it to change over time.
Unfortunately I can actually see the AFL going the stupid Yank conference system.
They will give them some ■■■■■ name like the McLaughlin conference and the Demetriou conference and split it into 2x conferences of 10.
You will play everyone in your conference H&A (18 games) and then 5 from the other conference to make a 23 round season. A final 5 system in each conference and then the two conference winners play off in a best of 3 GF 
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I’m fine with that other than the best of three GF.
I have a tiny bit of interest in the possibility of one home, one away, one at the MCG.
But not enough, and the MCG would never go for the possibility of missing out on The GF anyway.
After about season the AFL would think, hey we can make more money by scheduling cross-division games [just as NFLand MLB do).
The only thing that worries me in a conference system is that like the US sports is that you don’t play everyone every year. I guess if you played everyone in your conference twice and then 5 from the other conference you would need to do the draw so that the 5 you don’t play one year you play the next.
My main issue with conferences is that often the best teams can be from the same conference so you you get the situation like you do in the US where the Conference final is often better than the actual final
If the AFL wants say 20 teams, I think divisions isn’t quite necessary yet. Of bigger importance is a fair draw which is only possible by playing each other twice home and away which isn’t possible. I would support a 19 game season (playing each other once) followed by an expanded finals. There would be 4 weeks to make up so whole bunch of ways to do it.
My original napkin proposal already did that.
Ten teams playing each other twice is only eighteen rounds.
You wouldn’t play a team a third time (before finals).