Tasmanian team may not be the last as AFL eyes growth in ACT and NT
The AFL’s expansion plans are on a roll, with record crowds, booming memberships and the first non-Victorian grand final in 18 years.
Tasmanian team may not be the last as AFL eyes growth in ACT and NT
AFL chairman Richard Goyder says it would be only logical for the league to consider adding another team to the competition after the long-awaited Tasmanian Devils are bedded down, if the code keeps growing as it has in a landmark year for the league’s expansion plans.Speaking ahead of Saturday’s grand final – the first time since 2006 that two non-Victorian teams have faced off – Mr Goyder said it had been a record-breaking season for membership, television ratings and participation in the home-grown code.
“We’ve had closer games, we’ve had record crowds, we’ve got record membership, one in 20 Australians is a member of an AFL club, television viewership is up double digits in Sydney, and 7¾ million people went through the turnstiles for our home and away games,” Mr Goyder told The Australian Financial Review in an exclusive interview.
In 2028, Tasmania will become the last state to have an AFL team. Victoria has 10 teams while the other four states have two teams each. Canberra and the Northern Territory are yet to be represented, but football fans have long speculated about their inclusion.
“People say there will be an uneven number of teams after Tassie joins … I wouldn’t say its top of the agenda [but] you never say never,” Mr Goyder said, in the AFL’s strongest comments that it would be open to the push.
“If the game continues to develop on the trajectory it has, logically in the future whoever the commission is at the time will probably want to look at it.”
Mr Goyder said the AFL would first press to have more games in Far North Queensland and the Northern Territory while Tasmania is bedded down as the 19th club in 2028.
“We would like to have more footy played in the NT, we play in Darwin and Alice Springs. We would like more footy played in northern Queensland. And with the women’s game, there are a lot more opportunities too.”
AFL v NRL
The comments can only fuel the perennial debate among fans about which of the two largest domestic football competitions – the AFL and the NRL – is best, the largest, and the most representative.
Both leagues have unchallenged territory – Victoria belongs to AFL, for example, and NSW is NRL heartland – and both also have aggressive expansion strategies. Witness NRL’s season opener in Las Vegas.
The AFL launched its season this year with a special round featuring NSW and Queensland teams in their home states. Two seasons ago, it pinched an NRL idea and played every game due one week in the same city in a promotional AFL Gather Round.
Australian Rugby League Commission chairman Peter V’landys this week hit back at claims the NRL was losing the battle to AFL in rugby league heartland, after Channel 7 commentator Brian Taylor reignited the feud by pointing to the packed Sydney Cricket Ground while the NRL game next door was half empty.
More than 44,000 fans turned out to watch the Swans fight their way into the grand final, according to independent crowd data website Austadiums, while 19,124 watched the NRL’s Sharks beat the Cowboys at Allianz Stadium. Austadiums data shows the AFL averaged 38,056 people at a match this season, while the NRL averaged 20,207. More than 8 million fans watched live AFL matches, while 4 million attended NRL games.
But the AFL has much bigger stadiums than NRL, so even if more fans wanted to go they couldn’t compete with the AFL numbers. And the codes are at different points in their finals’ series. The AFL’s grand final takes place this weekend, while the NRL has another week to go.
The ratings game
TV ratings are tricky to measure because of difficulties getting reliable numbers across multiple free-to-air and paid broadcasts. Data from measurement provider OzTAM shows that 938,000 people tuned into the two AFL preliminary finals, while 634,000 NRL fans viewed the league semi-finals.
It is difficult to provide like-for-like comparisons of the two sports. Rugby league fans can watch the finals on Channel 9 or 9Now. Channel 7 doesn’t hold the digital rights to AFL matches, which means it can’t be accessed on 7Plus. Those wanting to watch require a Kayo or a Foxtel subscription.
Foxtel’s subscription television ratings are also not publicly available, leaving Kayo, Foxtel Go and Foxtel Now as the measure of audience consumption. Foxtel also uses a different measurement provider – Kantar – to aggregate these numbers.
Both codes are big business for broadcasting. The AFL secured a record television deal in 2022, with Seven West Media and Foxtel winning the media rights from 2025 to 2031 in a historic deal worth $4.5 billion.
The NRL’s current five-year deal with Foxtel, Nine Entertainment, Sky New Zealand and other international and radio partners is worth more than $2 billion and is not due to expire until 2027.
In 2024, the Nine Network had an average television audience of 521,600 for the home and away NRL series, up 11 per cent on the previous year. There are still two weeks to go in the NRL finals, but the average audience for Nine is 759,100.
Seven says the home and away AFL season average audience was 547,000, while Foxtel’s AFL streaming average was 239,000. Finals coverage to date is also larger than NRL: Seven is averaging 968,000 viewers and Foxtel’s online services have an average of 410,000. The Foxtel numbers don’t include people with set-top boxes, so the total is almost certainly even bigger.
