WHILE the final siren in the Grand Final each year means the end of another season, it also signals the start of the hard yards for the AFL's fixture team.

Lead by head of broadcasting and scheduling Josh Bowler and Canadian consultant Rick Stone, the fixture for the men's season – 18 clubs, 23 games each, 24 rounds – is a complex mathematical problem with literally trillions and trillions of possible solutions.

The many requests and requirements of fans, broadcasters, clubs, players, venues and more only add to the complexity.

It can best be described as a giant Rubik's Cube, where moving just one square – shifting a single game by a day or even a few hours – can throw the entire schedule off kilter.

The priorities

The AFL has some clear priorities when building the fixture: maximising eyeballs, both at venue and on television, and making an inherently unfair fixture as fair as possible.

Since the old VFL competition expanded to 14 teams in 1987, the fixture has been uneven, with teams playing some clubs twice and others once. Under the current 18-team, 23-games-per-team structure, it's impossible to make the fixture truly fair and equitable.

The 18 clubs also have their wish lists of fixture priorities in terms of when and where they play, while there are binding contracts with venues that require a certain number of games at each ground per season.

Throw in the desires of fans, the needs of the broadcast partners and the thoughts of a range of other stakeholders, the considerations for Bowler and his team are endless. 

The weighted rule

The uneven fixture makes the AFL something of a rarity in global sport. In 2025, the 18 teams will again play 23 games each; once against 11 teams and twice against six teams, with 11 games at home, 11 away and one at Gather Round.

To help make these double-up games as fair as possible, the AFL uses a 'weighted rule', where the 18 clubs are split into three groups of six based on their ladder position the previous year – first to sixth, seventh to 12th and 13th to 18th.

Each club is then allocated their double-up games based on these groups. The goal is for each club to play twice against 2-3 teams in the same group and twice against 1-2 teams in the other groups.

This means the difficulty of a club's fixture is affected by their performance the previous year. If you finish high on the ladder, you will play more double-up games the following year against other teams that finished high on the ladder, and vice versa.

But it's an imperfect system and when a team performs well above or below expectations, the fixture can add to that trend. In 2024, Hawthorn was widely expected to have another poor year and was consequently given double-up games against Richmond and North Melbourne. But the Hawks defied expectations and surged into finals, thanks in part to the four wins they banked against the lowly Kangaroos and Tigers.

Rivalries also play a major role in the double-up games. It's easy to see why it's in everyone's interests –  the clubs, the fans, the broadcasters, the venues – for massive rivals like Collingwood and Carlton to play more than once each year, while the derbies in Perth, Adelaide, Sydney and Queensland are all played twice a year as well.

The weighted rule also means the fixture cannot be built until the end of the previous season, once the final finishing positions have been determined and clubs can be split into three groups of six. It gives the AFL fixturing team a matter of weeks, rather than months, to build the final schedule.

Thursday nights and Super Saturday

An extra consideration for the 2025 fixture build is the new broadcast deal, which will include 'Super Saturday' on Foxtel and Kayo.

Under the new agreement, all matches played on Saturdays in the first eight rounds of the season (and the first 15 rounds in Victoria) will be broadcast exclusively live on Foxtel/Kayo.

It means – hypothetically – if a Victorian club was to be given 15 Saturday games to start the season, they would not appear live on free-to-air television until round 16. However, to ensure each club has a spread of games on both free-to-air and subscription TV, they have been given a mix of games in various time slots.

Helping this variety is another feature of the new broadcast deal, which guarantees Thursday night football live and free on Channel Seven for at least the first 15 rounds of the season.

Short breaks

The AFL's fixture team must also consider the length of the gaps between each club's games, meaning each round cannot be treated in isolation.

Under the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) with the players, clubs are not able to play after a four-day break. It means if a club plays on a Sunday, the earliest they can play the following week is the Friday night, ruling them out of a Thursday night game.

There are limits on five-day breaks as well, with the recent CBA permitting three five-day breaks per club, per season – an increase from one under the previous deal. In addition, the opponent of a side coming off a five-day break must itself have had a break of no longer than six days.

These factors reduce the number of options available when putting together a fixture. For example, if Collingwood plays on a Friday night and Carlton plays on the Sunday of the same round, the Magpies and Blues could not play each other on Friday night of the following week because the Pies would be coming off a seven-day break compared to just five days for the Blues.

Not all five-day breaks are the same, either. For example, if a Perth-based team coming off a five-day break is scheduled to play an away game against a Victorian club coming off a six-day break, that will skew the odds further in the Victorian side's favour.

Hitting the road

Each club plays 11 home games and 11 away each season, plus one in Gather Round, but the travel factor is far more significant for some clubs than others.

Teams in Perth, Adelaide, Sydney and Queensland travel much more during the year than Victorian clubs, and the travel for all teams is another factor to consider when the fixture is made.

For example, a team playing interstate on a Friday night won't return home until the following day, which impacts recovery time and effectively reduces the break before the next game.

To reduce inequity, the fixture team aims for clubs to play no more than two home games in a three-week span and no more than two away games in three weeks.

While the travel burden for non-Victorian teams is incredibly high, they do enjoy a true home-ground advantage, playing interstate sides at home in every game except their local derbies.

Victorian clubs have significantly less travel, but being a co-tenant of the MCG or Marvel Stadium can swing both ways. Playing an 'away' game at your home venue is clearly an advantage, but playing a 'home' game at the MCG against a fellow MCG tenant reduces the home-ground advantage.

The marquee timeslots

Fans – both at the ground and watching at home – and broadcasters want the big games and the best teams playing in prime time. It means clubs with large fan bases that are expected to compete for a premiership will get more games on Thursday and Friday nights than others. 

Carlton (eight), Collingwood and Brisbane (seven each) had the most Thursday and Friday night games in the initial 2024 fixture release, while Hawthorn and West Coast had none.

However, Hawthorn has a competition-high seven Thursday and Friday night games in first 16 rounds of 2025, reflecting the increased watchability of the Hawks. Essendon, with its massive supporter base, also has seven Thursday and Friday night games in that time.

But, as Hawthorn showed this year, clubs can prove everyone wrong and be more or less successful than expected. This is why the AFL does not lock in the timeslots for rounds 16-24 until well after the season gets underway. Once the cream rises to the top in the early part of the year, the in-form teams can be put in the marquee slots in the back part of the season.

The certainties

While there are literally billions of possibilities, some games – like Collingwood v Essendon on Anzac Day – are inked in from the start of the fixture build.

More recent traditions, such as Dreamtime and games on Good Friday, Easter Monday, Anzac Day Eve and King's Birthday, also need to be factored in along with the flow-on effect of these match-ups.

For example, with Collingwood and Melbourne playing on King's Birthday, neither club is able to play the following Thursday or Friday night because the break is too short.

The outcome

The giant Rubik's Cube that is the 2025 fixture was released this week, with all the above considerations factored in.

The next step will be finalising the time slots for rounds 16-23, which are normally announced in May, and round 24, which has previously been confirmed in early August.

And then, once the 2025 premier is confirmed on the last day of September, Bowler and the AFL fixturing team will turn their focus to 2026.