THE AFL will investigate the viability of building a third stadium in Melbourne to cope with the extra traffic from the introduction of two new teams in 2011 and 2012.

“I think it’s very important that we canvas all options and it would be absolutely remiss of us not to be doing that work,” AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou told Melbourne radio station 3AW on Friday.

“As we continue to do the work on the expansion of the competition and you introduce 17th and 18th teams and you start to think about 22 or 24 rounds, all of a sudden you have about 30 or 40 extra games of which probably 26 to 28 could be in Melbourne.

“We’re obviously looking at all options because that would mean, if we maintain our current policy with stadia, that we would have a very crowded MCG and Telstra Dome.

“We can’t play any more games at Skilled Stadium so one option obviously is to play as many games [as possible] at Telstra Dome and the MCG or another option which could be a boutique stadium.”

Demetriou said the possibility of a third AFL ground in metropolitan Melbourne had been raised at a conference involving the 16 club chief executives during the week.

“We basically said to them that we understand that the stadium economics isn’t working for the clubs in Melbourne, that we need to try and get a better return out of the MCG and Telstra Dome for them down the track if and when we introduce the two teams.

“In 2011 and 2012, there could be, if we go to 24 rounds, another 40 games.”

Demetriou said the investigation into a possible new stadium that could hold “26 or 28 games” was still in its infancy and had not reached the point of scouting locations, but he added such a project might not necessarily go ahead with the MCG and Telstra Dome capable of hosting extra matches.

“There is capacity, and there’s other things like you could start to play on Monday nights and you could look at other various things to squeeze it in,” he said.

“But then there’s things like the surface and so forth. I think we would be remiss if we weren’t looking at all options and doing the work.

“[But] we’ve got time, the western Sydney team comes in in 2012 and it’s only 2008 so this work will take a few months.”