AFL CLUB presidents have exhorted the league to push forward immediately on plans to add another two teams to the competition.
Tentative plans for expansion had been offered by the AFL last month, with 2012 nominated as the year when the AFL would like to add franchises in both the western Sydney and Gold Coast markets.
However, at Thursday’s presidents’ meeting at AFL House in Melbourne, the clubs put forward their collective belief that expanding the league was matter of urgency.
AFL commissioner Mike Fitzpatrick said the view of the clubs was terrific news for the league.
“The clear message from the meeting today is that this is a historic day in the history of the AFL and the AFL competition,” Fitzpatrick said.
“(The presidents) are excited by the future and have expressed their unanimous support for the principle of expanding the game from 16 teams to 18 teams.
“They have a strong preference for 18 teams over 17 teams, and the very clear message from the club presidents was ‘get going, get to work on expanding the competition, don’t waste any time, do it’.”
AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou said the clubs were concerned that the initial time-frame for expansion would be too long.
“2012 was on our radar, and the question now for all of us, and what the clubs have asked us to go away and do, is ask is that bold enough?” he said.
“Everyone acknowledged that we’re certainly ready for the Gold Coast, and that we’re probably more advanced in western Sydney than we thought we were, and the challenge for us is, how bold do we want to be?”
“It’s a really exciting time for the AFL and a really exciting headache to have, I can assure you.
“We’ve been saying for a long time that the cost of not expanding, we believe, is a far greater cost to the competition than doing it, and I think we were able to convince the presidents of that.”
The AFL will sign off on a bidding process for the Gold Coast licence from Friday, although it was announced that a preferred bidder had already been established and that the AFL would be dealing exclusively dealing with that consortium for the next few months.
It was also confirmed that the Southport Sharks had expressed an interest in being involved with that consortium.
Demetriou acknowledged that the depth of talent available was an issue of discussion during the day, but he said any problem could be overcome with the help of the clubs.
“We believe this part of the process is something we need to engage the clubs in, we need to tap into the expertise of recruiters, football managers, CEOs, and the like,” he said.
“We’ve learned some lessons from the past and we went through a variety of scenarios with the clubs today that involved rookies, pre-season drafts and priority access to players, and we just put that all out on the table for discussion.
“Every year about 120 players get nominated by the clubs for state screening in the draft, about 80 go to the draft camp, there’s 200, then about 80 players get delisted, about 20 retire, and the clubs recruit about 120 players between the rookie draft, pre-season and the draft itself.
“There’s about 300 players we think in the pool, and about 120 are being procured by clubs. We don’t believe the talent pool is shrinking, in fact we think there’s great opportunity for growth.”
Demetriou said the past decade had seen a transformation in Ireland, New South Wales and Queensland, all of which had become fertile recruiting grounds, and there was potential for others places, such as South Africa, to be future contributors to the pool.
On the matter of financing the new clubs, Fitzpatrick said that the new clubs – requiring around $30 million per year to run – would effectively “pay for themselves” through the additional TV revenue from having an extra match every weekend.
