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Why the AFL cannot back out on Thursday night
SEN • October 28th, 2025 8:43 am
SEN’s Sam Edmund thinks that the AFL must continue to commit to the fixturing of Thursday night football despite a poor reaction from fans towards the timeslot in the back half of this season.
With 2025 being the first year of the AFL’s new seven-year media broadcast deal, this saw a change in how the game's fixture was created.
One of the biggest changes that it would create was the proliferation of Thursday night football.
This year, 23 games were scheduled on a Thursday compared to 14 in 2024, with the reasoning being that fans and broadcast partners wanted more of the product.
It would also serve as a way for Channel 7 to broadcast the same number of free-to-air matches as it did in its previous broadcast rights deal, whilst Fox Footy had the exclusive rights to matches on Saturday, barring any marquee matchups that fall on that day.
However, those Thursday night matches seem to correlate with some blowout margins, with eight of the 23 matches having a margin of 40 points or greater, while only three games in that slot had a margin of two goals or less.
And while Edmund acknowledges that some of the games that were played on Thursday were ‘underwhelming’, he believes that the AFL cannot back away from the timeslot.
“They better not blink on Thursday night,” Edmund declared on SEN Breakfast.
“If they blink on Thursday night footy after going to 23 (games), I can’t have that.
“They went to 23, and okay, some of the games were underwhelming, but you get underwhelming games on a Sunday, on a Friday night.
“You cannot back away from Thursday nights. I know some people hate it, but you can’t.
“The genie is out of the bottle.”
Kane Cornes agreed with Edmund, saying that the addition of Thursday night helps provide a more even spread of games over each round of footy.
“The footy week is better when there is Thursday night footy,” Cornes explained.
“It just spreads it out, it shortens the week, gives you stuff to talk about in the lead in to the weekend."
The AFL's fixture release for the 2026 season is expected to be made in the coming weeks, with the last two seasons having had their fixtures announced in November.
