Cricket
Racing
Rugby
League
Motorsport
Football
Golf
Combat Sports
Basketball
Tennis
Other Sports
Sport Nation
It's time for Mark Ricciuto to save the AFL
Michelangelo Rucci • May 20th, 2025 6:30 pm
It is time to call a shovel by its real name - and issue a challenge to someone to dig the AFL out of the hole it has dug for itself.
Let's just forget all that keeps being fed to us like blind sheep about attendances, ratings, membership numbers and sponsorship deals.
The business at AFL House is good because there is no real competition as a winter sport. Sorry, Peter V'landys.
But the business of football is not great.
Listen to premiership coach Chris Scott call it for what it is ...
“There’s heaps (of things to be fixed), but it’s difficult to bring up, because the headline is you’re complaining,” Scott said post Geelong’s Round 10 win over Port Adelaide.
“Four umpires doesn’t work in my opinion, but it’s a long list of things in a category that falls into what’s my opinion, but it doesn’t mean in right.
“I think the stand rule has been a good rule tweak for attacking, offensive, football. It’s just not enforced the way it was when it came in. It’s worthy of debate.”
Yes, that is a long list, Chris - and I am sure he brought all this to Andrew Dillon's attention when he took the Geelong coach, among others, to a Melbourne pub last night.
The AFL has spent too much time from the commission table to the executive acting as Australia's alternative government with a social agenda for change in fields that the fans wish the league would avoid.
So, who can save the game from itself?
The AFL Commission needs to get back to being a football forum with advice from lawyers and financiers. The order of power has taken the wrong path with businessmen rather than football souls.
A decade ago, Mark Ricciuto was inclined to answer any call to be on the AFL Commission as a recently retired player.
He went to the Adelaide Football Club board, where his time is up.
He might not like it when a seat at the AFL Commission table would cost him millions in lost income from a top-rating breakfast radio show and his football commentary. And we all know the Brownlow Medallist has many mouths to feed at home.
But the game needs his knowledge at the AFL Commission table.
If not you, Mark, who will step up?
