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Whateley: At what point will the AFL become the modern national behemoth?
SEN • August 2nd, 2025 6:23 pm
SEN's Gerard Whateley has called upon the AFL to be a modern day behemoth as the league starts to prepare for its expansion to 19 teams.
This comes after an article was published in The Age, which spoke about how the AFL season may change with the 23-game season no longer a mathematical possibility when the Tasmanian Devils come into the competition in 2028.
As a result of these discussions which has seen State of Origin and a in-season tournament brought up to potentially compensate any lost fixtures from the home and away season, Whateley has questioned why the AFL, to some extent, is stuck within the old ways of the VFL and wondered who could bring some new ideas for the competition to succeed.
“At what point will the AFL become the modern national behemoth that it should be?” he posed on SEN’s Crunch Time.
“Who’s got the imagination for it? How will they present it? How will they get everyone to buy into it, and when does it start?
“Like we’re still just bolting on rooms to the old VFL. When are we going to remodel and become the modern AFL?”
Sam Edmund then jumped in and added that the person likely to be on that task is the AFL’s new Chief Operating Officer, Tom Harley, who will begin once the season concludes.
He believes that with three years left before the Devils come in, it should be Harley’s main task throughout his tenure to ensure that the AFL fixes its past errors, such as unequal fixturing, amongst other issues, to ensure smooth sailing for when we do have an odd number of teams.
“I’d just love to have Tom Harley in the room so we could ask him all these questions,” Edmund said.
“This starts when Tom Harley starts for me, and it’s probably started already.
“And Tassie is the trigger, isn’t it. Because when Tassie comes in and we go to 19 (teams), something has to give.
“So do we spend now, the next three years till 2028, working out how this plays, and this is Tom Harley’s mandate.
“And then when Tassie comes, we say, ‘Right, we finally have the trigger to get things right or more right than they’ve ever been when it comes to fixture inequalities and how many times we play each other and all those sorts of things.
“But it’s as long as a piece of string, at the moment, isn’t it?”
Whateley would continue to labour his point about the AFL needing to be innovators once more, noting how other sports have used abandoned concepts from the AFL, like State of Origin.
The respected sports broadcaster also felt that, alongside the introduction of Tasmania into the competition, the next TV rights deal, which would start in 2032, would also be a pivotal moment for the competition to help resolve the issues it faces.
“They’ve (the AFL) danced around this for a little while,” he continued.
“I hope it's Tom Harley’s number one project. And there’s two triggers (for this).
“When Tassie comes in and when the next TV rights deal comes up.
"So, pick your poison, and are we doing it on 19 teams or are we doing it on 20 teams?
“The history of these things fascinates me. We were a highly imaginative competition.
“We did rep footy better than anyone else. The idea was borrowed and then perfected by the NRL.
“We had in-season trading of players. We had a fixture that made perfect sense, and we had an in-season competition which was highly successful for a couple of decades.
“And we have abandoned everything, and now we are just so…all we can see is home and away footy in a year where home and away footy has been really disappointing.
For more of this chat with the SEN Crunch Time team, hit the play button below.
