By Jon Pierik
As footy fans across the country poured over the AFL fixture this week, looking for the pros and cons of their team’s schedule for 2025, Josh Bowler was entitled to breathe a heavy sigh of relief.
For the previous five months, Bowler, the AFL’s head of broadcast operations and scheduling, was consumed by thoughts of the fixture.
AFL broadcasting and scheduling boss Josh Bowler is happy with what the 2025 fixture looks like.Credit: Joe Armao
Was it fair? Were the right teams being shown in prime-time? How many five-day breaks did each team have? How would the clubs and their supporters react, and perhaps more importantly, were the broadcasters’ needs being met? These were just some of the questions occupying his mind.
It’s enough to keep a person awake at night.
In fact, it’s not uncommon for Bowler to be woken by a lightbulb moment during those crazy months when he is leading the formulation of the most anticipated annual list in Australian Sport.
Thankfully, he has some high-tech help.
A sophisticated computer system run by US sports software company Fastbreak has more than a few “rules” it must adhere to when Bowler begins to get serious the day after the grand final.
“There are over 400 rules or constraints in the system. That’s everything from what venues aren’t available, so we’ll have a venue block, through to the standard rules – we have rules around a five-day break, each club has to have 11 home, 11 away games, so on and so forth,” Bowler said.
“They essentially get preloaded into the system, and then we adjust the priority of those rules from there.”
The priority of those rules has been to maximise attendances and broadcast ratings in the first year of a $4.5 billion deal with Seven and Foxtel, and culminated this week in the release of the 2025 schedule, which, as always, left some clubs and fans happier than others.
It’s been Bowler’s primary focus since July, although it’s something never too far from the lips of any club boss throughout the season.
“Throughout the year you are always thinking about different things which could influence your thinking about next year. But properly actually doing work on it is from July,” Bowler said.
“We do a heap of prep work basically from July through to mid-September. That’s when we start to get everything across … to build what the actual rules are in the computer system, and then the week post the grand final is when the computer starts running versions for us to review.”
Those full versions can be up to three a day for three weeks, so there can be about 60 potential fixtures before the final draft is signed off.
Fastbreak plots the NBA and WNBA schedules (and has seed investment from the NBA), but Bowler says the AFL fixture is more complex.
“As a first step, it’s mainly based around match-ups and rounds. Once you have match-ups in place, and all your rounds are looking good, the last week (of discussion) is more based around the scheduling of those games – which games are on Thursday, Friday nights, who will broadcast those games, then the start times, the balance of each club’s home games overall,” Bowler said.
“You don’t want a club to have, for example, a Sunday afternoon game for every home game. You want to provide a bit of a mix.”
Bowler said Fox Footy’s exclusive live coverage in Victoria of all Saturday matches through the opening 16 weeks next season made planning easier on that particular day, but on the flip side, there was now the challenge of scheduling 23 weeks of Thursday-night football.
“If a game is on a Saturday, it’s then trying to optimise the best slot for viewers at home and for the crowd. Given they are all on Foxtel, we work really closely with Foxtel to try and achieve the best flow for the day. Seven, coming out of that Saturday night (slot) ... onto a Thursday night … has added more constraints,” Bowler said.
“Generally, what you will see is a team on the Thursday or Friday the week prior will play the following Thursday to minimise five-day breaks, and so, over a period of time, you start to run out of teams that … haven’t had a five-day break recently.
“Last year, we took the step of 14 (Thursday night games), and that was a big jump, but we thought that was the right number with the additional five-day break (and its) impact on clubs. We didn’t want to push it too far all in one go.
“This year we have clearly heard the feedback from clubs and fans that Thursday-night footy is great, players enjoy it, and (we have) expanded it this year. The new broadcast deal has enabled it.”
Under the collective bargaining agreement between the AFL and players, clubs can have only three five-day breaks – an increase from one under the previous deal. There is also a quirk that the opponent of a side coming off a five-day break cannot have had a break longer than six days.
There is an inherent imbalance in the fixture, with each team drawn to play 23 games in an 18-team competition, which means they come up against six of their opponents twice and the remaining 11 just once. That this comes within the scope of 11 games at home, 11 away and one at Gather Round, makes it difficult to keep everyone happy.
In a bid to keep the double-up games as fair as possible, the AFL has a “weighted rule”, where the 18 clubs are divided into three groups of six based on their ladder position the previous year – first to sixth, seventh to 12th and 13th to 18th. Geelong, for instance, will play last year’s bottom-placed team, Richmond, twice next year, much to the chagrin of talkback callers from rival clubs. But the Cats will also have to play reigning premier the Brisbane Lions twice.
While the aim is to have each club play twice against two or three teams in the same group and twice against one or two teams in the other groups, Bowler said that system had to be viewed “holistically”.
“We want to ensure everyone has a balanced fixture based on where they finished the year before, but it’s not necessarily prescribed for every club because it would literally be impossible to do a final fixture if we did that,” he said.
If that all sounds a convoluted, spare a thought for Bowler, who is known to have a lightbulb moment in the middle of the night, whether that’s a fresh idea, or something that may have been overlooked.
“Yep. Not in the final version but it happens in the whole (final) month. There is always something I am thinking about,” he said.
And it’s presumably not going to get any easier, with the inclusion of the league’s 19th club, Tasmania Devils, on the horizon, ensuring an uneven number of teams. Bowler, however, says this could open up opportunities, particularly on when the bye rounds are used.
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