AFL fixtures boss Travis Auld has broken down why some teams were snubbed of free-to-air games in the recent fixture release.
Gold Coast, Fremantle and St Kilda are the three teams who will be exclusively on Fox Footy between rounds two and five, which would be disappointing for fans without access to pay TV given they also can’t attend games.
Auld said they want to see exciting and entertaining football from clubs before they get rewarded with bigger broadcast slots.
“That’s just the way it has turned out. If you look at the fixture we released at the beginning of the year, there is blocks where teams don’t have free-to-air games,” Auld told SEN Breakfast.
“That’s only a four-week block and there’s a lot of football to go. I think there’s an incentive this year more than ever for teams to play really competitive and exciting brands of football because we’ll reassess (the fixture) every couple of weeks.
“At the end of Round 3 we’ll release the fixture for a further two weeks and if (St Kilda) is playing good football and an exciting brand of football then they’ll get plenty of attention in those big spots.”
People have also wondered why the two Saturday night games need to be played concurrently, given the lack of crowds.
Auld said they did their best to minimise game overlap, but were limited by their desire to keep to a relatively normal looking weekend of games.
“We’ve spaced out the round as much as we can. If you think about what the original fixture was, we had crossover for two or three games, we now have one,” he said.
“By having a Thursday night you draw one game out of the weekend and now we’ve got the Sunday evening game which clears up the Sunday.
“(Saturday night) is the one that is remaining and there’s not much we can do about that with running the standard sort of Thursday to Sunday format, but outside of that there’s no other overlaps which is pleasing.”