With 47 seconds remaining in the third quarter of Carlton and St Kilda’s season-opening AFLW match on Sunday, Channel Seven commentator Alistair Nicholson delivered a message to viewers that inadvertently captured one of the most significant challenges confronting the competition.
“For Victorian viewers, you are going to Seven News. If you want to keep watching the footy, go to 7mate now.”
Tyanna Smith had just burst through a centre bounce like Bailey Smith and booted a brilliant goal – her second – from outside 50 metres to put the Saints within 22 points.
The football continued. Seven’s coverage on its primary Victorian channel did not.
There was nothing sinister about the decision. TV networks routinely move programming between channels, and Seven’s evening news remains among the most commercially important programs on its schedule.
But the timing was striking.
Four days later, there will be no men’s AFL match on Thursday night, with Melbourne and Hawthorn instead afforded clear air for their AFLW fixture.
The contrast warrants examination.
Thursday night AFL has become one of the most valuable pieces of sporting content on Australian television, regularly attracting audiences of around one million across Seven’s platforms this season. This Thursday night’s AFLW game is expected to attract a fraction of that audience.
So the decision to clear men’s footy from that timeslot to showcase the AFLW will cost hundreds of thousands of viewers.
Within the space of four days, the industry will have provided two vastly different illustrations of where the AFLW currently sits.
On Sunday, the broadcaster considered the product sufficiently expendable to move the final quarter from its primary channel.
On Thursday, the AFL will clear one of its most lucrative broadcast windows to provide the same competition with uncontested exposure.
After a decade of AFLW, it is reasonable to ask whether this approach remains sustainable.
The creation of the AFLW has been among the most consequential developments in Australian sport this century. Its influence on female participation, pathways and the visibility of women in the game has been profound.
Girls who once reached their early teenage years and discovered their football pathway effectively ended can now aspire to play the sport professionally. Clubs that existed for more than a century as overwhelmingly male institutions now have women wearing their jumpers at the elite level.
Those achievements are substantial and permanent.
But the success of female football as a participation movement and the commercial sustainability of an 18-team professional national competition are not necessarily the same proposition.
Eleven seasons after its establishment, the AFLW should be sufficiently mature to withstand scrutiny of the latter.
Professional sport is expensive.
Players must be paid. Football departments must be funded. Teams must travel around the country. Venues must be opened and staffed. Matches must be produced and broadcast to professional standards.
The AFL and its broadcast partners are investing millions of dollars annually in a competition that remains a considerable distance from paying for itself.
That investment was entirely understandable during AFLW’s establishment phase. New competitions require subsidies. Audiences take time to develop, sporting traditions are not manufactured overnight, and the AFL possessed both the financial capacity and strategic incentive to establish a national women’s competition.
But an establishment phase cannot continue indefinitely.
The AFLW is now entering season 11. The question should no longer simply be how much the competition has grown, but how it eventually becomes commercially sustainable.
That discussion becomes particularly relevant given the broader financial demands confronting the AFL.
The league is preparing to establish a 19th licence in Tasmania, an undertaking that will require significant investment over many years. Expansion clubs GWS and Gold Coast continue to be heavily funded by the AFL. Clubs continue to seek greater distributions. Player payments continue to increase. The cost of operating football clubs continues to rise.
The media industry underwriting much of that expenditure is simultaneously navigating one of the most difficult advertising markets in recent memory.
The AFLW game between Carlton and St Kilda rated 147,000 nationally, overlapping with the men’s West Coast-Collingwood match. The previous Sunday afternoon men’s game between Gold Coast and Melbourne rated 402,000.
Scheduling the women’s match as part of a double header with the Blues-Saints men’s clash meant there were more than 20,000 people watching at Marvel Stadium by midway through the last quarter.
It would be absurd to expect AFLW to generate the same audiences and revenue as the AFL given the men’s competition has enjoyed more than a century to establish its cultural and commercial position.
Nor does commercial sustainability necessarily require immediate profitability.
But there must be a credible trajectory towards an economic model in which the size and cost of the competition bears some relationship to the audience and revenue it generates.
Perhaps that requires reconsidering how AFLW is scheduled.
The instinct has often been to provide the competition with “clear air” — removing competing AFL matches and attempting to manufacture standalone marquee windows.
Thursday night will provide another experiment in that philosophy.
But there is an alternative argument.
Rather than seeking clear air for AFLW while the men’s season is on, perhaps the league would be better to persevere with fixtures that tap into the audience already watching Australian football.
Double headers, such as Sunday’s Spud’s Game fixtures, integrated match days and fixtures positioned around major AFL games may provide AFLW with access to an audience far greater than it can presently attract on its own.
The next stage of AFLW cannot simply be about expansion: more teams, more games, longer seasons, higher salaries and more premium broadcast windows.
It must also be about demand. To extend the women’s season length to 14 home-and-away rounds, the league and the AFL Players’ Association agreed on key performance metrics: an average attendance of 6000 fans and 100,000 broadcast viewers per match.
Those are ambitious targets across the season, but by staging select games in high-value timeslots, the league is giving W a chance to maximise its audience.
At some point, investment has to become a test of demand and Thursday night is exactly that.
How many people are watching? How many are attending? What are advertisers prepared to pay to reach that audience? What does each match cost to stage and broadcast? And what structure gives the competition the greatest chance to grow those numbers?
Those questions should not be interpreted as an attack on women’s football.
They are the questions asked of every professional sporting competition.
The AFLW has already transformed the pathway for women and girls who want to play Australian football and fundamentally altered the culture of the national game.
Its second decade presents a different challenge.
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Sam McClure is an award-winning AFL journalist and broadcaster.Connect via X or email.