I find it funny that people say this yet there is still so much 'how good were the 70s and 80s?' sentiment around. I'm sure Hawthorn and Carlton supporters old enough to remember would like to see a return to those days but what about St Kilda? Their best finish in the 80s was 9 wins, 13 losses and 10th in a 14 team comp. After making the 1982 GF Richmond didn't play finals again until 1995. Melbourne were trash until the late 80s also. Etc.
Seven of the 11 VFL clubs in Victoria were insolvent when WC joined in 1986; Fitzroy, Geelong, Footscray, Collingwood, Melbourne, North Melbourne and Richmond. Hard to fathom for some of those clubs today. That left Carlton, Hawthorn, Essendon who were the ones spending the cash and winning all the flags and somehow St Kilda who I assume just didn't spend any money at all because they were terrible. It was a two tier comp with clubs tin rattling to keep the doors open.
Whatever system is employed there are always great stories in sport. Leicester won the EPL, that's not supposed to happen. Greece won Euro 2004. The moneyball Oakland A's won their division. The 2008 Boston Celtics traded almost their entire roster to create a big 3 and won a championship. The Toronto Raptors gambled on trading for Kawhi Leonard knowing they would likely lose him after one season and they won a championship. Etc. For a long time Manchester United had a monopoly on the Premier League. 5 wins in the 90s, 6 in the 00s, 2 in 3 years over 2011-2013 and now with all the resources in the world seem to be steadily getting worse. Four times outside the the top 6 in 6 years after not finishing worse than 3rd for over 20 years. Soccer is a different world though because placings matter. In the last two years Burnley and Wolves have finished 7th which got them into Europa League qualifying. That's huge for those teams. Just playing teams like Man United and Liverpool etc. is something to remember if you support Swansea or Blackpool or someone.
AFL club fans do fall into the trap a bit of believing that the 18 teams currently running around have some right to compete at the highest level of the sport forever when the reality is AFL stage management keeps things as they are. If there weren't AFL owned teams and shared if not AFL owned venues, special distributions to clubs etc. the league would look very different.
Good post. I find it funny that anyone thinks there will be a salary cap in 20-40 years time. Player greed will eventually wipe out the cap or at the very least make the cap so huge it will bring some clubs to their knees.
Players are forever going to keep asking for more and that concept for more won't have ceiling eventually. If that means less clubs do you really think the players will care.
Within 10 years the average AFL player will be getting 500-600k per season. TV will only pay so much so that means clubs will need to find it. How will they do that? Double or triple your membership cost?
AFL is no different to any other sport in the world, players are going to want to be paid very highly and while we may think they are well rewarded now the simple truth is that on a world scale they are grossly underpaid for their time and effort they put in and also for the media attention they have to put up with.
More more more is going to happen and it will happen fast over the next few decades, there is going to be fallout from this. 18 clubs in the AFL in 40 years will not be the case and it may look like closer to 12 clubs.