The Sunday night timeslot - held on the eve of school holidays - was a trial ahead of discussions for the next broadcast rights, but the league said the crowd fell “well short” of the pass mark. Eddie McGuire at the MCG on Sunday. Credit:Getty Images McGuire said even he had pondered whether he could address his president’s function by Skype, and wanted the lost dollars to come from the pockets of the officials who had scheduled his club to play on a Sunday night in the middle of winter, a timeslot that he said was never going to work. “It’s exactly the way we told them 12 months ago that it would be. Am I worried at the fact it’s probably cost us a couple of hundred thousand dollars? That’s equalisation money gone out the door,” he said. “But more importantly for me, somewhere along the line, 35,000-40,000 people have not come to a game that is traditionally a great game. We used to get 40,000 people at Victoria Park.

“I know the AFL are not going to do this next year. But what we’ll do is we’ll take the money out of the AFL executives’ bonuses, those who did it, and send it to the Westpac Centre, because at nine o’clock and one second tomorrow, I’m going to be on the phone saying: compensation. Fed-up fans are voting with their feet in Melbourne. Credit:Getty Images “We turn up, we’ve got the numbers, we pre-sold a lot of seats, so people have actually paid for their seats and not come. That’s not good for football. “We’ve been screaming about it since the fixture came out. It won’t happen again. We will never play on a Sunday night in the middle of winter again, but it doesn’t help us or the people who didn’t turn up.” A crowd of just over 40,000 attend the round 15 AFL match between the Magpies and the Blues at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Credit:Getty Images

McGuire was grateful for those supporters who did come to the game, and said they deserved an apology. “This is not a test to see what their endurance is. Make it easy for people. Life’s hard out there at the moment. Make it easy. Make the football the one thing in your life that’s great, not an ordeal,” he said. “Don’t say it's school holidays, because most people who are working class people aren’t flying to Noosa tomorrow. They’re getting up and going to work tomorrow and this is what people have got to start understanding in football. It’s a working, family game and we’ve got to get back to that.” AFL spokesman Patrick Keane said the league had hoped for a crowd of 50,000.‘‘Our figures from tonight show that between the two clubs, there’s about 13,000 reserves seat holders who didn’t turn up,’’ Keane said. ‘‘The clubs get the money for those people but from our point of view, we want the people to attend.

‘‘We’ve said quite consistently this year we’re trialling a number of slots, Thursdays worked really well, Monday only had the one game and the crowds have trended down in the last couple of years. ‘‘Sunday night hasn’t had the response in the same way Thursday has.’’ Loading Sunday evening match in school hols was a trial for AFL before next broadcast discussions but 40k crowd well short of pass mark hoped for.

— Patrick Keane (@AFL_PKeane) June 29, 2014