On Monday, mere days after the AFLW grand final, Steve Hocking was meeting with clubs to discuss a proposed “women’s football charter”, designed, as Caroline Wilson revealed for Fairfax media, to “improve the quality and appeal of female football and make the game better and safer.” The AFL is of the view, reported Wilson, that “while the standard of AFLW has improved in its second season, its players generally lack the sufficient skills to deal with congestion and the kicking skills to avoid regular stoppages and low scoring”.

This not so thinly-veiled swipe at the competition’s players did not go unnoticed on a day meant to celebrate the league’s best and fairest. Kate McCarthy, Brisbane Lions midfielder, took to Twitter to respond: “I wonder how quickly these lack of skills world [sic] improve if we were full-time. We train 15hrs/week. Don’t expect a professional outcome when we are semi-professional athletes.”

Looking forward to season three, McCarthy’s tweet highlights the fundamental tension that is threatening to tear the competition apart. On the one hand, the AFL is happy for the AFLW to remain a semi-professional competition. As it stands, most players take home just $10,500 for a season, which means they must work part or full-time jobs on top of their training loads. Some work eight or nine hour days, spend hours traveling to and from training and then arrive home for just a few hours sleep before they get up and do it all over again.

Without taking this into account – and a mere two seasons into the competition – however, the AFL is impatient with a product of its own making. It insists that the standard is insufficient (importantly by its own – not the fans’ – measures) but will not move to professionalise the competition. As a result, it has decided that the best way to proceed is to change the rules of the women’s game to make it a more enjoyable spectacle.

This is folly on several accounts. For a start, it is important to push against the perception that the AFL cannot afford to pay its AFLW players a better wage. No-one is realistically asking that they be paid the same as the men’s players – presently, they play a season that is far shorter and commit fewer hours to their clubs. However, just six days ago the AFL announced a net surplus of $48.8m. In 2017, the entire AFLW playing group were paid a total of $2,752,000. The AFL could triple their salaries and still have a profit in excess of $43m.

This would at least mean women earn something approaching the minimum wage (currently $34,499 in Australia), and would allow them to commit full-time to the game for the duration of the AFLW season – a move that would certainly see standards spike in the short-term.

If the AFL are not open to this, why not the AFL men’s players? Astonishingly, if they agreed to take a 1% pay cut across the board, women’s salaries would increase by almost exactly 100%. It’s not fair to speculate on whether the men of the competition would agree to this, but a 1% tax on the privilege of always having had the opportunity to play football as a professional seems fair enough.

Another significant issue with the idea of changing the rules for women is that it dilutes the product that women fought so hard to play in the first place. According to Play On, women were asking for teams as early as 1880. When AFLW belatedly arrived in 2017 it was an emotional, watershed moment for those who fought for over 137 years to play the game that is so entrenched and revered in the Australian psyche. Any young girl or woman who has dreamed of playing AFL has aspired to their place in that same game: not a watered-down version of it.

This would not be a smart move on the AFL’s behalf. If it moves to dilute its product for women, it risks losing more young girls to other codes (ironic, given it so far has a history of poaching them). Other sports have not radically adapted their rules for women; look at the AFL’s rival football code. The success of the Matildas is in part down to young girls now seeing themselves in their heroes’ shoes, playing the same game as the Socceroos.

It is true that the AFL is unique in comparison to most of its rivals in that it is a contact sport, but that is what makes it so appealing to the women who play. Women who love football love it for its physicality; its bone-crunching tackles, the over-zealous attempt at a spoil that quickly turns into melee as tempers fray. When Hocking says he wants a new style of football for women “to make the game better and safer” he misunderstands the appeal of football to women in the first place. Football is a socially-sanctioned environment for women to be as aggressive and brutish as they like: all under the guise of winning a game. It’s not an opportunity society often provides.

One can’t help but think the imperative to “protect” women is a concern borne from male paternalism creeping into the game. Hawthorn president Jeff Kennett, for instance, said he was “very happy” the Hawks didn’t have a women’s team because he was worried about the spate of ACL injuries. He then went on to call for women to play a form of AFLX because it might be better suited to women’s (read: weaker) bodies.

At the time, Kennett was roundly and rightly critiqued for this suggestion. With his suggestion of a charter for women’s football, however, Hocking threatens to take all of Kennett’s suggestions on board and rip the heart out of the game. He too has made reference to AFLX, arguing that “AFLW has a personality of its own and we want to wrap it up that way. It’s different from AFL, it’s an individual game, just as AFLX is individual”.

This is where Hocking is most misled. AFLX is a bastardised form of AFL, which, if public opinion is anything to go by, lacks any of the elements of the game most loved by its fans. AFLW is the women’s equivalent of AFL. It is not an invention of the AFL. It is the national platform, fought for for nearly two centuries, for women to finally play in an Australian rules competition of their own. Now, in proposing to re-write the rules of the game, the AFL threatens to take that right away from them all over again.

If the AFL is serious about the future of AFLW, it must listen to women and what they want. An obvious starting point would be its players. On Tuesday night, at the league best and fairest, premiership-winning captain Ellie Blackburn was asked about the mooted changes. Her response? Keep the game the way it is, because that’s the one we aspired to play as kids, and the one we’ve grown up playing, as interrupted as those pathways may have been.

AFL, there is your answer. Give the league time and space to grow, and pay women enough that they are able to fully commit to the sport. “Standards” will improve as a result, but it won’t be the reason people are drawn to the game. They’ll be gripped by it because of all the things that makes the contest inherent in Australian rules football so great, and they’ll support it because women finally have the national platform to play that familiar and much-loved game.