Guess how much football the women play across their regular season compared with the AFL men? Answer: roughly one sixth as much! Seven rounds against the men's 22, and actual playing time in each game not much more than half the men's. Putting that another way: in their whole regular season the women play the equivalent of about four games of men's football. The women's pre-season training lasts longer than their whole season. That might have been OK for the first season, and even the second, with eight teams playing each other once. But a fourth blink-and-you-miss-it season in 2020, this time with 14 teams in the competition? That simply isn't good enough, and it's hard to see the AFL as really serious about the women's comp if they don't recognise this. Compare the AFLW season with other elite national women's sporting competitions such as WBBL, W-League, WNBL, Super Netball. They all play much longer seasons and/or more games than the 2019 version of AFLW. With so little game-time on offer, the cross-code drift could be away from the AFLW. Ideally, we'd like the 2020 season to consist of 13 rounds, with each of the 14 teams playing each other once, plus three weeks of finals.

At an absolute minimum, the season for 2020 should be extended to 10 regular-season rounds. That would increase the playing time in the women's season from one-sixth to about one-quarter of the men's playing time. Loading That extension would take the women's season four or five weeks into the men's season. How might it go? The indications are that it would go very well. In 2019 there were 53,000 people at the AFLW grand final at Adelaide Oval two weeks into the men's season. Of course those numbers aren't going to happen right across three extra regular season rounds, but the signs are encouraging. Extending the season would incur extra costs, including the cost of televising games. Maybe the AFL is looking to hold off on significant extension of the AFLW season until the signing of the next TV rights agreement for 2023 and beyond. That way they can hope to get paid for televising extra weeks rather than having to pay for them. That extra money is significant, of course. But if the explosion of interest in girls and women playing and watching football since the launch of AFLW is any indication, keeping up the momentum with our proposal would be a move perfectly targeted to sustain and increase girls' and women's broader participation.