Sport | Australian rules football |
---|---|
Jurisdiction | AFL, controlled entities and affiliates. |
Founded | 1985 |
Headquarters | AFL House, 140 Harbour Esplanade, Melbourne Docklands |
Chairman | Richard Goyder |
Replaced | Australian National Football Council |
The AFL Commission is the governing body of the Australian Football League Limited (AFL), its subsidiaries and controlled entities. Richard Goyder has been chairman since 4 April 2017, replacing Mike Fitzpatrick.
It was formed in 1985 as the VFL Commission, and gained its current name in 1990 in conjunction with the renaming of the VFL competition to the Australian Football League.
Its constitution self-proclaims the commission to be the "keeper of the code" responsible for the sport of Australian football. As part of its role, the Commission is responsible for the Laws of Australian Football. It is also responsible for worldwide player acknowledgement through the Australian Football Hall of Fame, All-Australian team and World (formerly All-International) Team.
The Commission controls the AFL competition and maintains a professional talent pathway for players through the AFL Draft, AFL Draft Combine, AFL Academy and academies through its member clubs and affiliated bodies, Underage Men's and Underage Women's championships, the Australian Football (AFL) International Cup and through its worldwide affiliates, numerous regional representative tournaments.
The Commission organises the highest level of representative competition in Australia, being responsible for senior State of Origin competition from 1991 to its cessation in 1999. [1] Since 1998, it has also overseen Australia's involvement in the International Rules Series.
The AFL Commission has been responsible for the administration of the AFL competition since 1993, when the AFL Board of Directors voted itself out of existence after 96 years of operation. Its constitution self-proclaims the Commission to be the "keeper of the code" responsible for the sport of Australian football.
The Commission later became responsible for the national administration of the sport (since 1995, when the Australian National Football Council ceased operations after 89 years), as well as its international administration (since 2002, when it absorbed the International Australian Football Council) and the administration of women's football (since 2010, when it took over the operations of Women's Football Australia, which ceased operations in 2015).
Leagues affiliated with or owned by the AFL Commission have names beginning with AFL, and incorporate the AFL logo, and now owns the governing body for Australia's most populous eastern region through the AFL NSW/ACT and has strong affiliations with all other states. The AFL also promotes and brands the sport under its own name instead of the official name of Australian Football, especially in developing areas where the sport is not well known and the AFL has a major stake in the local governing bodies.
The ten commissioners are elected by the 18 AFL clubs, with each of the 18 clubs entitled to make nominations, but other Australian Football leagues, associations and clubs do not have any control or representation.
The AFL Commission's primary role is to oversee the profitability of its competitions, its primary competitions being the AFL and AFL Women's. As such, it has a direct stake in many of its member clubs.
It also approves the administration of new club licenses, and has been involved in the expansion of the national competition since 1987, being instrumental in the merger that created the Brisbane Lions. The Commission also fully owns the Greater Western Sydney Giants. Other clubs to have an AFL Commission appointed board include the Sydney Swans, the Gold Coast Suns, Adelaide Football Club and Port Adelaide Football Club. The Commission operates a Competitive Balance Fund, which redistributes profits to the clubs most in need to help ensure that all of its member clubs are financially sustainable in the long-term. [2]
Financially, the Commission is highly co-dependent on the success of the AFL and the majority of its funding comes from AFL competition broadcasting rights. The 2025-2031 rights will earn $4.5 billion, the most lucrative in Australian sporting history. The Commission distributes some of the profit from these rights into development of the game.
However, the majority is invested in ensuring that the AFL continues to sustain its future revenues, such as protecting the primacy of the competition, as well as growing its broadcast audience, talent pathways and professionalism to attract the best available players (from junior development programs and high performance athletes from around the world).
As part of its role, the Commission is responsible for the Australian Football Hall of Fame, the AFL men's underage championships and AFL Women's underage championships. It was also responsible for senior State of Origin competition from 1991 until it ended in 1999. [3]
The Commission was formed to set policy, and has directed the VFL/AFL (known then as the VFL) as the game's most professional league since December 1985.
In 1993, the AFL Commission assumed control of the league's administration from the AFL Board of Directors (in effect, the 15 AFL clubs at that time). Subsequently, the board of directors voted itself out of existence, and a new Memorandum and Articles of Association were adopted for the AFL. It also assumed national governance of the sport (see Principle 2 below) after the ANFC ceased operations in 1995.
This was a significant change of power: between 1985 and 1993, the Commission had required explicit approval by a 75% vote of the League (the teams) for major items such as further expansion, mergers, relocations, and major capital works.
The AFL also created an International Policy in 2005, and absorbed the International Australian Football Council, thus gaining control of the sport worldwide.
In its role as national and international governing body, the AFL Commission also controls and delegates development funding for Australian state and international bodies and leagues. As most of this funding is sourced the revenue and activities associated with the AFL competition, much of the funding is directed to the competition's developing markets. Semi-professional state competitions are generally self-sufficient, and receive a much lower percentage of the AFL's funding. The Commission has established a pathway that features junior Academies and scholarships from representational level up to its member clubs. The highest level is the AFL Academy, with academies for each state being managed by their respective AFL clubs and affiliated governing bodies.
Between 2010 and 2021, the AFL spent between $6–38 million per annum (under 5% of total revenue) on game development grants globally (excluding a one-off COVID-19 Pandemic community football recovery package). With a new TV rights deal in 2022 and to help the game at the grassroots continue its recovery post COVID-19 Pandemic, the Commission increased its community grants to $67 million. [4]
The AFL Commission has a simple structure. There are formal corporate titles for members which currently consists of a chairman, whose role is to oversee meetings, and a chief executive officer, who typically also oversees the operations of the Australian Football League.
Commissioners are elected by the 18 AFL clubs, who each are entitled to make nominations. Should an election be necessary, then the membership is decided by a vote of the AFL clubs. Under the current constitution, the member clubs have the power to veto commission decisions with a two-thirds majority vote.
The current membership of the Commission is:
Name | Current Role | Appointed |
---|---|---|
Richard Goyder | Chairman | 2017 |
Andrew Dillon | Chief Executive Officer | 2023 |
Paul Bassat | Commissioner | 2011 |
Kim Williams | Commissioner | 2014 |
Major General Simone Wilkie | Commissioner | 2015 |
Jason Ball | Commissioner | 2015 |
Andrew Newbold | Commissioner | 2016 |
Gabrielle Trainor | Commissioner | 2016 |
Robin Bishop | Commissioner | 2017 |
Professor Helen Milroy | Commissioner | 2018 |
The AFL Commission has also become involved in Australian Football League matters on occasion, both on and off-field. Sometimes these interventions have been in controversial circumstances.
The commission has become involved when players or a club bring the game into disrepute, including:
The AFL Commission has a role in undertaking assessments of expansion clubs and awarding new licences including:
The Commission owns a stake in the Gold Coast and Greater Western Sydney clubs.
The AFL Commission manages a special fund called the Competitive Balance Fund (CBF) since 2004 as a grant of up to $5 million per club to ensure that member clubs remain financially viable.
The system was later changed to the Annual Special Distribution (ASD) of $6.3 million shared among all clubs, [35] as well as allowing for grants and special concessions, such as payments, to ensure that the AFL member clubs remain viable in the short term. In 2006, the Commission approved a $2.1 million special financial assistance package for Carlton.
In response to clubs increasingly relying on and applying for special funding, in 2008, the Commission recommended removing the fund altogether, [35] but after considerable club protests led by three struggling clubs, the Western Bulldogs, Melbourne and North Melbourne, CEO Andrew Demetriou announced that the ASD would remain.
In early 2009, it increased Melbourne's assistance from $250,000 to $1 million and made a $1 million grant to Port Adelaide. [36]
The Essendon Football Club, nicknamed the Bombers, is a professional Australian rules football club. The club plays in the Australian Football League (AFL), the game's premier competition. The club was formed by the McCracken family in their Ascot Vale home "Alisa", and while the exact date is unknown, it is generally accepted to have been in 1872. The club's first recorded game took place on 7 June 1873 against a Carlton seconds team. From 1878 until 1896, the club played in the Victorian Football Association (VFA), then joined seven other clubs in October 1896 to form the breakaway Victorian Football League. Headquartered at the Essendon Recreation Ground, known as Windy Hill, from 1922 to 2013, the club moved to The Hangar in Tullamarine in late 2013 on land owned by the Melbourne Airport corporation. The club shares its home games between Docklands Stadium and the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Zach Merrett is the current club captain.
James Albert Hird is a former professional Australian rules football player and past senior coach of the Essendon Football Club in the Australian Football League (AFL).
The 2004 AFL season was the 108th season of the Australian Football League (AFL), the highest level senior Australian rules football competition in Australia, which was known as the Victorian Football League until 1989. The season featured sixteen clubs, ran from 26 March until 25 September, and comprised a 22-game home-and-away season followed by a finals series featuring the top eight clubs.
Andrew Demetriou is an Australian businessman, sports administrator, and former Australian rules football player who was chief executive officer (CEO) of the Australian Football League (AFL) up to June 2014. Demetriou played 103 games for the North Melbourne Football Club between 1981 and 1987, finishing his playing career with a three-game stint for Hawthorn in 1988. Chairing several companies after his retirement from playing, he was appointed CEO of the AFL Players Association in 1998, and was responsible for negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement between the league and the players. Demetriou was made CEO of the AFL in 2003, replacing Wayne Jackson. In his role as head of the AFL Commission, he was responsible for a number of changes, including the expansion of the league from 16 to 18 teams, the restructuring of the tribunal system, and the brokering of two new television rights deals.
The AFL Players Association is the representative body for all current and past professional Australian Football League (AFL) and AFL Women's (AFLW) players.
The 2006 AFL season was the 110th season of the Australian Football League (AFL), the highest level senior Australian rules football competition in Australia, which was known as the Victorian Football League until 1989. The season featured sixteen clubs, ran from 30 March until 30 September, and comprised a 22-game home-and-away season followed by a finals series featuring the top eight clubs.
The Australian Football League (AFL) is the pre-eminent and only fully professional competition of Australian rules football. It was originally named the Victorian Football League (VFL) and was founded in 1896 as a breakaway competition from the Victorian Football Association (VFA), with its inaugural season in 1897. It changed its name to Australian Football League in 1990 after expanding its competition to other Australian states in the 1980s. The AFL publishes its Laws of Australian football, which are used, with variations, by other Australian football organisations.
Australian rules football in the Australian Capital Territory has been played continuously since 1911 and was the most popular football code in the nation's capital Canberra between 1978 and 1982. The current governing body is AFL Canberra founded 1922, while the development body is AFL NSW/ACT established in 1999.
Rivalries in the Australian Football League exist between many teams, most of which typically draw large crowds and interest regardless of both teams' positions on the ladder. The AFL encourages the building of such rivalries, as a method of increasing publicity for the league, to the point of designating one round each year as "Rivalry Round" when many of these match-ups are held on the one weekend. Whilst some rivalries, such as between teams from adjacent areas, are still strong, the designation of an entire round of fixtures as a Rivalry Round is often criticised due to some arbitrary match-ups, or ignoring stronger and more recent rivalries.
The Gold Coast Suns, officially the Gold Coast Football Club, are a professional Australian rules football club that competes in the Australian Football League (AFL). The club is based on Queensland's Gold Coast in the suburb of Carrara.
The 2011 AFL season was the 115th season of the Australian Football League (AFL), the highest level senior Australian rules football competition in Australia, which was known as the Victorian Football League until 1989.
The AFL Australian Football League is the top professional Australian rules football league in the world. The league consists of eighteen teams: nine based in the city of Melbourne, one from regional Victoria, and eight based in other Australian states. The reason for this unbalanced geographic distribution lies in the history of the league, which was based solely within Victoria from the time it was established in 1897, until the time the league expanded through the addition of clubs from interstate to the existing teams starting in the 1980s; until this expansion, the league was known as the VFL (Victorian Football League).
The 2013 AFL season was the 117th season of the Australian Football League (AFL), the highest level senior Australian rules football competition in Australia, which was known as the Victorian Football League until 1989. The season featured eighteen clubs, ran from 22 March until 28 September, and comprised a 22-game home-and-away season followed by a finals series featuring the top eight clubs.
The Gold Coast Suns is a professional Australian rules football team based on the Gold Coast, Queensland. Nicknamed the Suns, the club competes in the Australian Football League and has done so since 2011.
The 2014 AFL season was the 118th season of the Australian Football League (AFL), the highest level senior Australian rules football competition in Australia, which was known as the Victorian Football League until 1989. The season featured eighteen clubs, ran from 14 March until 27 September, and comprised a 22-game home-and-away season followed by a finals series featuring the top eight clubs.
The Australian Football League registered the name Western Sydney Football Club Ltd with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission in January 2008. On 12 March 2008 the AFL received unanimous support from the existing 16 clubs for two expansion teams to enter the league, one of which was to be based in western Sydney. The Western Sydney working party met on 22 July to discuss player rules and draft concessions.
The 2015 AFL season was the 119th season of the Australian Football League (AFL), the highest level senior Australian rules football competition in Australia, which was known as the Victorian Football League until 1989. The season featured eighteen clubs, ran from 2 April until 3 October, and comprised a 22-game home-and-away season followed by a finals series featuring the top eight clubs.
The Greater Western Sydney Giants' 2015 season was its 4th season in the Australian Football League (AFL).
The 2016 AFL season was the 120th season of the Australian Football League (AFL), the highest level senior Australian rules football competition in Australia, which was known as the Victorian Football League until 1989.
2022 AFL Women's season 7 was the seventh season of the AFL Women's (AFLW) competition, the highest-level senior women's Australian rules football competition in Australia. The season began on 25 August and ran until 27 November, and was the second AFL Women's season to take place in the 2022 calendar year. The season was the first to feature 18 clubs, an increase from 14 the previous season, and the first to have an August start date. The season comprised ten home-and-away rounds, just as the previous season was scheduled to before it was impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and a four-week finals series featuring the top eight clubs, like in the Australian Football League (AFL), took place for the first time.