How the AFL Fixture Is Made and Why It Is Uneven

The AFL fixture is uneven by design, and the reason is arithmetic rather than conspiracy. Eighteen clubs would need thirty-four matches each to play everybody home and away. The AFL schedules twenty-three. That leaves ninety-nine of the three hundred and six possible fixtures on the cutting-room floor every year, and the choices made about which ninety-nine get cut are the single largest structural influence on who finishes where.

Put plainly: every club plays eleven opponents once and six opponents twice. Those six double-up games are what people mean when they argue about a soft draw. A club that meets four of last year's top six twice has a materially harder season than a club that meets four of last year's bottom six twice, and neither club has any say in it. This guide is the AFL fixture explained from the inside out — the maths, the weighted rule that picks the double-ups, the fixed-date fixtures the whole calendar bends around, the byes, the travel, and the parts the league deliberately leaves blank until the season is under way.

It is worth saying at the start that 2026 is the most changed AFL season in a generation. The centre bounce has been abolished and replaced by a throw-up. The medical substitute is gone, with clubs naming twenty-three players and five on the interchange bench. Finals have grown to a final ten with a wildcard round, the pre-finals bye has been scrapped, and September now runs five weeks and eleven matches. The fixture sits underneath all of that, and it changed too.

The short version

Eighteen clubs. Twenty-three matches each. Two hundred and seven home and away games. An Opening Round that only some clubs play in, twenty-four numbered rounds after it, byes spread across five of those rounds, and a set of fixed-date fixtures — Anzac Day, Good Friday, Easter Monday, King's Birthday, Gather Round — that are locked in before anything else is placed. Everything else is negotiation between the scheduler, the broadcasters, the stadiums and eighteen clubs who all want Friday night.

• 18Clubs
• 23Matches per club
• 207Home and away games
• 99Fixtures omitted

Structural counts for the 2026 season taken from the published fixture. These are counts of scheduled matches, not measurements of crowds, ratings or revenue.

Why thirty-four matches is impossible

A double round-robin among eighteen clubs is thirty-four matches per club and three hundred and six matches in total. At nine games a weekend that is thirty-four weekends of football, before byes, before finals, and before any allowance for a mid-season break. Add five bye rounds and five weeks of finals and the season would start in the middle of February and finish in the middle of November.

Nobody wants that. Player welfare arguments aside, the AFL season already collides with cricket at one end and with the start of the Australian summer at the other. The Australian sporting calendar is crowded from October to March, which is why football stops when the Australian cricket season starts, and why the two codes have coexisted for a century by staying out of each other's months.

So the AFL cuts. Twenty-three matches is the number the competition has settled on, and it has been broadly stable even as the number of clubs has grown.

Eleven once, six twice

Here is the part that matters most and gets explained least. With seventeen possible opponents and twenty-three matches, every club plays:

• Eleven opponents once
• Six opponents twice

Six double-up games out of twenty-three is a little over a quarter of the season. If those six are strong, a club can play well and finish tenth. If they are weak, a club can be ordinary and play finals. The ladder that results is not a lie, but it is not a pure ranking either.

• Opponents played once64.7%
• Opponents played twice35.3%

Counts of opponents, not matches. Eleven opponents met once and six met twice produces twenty-three games. This is the standard structure for every club in an eighteen-team season.

Show the numbers

How one club's twenty-three matches are distributed

Item	Value
Opponents played once	11
Opponents played twice	6

The 2026 fixture threw up one oddity worth knowing about: Hawthorn and the Western Bulldogs were scheduled to meet twice with Hawthorn as the home club on both occasions. Double-ups are normally split one home and one away. When they are not, it is because the scheduler has traded that fairness away for something else — a venue, a timeslot, a marquee date.

The weighted rule

The AFL does not pick the double-ups at random. It applies what it calls the weighted rule.

The league takes the previous season's final ladder, measured after the finals series rather than after the last home and away round, and splits the eighteen clubs into three brackets of six: top six, middle six, bottom six. It then arranges the double-up games so that clubs meet opponents from their own bracket twice. The logic is that a competition where the best clubs play each other more often and the struggling clubs play each other more often produces closer matches across the whole season and a tighter ladder at the end of it.

That is the theory. In practice the weighted rule is one constraint among many, and it loses arguments to Anzac Day, to Gather Round, to stadium availability and to a broadcaster who wants a particular fixture on a particular night.

What changed for 2026

Before the 2026 fixture was released, the AFL amended the rule. Clubs may now play as many as four of the five other clubs in their own bracket twice, where the previous maximum was three.

The stated reason was flexibility. Opening Round and Gather Round both remove weekends from the scheduler's control, and clubs have become more assertive about asking for specific slots. The extra allowance gives the fixture team somewhere to move.

There was a specific trigger. In 2025 the reigning premiers Brisbane finished with what was widely regarded as the hardest draw in the competition, facing four clubs from the previous top six twice despite the three-game cap, because of the way the brackets fell. Loosening the rule makes that kind of outcome easier to manage rather than harder.

Opening Round and the two-bye problem

Opening Round is the weekend of football that starts the season without being called Round 1. It has no round number. It does not include every club. In 2026 it ran from Thursday 5 March to Sunday 8 March, opened with Sydney against Carlton at the Sydney Cricket Ground, continued with Gold Coast hosting Geelong on the Friday, and closed with St Kilda against Collingwood at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on the Sunday night — the first time a Victorian fixture had been included in Opening Round.

The clubs that play in Opening Round would end the season one game ahead of everybody else, so they take a second bye in the first month. In 2026 those early byes were spread across Rounds 2 to 4 and given to the four northern clubs plus St Kilda and Collingwood, with everything arranged so that all eighteen clubs arrived at Gather Round in Round 5 having played the same number of matches.

There is a subtler rule attached. The scheduler avoids matching a club that has already taken its early bye against a club that has not, because a week of recovery in the first month of a season is a real edge.

Gather Round: an entire round in one state

Gather Round takes a whole round of AFL football and plays it in one state. Since its introduction it has been staged in South Australia, with Adelaide Oval as the main venue and regional grounds taking the rest.

In 2026 it was Round 5, played from Thursday 9 April to Sunday 12 April. Adelaide hosted Carlton at Adelaide Oval on the Thursday night to open it. Two matches went to the Barossa Valley township of Lyndoch, which had first hosted in 2025: North Melbourne against Brisbane on the Saturday afternoon and Greater Western Sydney against Richmond on the Sunday.

Gather Round is a commercial arrangement with a state government as much as a football round. It concentrates nine matches, eighteen travelling squads and a large number of interstate supporters into one market over four days. For the fixture it means one round in which nobody plays at home in the normal sense, and it must be placed before the rest of the season is built around it.

The fixed dates the calendar bends around

A handful of fixtures are effectively immovable. They are placed first and everything else fits around them.

Fixture	2026 placement	Clubs
Opening Round	5 to 8 March	Selected clubs, no round number
Gather Round	Round 5, 9 to 12 April	All eighteen, all matches in South Australia
Good Friday	Round 6 window	North Melbourne v Carlton
Easter Monday	Round 6 window	Hawthorn v Geelong at the MCG
Anzac Day eve	Round 7, Friday night	Richmond v Melbourne
Anzac Day	Round 7, 25 April	Essendon v Collingwood plus three further matches
Sir Doug Nicholls Round	Round 10	Includes Brisbane v Geelong, a Grand Final rematch
Dreamtime at the G	Round 11, Friday night	Richmond v Essendon
King's Birthday	Round 13	Gold Coast v Brisbane, the first QClash in the slot
Bye rounds	Rounds 12 to 16	At least seven matches each weekend

The Anzac Day fixture is the strongest constraint of the lot. Essendon and Collingwood have played each other on 25 April since 1995, and the whole of April is built around the fact — see our guide to the Anzac Day clash for how that tradition became a fixed point in the calendar.

King's Birthday is a useful example of how the AFL now uses these dates. The slot had long belonged to a Melbourne fixture. In 2026 it went to the first QClash between Gold Coast and Brisbane, which is the league using a protected timeslot to build a market rather than to reward an old one.

Travel and the geography problem

Ten of the eighteen clubs are based in Victoria. The other eight are split evenly across four states.

Victoria10

South Australia2

Western Australia2

New South Wales2

Queensland2

A count of the eighteen clubs by the state each is based in. It describes where clubs are, not how many matches are played in each state, which differs because of Gather Round and neutral venues.

Show the numbers

AFL clubs by home state

Item	Value
Victoria	10
South Australia	2
Western Australia	2
New South Wales	2
Queensland	2

That distribution decides almost everything about travel. A Melbourne club can play well over half its season without leaving the city, moving between the MCG and Marvel Stadium with a bus ride. West Coast and Fremantle fly east for roughly half their matches and lose hours to the time difference every time. Sydney, Greater Western Sydney, Brisbane and Gold Coast fly to Melbourne repeatedly.

The AFL manages this with scheduling rules rather than by pretending it does not exist. Clubs are not asked to make consecutive long trips without a home game or a bye in between where it can be avoided, return trips are grouped where possible, and the West Australian clubs are given a share of the Sunday afternoon slots that suit their body clocks. None of it makes the schedule equal. It makes it survivable.

The 2026 fixture also sent matches to grounds outside the eighteen home venues, including Canberra, Bunbury in Western Australia, Alice Springs, Hobart and Launceston. Those games are partly commercial arrangements with state and territory governments and partly market development, and the Tasmanian fixtures in particular are groundwork for a nineteenth club.

Broadcast slots and why they matter

The AFL fixture is built around a broadcast deal, and the deal values timeslots differently.

Thursday night and Friday night are the premium national slots. Saturday afternoon and Saturday night carry the largest total audience across the weekend. Sunday afternoon is the family slot and the one that suits West Australian clubs travelling east. Sunday twilight and Sunday night are the newest additions and the ones clubs complain about most, because they compress recovery before the next round.

Clubs want primetime because it drives membership, sponsorship value and profile. In 2026 Geelong was given eight primetime appearances across Thursday and Friday nights, and there were five Friday night double-headers in the first half of the season. The distribution of those slots is one of the two things clubs actually argue about when the fixture drops. The other is the double-up games.

Byes, and the pre-finals bye that no longer exists

Mid-season byes in 2026 sat across Rounds 12 to 16. Five rounds, at least seven matches on each of them, one bye per club.

Spreading byes over five weekends rather than compressing them into two is a compromise. Compressed byes mean short weekends with only a handful of matches, which is bad for broadcast. Spread byes mean a longer stretch of the season where the ladder is slightly distorted because clubs have played different numbers of games. The AFL has chosen the second problem.

The bigger change is at the other end. The pre-finals bye — a full week off between the last home and away round and the first final — has been removed. It went when the wildcard round arrived. Finals now start the weekend after the season ends and run five weeks, ending with a Grand Final in the last week of September. The 2026 decider is set for Saturday 26 September at the MCG, and our AFL Grand Final guide covers that week in detail.

Strength of schedule: how hard is hard

Because the draw is uneven, people measure it. Independent modelling of the 2026 fixture, which combines opponent quality with venue effects, put Carlton and Essendon on the hardest schedules and Port Adelaide and Brisbane on the easiest. The estimated gap between the hardest and easiest schedule was around nine points per game.

Nine points a game across twenty-three matches is not a rounding error. It is the difference between a club that plays finals and one that does not, and it is entirely outside the control of the players.

Two cautions. First, these are models, not AFL statements, and different models disagree about the middle of the range even when they agree about the extremes. Second, strength of schedule is calculated on last year's ladder, and clubs improve and collapse. A draw that looked brutal in November can look generous by June if two of the double-up opponents fall apart.

Why the back half of the fixture is blank

The AFL releases Opening Round and Rounds 1 to 15 with full dates, venues and start times. Rounds 16 to 24 float, and the league confirms them in blocks during the season.

This is deliberate. By July the AFL can see which clubs are chasing the eight, which rivalry has heat in it and which fixture deserves a Friday night. Locking a dead rubber into primetime in November and being stuck with it in August wastes the most valuable inventory the competition has.

For supporters it is genuinely inconvenient. If you live in Perth and want to see your club play in Melbourne in Round 20, you cannot book flights until the AFL says so, which is often only a few weeks out. Anyone planning an interstate trip to a late-season match should watch the league's fixture page and be ready to move quickly.

What the fixture cannot fix

There is a persistent argument in Australian football that the draw should be equalised, usually by cutting to a seventeen-match season where everybody plays everybody once. It would be perfectly fair and it would cost the competition six rounds of revenue, which is why it has never happened.

Other equalisation levers exist and are used instead. The salary cap, the draft, revenue distribution to smaller clubs and the priority pick system all push the competition back towards the middle. The fixture pushes in the same direction with the weighted rule, but weakly and with commercial exceptions. It is the same tension that runs through every Australian professional competition — the NRL salary cap exists for the same reason and gets argued about in the same terms.

Cricket avoids the problem by being smaller. The Big Bash League format runs a long schedule relative to its number of clubs, and a Sheffield Shield season is close to a true round-robin because there are only six teams. Eighteen clubs is simply too many for that arithmetic to work.

A nineteenth club

The AFL has granted a licence to a Tasmanian club, and on the current timetable it enters the competition at the end of the decade. Nineteen clubs makes the fixture harder, not easier: an odd number means one club sits out every round unless the league restructures around it. Expect that to be resolved with a further change to the round structure rather than with a longer season, and expect the details to move. Anyone planning around it should check the AFL's own announcements rather than trusting a number in an article.

How to read the fixture as a supporter

When the draw is released in November, four things are worth checking before anything else.

First, the six double-up opponents. That is your season's difficulty in one line.

Second, the split of home and away inside those double-ups. Two matches against a strong club with one at your home ground is very different from two on the road.

Third, the travel pattern. Count the interstate trips, then look for consecutive ones and for trips that sit immediately before a short turnaround.

Fourth, the position of the bye. A bye in Round 12 and a bye in Round 16 are not the same asset. Late byes help clubs carrying injuries into September.

Common misconceptions

"The AFL fixes the draw for the big clubs." The AFL schedules big clubs into valuable timeslots, which is a commercial decision it makes openly. That is different from giving them easier opponents, and the weighted rule generally pushes the other way by sending strong clubs to play strong clubs twice.

"Every club plays every other club." Every club plays every other club at least once. That part is true and it is the reason the ladder means anything at all.

"The fixture is released in full." Only the first fifteen rounds are.

"Percentage fixes the unfairness." It does not. Percentage separates clubs level on premiership points, but it is calculated from matches against different opponents, so it inherits every distortion the draw contains.

What to check before you book anything

Start and finish times move. Venues occasionally move. Rounds after fifteen are not confirmed until the season is running. Finals fixtures, including which club hosts, are set only once the final ladder is known, and under the wildcard system that is later than it used to be.

If you are travelling for a match, check the AFL fixture page in the week the round is confirmed, then check it again before you fly. If you are planning a stadium visit around a game, our guides to the MCG, Marvel Stadium, the Gabba and Optus Stadium cover access, seating and transport, and the Australian cricket grounds guide is useful for the venues that host both codes.

Travel, and who actually pays for it

The fixture is also a travel document, and the burden it distributes is unequal in ways that rarely appear in the published complaints.

The two Western Australian clubs and the two South Australian clubs fly for every away game. The Gold Coast and Greater Western Sydney clubs fly for most. A Melbourne club can play a majority of its season without boarding a plane. Across a full home-and-away season the difference in air travel between the least- and most-travelled clubs runs to tens of thousands of kilometres.

The AFL manages this with scheduling conventions rather than compensation — grouping interstate trips, avoiding short turnarounds after long flights, and trying not to schedule a west-coast club for a Sunday twilight fixture in Melbourne followed by a Friday night at home. The conventions are real but they are soft, and they get broken when broadcast demands conflict with them.

The time zone compounds it. Western Australia is two or three hours behind the eastern states depending on daylight saving, so a Perth club playing a night game in Melbourne finishes at what its players' bodies register as late afternoon, and the return flight lands in the small hours. Sports-science submissions have argued this measurably affects the following week's performance.

When the fixture is released, and what changes after

The full fixture is released late in the preceding year, usually with the first several rounds fixed and later rounds subject to change.

The part supporters most often get caught by is that later-round times are not final. Broadcasters hold the right to move fixtures within a window as the season develops and the ladder takes shape, which means a match you booked flights around in November can shift day or timeslot months later. The AFL publishes revised blocks periodically through the season.

The practical rule is simple: fixtures early in the season are safe to plan travel around, and fixtures in the back half are not, unless they are one of the fixed traditional matches.

Gather Round and the themed blocks

The fixture is no longer a plain list of matches. Several rounds are now built as events in their own right, and they constrain everything scheduled around them.

Gather Round puts an entire round in South Australia across Adelaide Oval and regional venues, with every club playing there. It removes a full round of home games from the normal rotation, which the fixture then has to compensate for elsewhere.

Opening Round and the season-opening blocks are built for broadcast rather than balance, which is why they often pair clubs who are not natural rivals but do rate.

Anzac Day, Easter and King's Birthday are effectively fixed. Those slots belong to particular clubs by long convention, and the rest of the round is arranged around them rather than the other way round.

Sir Doug Nicholls Round carries its own scheduling requirements and venue considerations.

The practical consequence for a supporter is that the number of genuinely free scheduling slots is far smaller than twenty-three rounds suggests. Once the fixed fixtures, the themed rounds, the broadcast picks and the venue contracts are placed, the fixture writers are solving a much tighter problem than the complaints usually allow for.

The double-up problem, stated plainly

With more clubs than rounds, a full home-and-away season is arithmetically impossible, and the gap is what generates most fixture criticism.

Every club plays some opponents twice and some once. Which opponents you double up against is decided partly by the previous season's ladder — a weighting intended to keep the competition close — and partly by rivalry and broadcast value. The result is that two clubs finishing on identical records can have faced materially different schedules.

There is no fix available inside a 23-round season. Lengthening the season to accommodate a true round robin would require a substantial increase in matches, which the players' agreement and the medical evidence both push against. Shortening it makes the imbalance worse. Every proposal floated so far trades one unfairness for another, which is why the current compromise has survived despite being visibly imperfect.

The honest summary for a supporter is that the ladder is not a pure ranking. It is a ranking produced by unequal schedules, and percentage does not correct for that.

Where the fixture fits in the season

The fixture decides who reaches September. From 2026 the top ten clubs qualify for finals, with seventh hosting tenth and eighth hosting ninth in a wildcard round, the top six resting that week, and the two survivors re-seeded into the familiar eight-club bracket. Only the top four keep a double chance. Eleven finals are played over five weeks.

That structure raises the stakes on the draw rather than lowering them. Under an eight-team finals series, a club that finished tenth had nothing to argue about. Under a ten-team series, the difference between tenth and eleventh is a finals berth, and that difference can easily come down to one double-up fixture chosen in November by a scheduler in an office in Docklands.

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