Quantity has hurt quality

Cameron Mooney’s EXCLUSIVE COLUMN

THE AFL is seeing the domino effect of bringing in two extra teams.

By diluting the talent pool and compromising drafts, the standard of the competition has fallen dramatically, prompting massive think tanks on whether we should even change the rules to improve the entertainment factor.

I hate to talk negatively about our great game, but I worry that the longer we go with a diluted competition, the longer we will be hurting the product.

When North Melbourne chose not to go to the Gold Coast, the AFL decided instead to expand to 17 teams and formed a club from the ground up. It then needed an 18th, so along came the Giants in western Sydney.

While I’ve got no problem with expanding into new markets, 18 teams is simply too many, and finding an extra 90-odd players to put on AFL lists was always going to spread the talent too thin. Sadly, what we are seeing with a lot of games is the knock-on effect five years down the track from this expansion.

Clubs who found themselves at the bottom of the ladder at the time Gold Coast and GWS came in have had no fair way to quickly regenerate their lists. They were set back for years by compromised drafts, denied access to the best kids out there, and then free agency allowed the better clubs or the cashed-up new clubs to pick off their best talent.

So what do you do if you are Carlton or Melbourne, for instance? You are forced to recycle average players on to your list to remain competitive.

And then what do you do to remain competitive on the field given that you can’t match the top teams for talent? Well you clog up the games as best you can, create lots of stoppages and throw numbers behind the ball.

You do this and hope to not get blown out of the water.

What we saw with Hawthorn and Carlton last week was a sad reflection of just how unequal the competition actually is right now.

It was the Blues’ worst loss in history. This is supposed to be an era of equalisation where clubs like the Carlton of the old days can’t simply buy premierships and bully the poorer clubs. Yet the gulf between top and bottom is arguably wider than it has ever been.

The AFL will want to stick with the 18 teams now that it has committed so much money and resources at Gold Coast and GWS.

It is also working very hard to ensure all its Melbourne clubs are financially viable.

But just how it plans to find enough top end talent to fill all 18 clubs and then make them equal is a question that it appears a long way off answering.

On Friday night, we have a game to look forward to in Richmond and Hawthorn. Hopefully it is close, with plenty of fast ball movement and lots of tough hits between two finals contenders.

But look through the rest of the weekend and there isn’t a lot to get too excited about.

If two Melbourne clubs had been forced to relocate to Gold Coast and west Sydney, I don’t think the AFL would have the issues that it does now. Sometimes less is more and the extra quantity has certainly lessened the quality of the show.

‘While I’ve got no problem with expanding into new markets, 18 teams is simply too many, and finding an extra 90-odd players to put on AFL lists was always going to spread

the talent too thin.’