NO document creates more joy, frustration, debate and dismay as the AFL - and now AFLW - fixture.

Port Adelaide on Sunday - against AFL premier Melbourne at Alice Springs - began its five "double-up" games before even playing all its 17 AFL rivals once. Next is Geelong (nine weeks after the first clash at Kardinia Park); then Collingwood for the first time this season and first time since July 23 last year; followed by Richmond (seven weeks after the match at the MCG), Essendon (after a 10-week gap) and a Showdown finish to the home-and-away series with a home derby 20 weeks after the 51st Showdown.

The AFL fixture is a hangover from the old 12-team Victorian Football League that gave all 12 teams the perfectly balanced annual program of 11 home games and 11 away matches - 22 rounds from late March to late August, followed by finals.

The AFL has preserved (for commercial reasons rather than sentiment) the 22 games with a bye during the season and one before the top-eight finals.

But with 18 teams - and possibly 19 soon with the impending vote on creating a new AFL licence for Tasmania - the fixture has become a contradiction of all the league has sought to establish by fairness and equality with the key platforms of the salary cap and the draft.

Those five "double-up" games are mysterious.

One of the five always will be a derby - the Showdown in South Australia, the Western Derby in Perth for West Coast and Fremantle, the Q Clash in Queensland with Brisbane and Gold Coast, the Battle of the Bridge in Sydney and the so-called "blockbuster" pairings in Melbourne, such as Collingwood-Carlton.

The other four?

The AFL has its weighted formula to settle this question. There is a guaranteed minimum and maximum games allocated against rivals from three groups, those that ranked 1-6, 7-12 and 13-18 the previous season.

Port Adelaide was placed third in 2021. This put Port Adelaide in the frame to play:

NO MORE than three games (but at least two) against teams that also ranked in the top six in 2021. This put Melbourne (premiers) and Geelong (fourth) on Port Adelaide's cards this season.

NO MORE than two games (but at least one) against sides that ranked between seventh and 12th in 2021. Essendon (eighth) and Richmond (12th) for Port Adelaide this season.

NO MORE than one team from the bottom six of 2021. Adelaide (15th) had to be the bottom-six "double-up" opponent by the need for two Showdowns each seasons.

Fair?

Port Adelaide coach Ken Hinkley recently noted the fixture "can be so skewed between one year and the next with ladder performance".

Then there is the commentary on "tough" and "easy" draws when every sporting competition should actually have a fair fixture.

Those who argue the race to the top-eight finals this season becomes distorted by having "double-up" games against bottom-two teams North Melbourne and West Coast have had their "trump" card creased by the weekend's results. In meeting North Melbourne for the first time this season, eighth-ranked Richmond lost ... an unexpected four-point result that again made the race to the final eight this season seem a wild ride to September.

Then there are the new issues.

There has been the "floating" fixture - a method of allocating timeslots to matches in blocks of between three and six weeks, a mechanism to put the most-appealing match-ups in the prime timeslots for attendances and, critically, television ratings.

This changed the annual routine of waiting until late October or early November for the AFL to release the full 22 home-and-away rounds - dates, timeslots and venues all locked.
Fans would quickly get out their calendars, rush to airline websites and plan the social and travel diary for the year ahead.

Clubs had certainty in planning their programs.

Venues could confidently take bookings for their function rooms. Losing this certainty on the calendar is a sore point with stadium management teams, such as the SMA at Adelaide Oval. The venue operator needs to earn cash away from football events (easing the need to take more from AFL clubs such as Port Adelaide) - and cancelling wedding receptions to put on an AFL match works against this agenda.

The AFL - saying it "has listened" to the fans - will deliver a fixed fixture for the first 15 rounds of next season. The final seven-eight weeks will be a "floating" fixture. It is a compromise rather than a return to what the fans knew and preferred.

But what of the fixture itself?

Port Adelaide coach Ken Hinkley recently suggested the fixture have 27 games for the home-and-away series - 17 plus 10 (nine of the 18 rivals, plus the guaranteed double-up derby).
"My magic number is 27 ... you play one and a half rounds a year and after three years you play everyone twice (in the 'double-up' games)," Hinkley said, while also advocating shorter matches to ease the demands on the players with this longer season.

"We're never going to get 34 games of footy (each team playing its 17 rivals twice)."

And 17 games (with just one game against each of the 17 rivals) is too short in a commercial context for the AFL and its 18 clubs.

The AFL clubs already have rejected the proposal (posed in 2016 along with 11 other fixture concepts) for the league to have every club play its rivals once - and determine the last five games of the home-and-away series by the premiership rankings after round 17.

Hinkley says the 27-game fixture is "fairer" than the current 22. But it still has the issue that one set of nine double-up games can be tougher than another. It does not resolve the challenge of developing a fair draw.

And the AFL premiership is decided annually - not on a three-year cycle after every team has played its rivals twice in the "double-up" matches.

The AFLW fixture - that features Port Adelaide for the first time in Season 7 starting in late August - is even more compromised by having the 18 teams play just 10 home-and-away games. But that league is amid growing pains ...

So where is the solution?

Conferences, as used in American professional sports (and in the early days of the VFL), certainly offer a fair fixture with 22 games for each AFL club.

The 18 teams can be split into three groups of six. A club plays its five conference rivals twice (10 games) and the 12 teams in the other two conferences once (12 matches).
The top-eight final series could have the top-two teams from each conference (six clubs) and two of the best-performed third-ranked teams.

But who decides the break up of the 18 teams for the three conferences? Will one conference become more demanding than others (as is often said of the American League East division in Major League Baseball that answered this concern by introducing wild cards to the play-offs)?

The AFL fixture - along with the assigning of prime timeslots regardless of how the program is constructed - will remain a guaranteed subject of debate for as long as the draw is compromised by the "double-up" games.

And there is a point of mystery with the current fixture system.

Does it significantly distort the race to the AFL premiership? This point is a little more difficult to substantiate ...