About this site
About this site and how the fixture is made
An independent, AI-generated study of the AFL fixture. Not affiliated with the AFL or any club.
What this is
thefixture.com.au is an unofficial, AI-generated explorer for a modelled AFL fixture. The fixture shown here was produced by a research model. The AFL did not write it and has not endorsed it, and the AFL will publish its own 2027 fixture on its own timetable. Where this site says modelled, it means our model produced the result.
Who made it
It is an independent research project built by one person with AI assistance, in the open, as a study of how a fixture could be generated and explained. It is not affiliated with the AFL, any club, any broadcaster or any venue.
How the fixture is built
A season fixture is too big to work out in one go, so it is built in five steps. Step 1 picks which six opponents each club plays twice. Step 2 puts every game in a round and places the byeA round in which a club does not play.Read more in the glossary and special rounds. Step 3 gives each game a calendar date under the players' rest-break rules and chooses the Thursday and Friday night games. Step 4 picks the home club and the ground. Step 5 gives each game a TV time band and models which games go to free-to-airTelevision anyone can watch without a subscription.Read more in the glossary TV. The steps before the TV step must show they found the best answer their rules allow, or the release does not ship; the TV step records how close it got.
- OpponentsOpponentsWho plays twice
- RoundsRoundsWhich round
- DatesDatesWhich day
- Home ground and venueVenueWho hosts, and where
- TV slotTV slotWhich slot
Afterwards: A human tweak, then a re-run. pin a game → re-run → new version → see what changed
For Steps 1 to 4 the solverThe program that searches for a fixture satisfying every rule and, among those, the best for the stage's objective.Read more in the glossary must prove that no better answer exists within that step's rules, or the release refuses to ship. A step that stopped because its clock ran out might give a different answer next time, and a fixture that cannot be reproduced cannot be audited. Step 5 reports its status and how close to proven it got. Every step's result is recorded in the release.
How it works, step by stepRead the journeyExplore the rulesObjectivesGlossaryFAQ
How it is checked
After each solve, independent checkers read the delivered fixture back and test it against every rule the model knows about, without consulting the solver's own reasoning. Each rule's result is a verdictAn independent checker's result for one rule on one version: met, not met, switched off, or doesn't apply.Read more in the glossary: met, not met, switched offNo checker could test this rule in this version. Not a verdict on the fixture.Read more in the glossary (no checker available yet), couldn't check, or doesn't apply. A fixture's acceptance is incomplete until every rule rests on sourced facts for the target season rather than labelled assumptions. Every release so far is incomplete, and says so.
Where the rules come from
The rules are catalogued from public sources: the players' collective agreement, the broadcast dealThe 2025 to 2031 television rights agreement. Its promises are the BC-numbered rules.Read more in the glossary as reported, the AFL's fixture announcements and booklets, venue and sold-game deal announcements, and a published academic description of the AFL scheduling problem. Where a rule is a convention rather than a written rule, it is calibrated to the AFL's 2023 to 2026 fixtures and labelled a modelled assumptionA value we chose because the AFL has not published the 2027 fact, or because a convention is only visible in past fixtures.Read more in the glossary. Where the AFL has not published a 2027 fact, we made an assumption and labelled that too.
What is not here
No scheduled kickoff timeSecond-level detail under the slot band: a typical start time we assumed for that slot, marked modelled. It is not a scheduled time.Read more in the glossary: the model decides a weekday and a time band. Some versions also carry a typical start time assumed for each slot, which we show marked as modelled. No audience or ratings numbers: the current release uses an audience modelA model fitted to published television ratings that predicts a free-to-air audience for each slot choice. Its numbers are not published here.Read more in the glossary to help choose slots, but its predictions are in model units, not viewers, and are not published. No crowd estimates. No finals. No club or league marks: clubs appear as plain-text names only.
Versions and edits
Every published fixture is frozen, with its own fingerprintA unique code computed from a version's contents. Change one byte and the fingerprint changes.Read more in the glossary. Nine were released between 13 and 30 September 2026. An operator editA new version made by locking a game's date or ground with a stated reason and rebuilding the fixture around the lock.Read more in the glossary (a locked match, a rebuild around it, a child version) produces a new version with a recorded diff; the parent is never altered. The site renders what the records say and never recomputes a verdict, a diff or a score.
Honesty rules
Absence has three words here and they are never swapped: not recorded (the field exists and is empty), unknown (we looked and could not find out) and not modelled (we chose not to include it). A zero is a count that came to zero. No percentage compliance, no quality score, no invented precision.
Who this is for
Football fans who want to see how a season could be laid out, analysts who want to check the detail, and people who build fixtures and want to compare approaches.
The site shows how a model builds a fixture and how that compares with the AFL's publicly shown process. It is not the AFL's fixture, and it is not endorsed by the AFL.
Flagging an issue
Every data point on this site, from a match's date, ground or slot to a rule explanation or a release note, carries a small “Flag an issue” link. It opens a short report prefilled with what you were looking at: the version, the match or rule, the field and the value shown. You add what you think is wrong or missing, a source if you have one, and optionally an email.
Some rules depend on facts the community may know better than we do. The clearest case is whether a ground is free that day: no venue has confirmed any date, so its verdict reads “No known conflict”, never “met”, and its flag link is the prominent kind.
Reports go to a public issue tracker at github.com (a free account is needed) or, by email, to [email protected].
Contact
Questions, corrections and sources: [email protected]. There is no newsletter and no tracking; the only thing the site remembers is a club you choose on your own device.
Disclaimer
- thefixture.com.au is an unofficial, AI-generated fixture explorer. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the AFL or any club.
- This is a modelled fixture, not the AFL's announced fixture. The AFL will publish its own 2027 fixture.
- Every value shown is a recorded fact from the fixture version named above. Where we have nothing, it says not recorded.
- No league or club marks are used. Clubs appear as plain-text names.
Current version: B012 Wednesday opening from the release of 30 Sep 2026.