Broadcast and prime time

Thursday and Friday night games draw plenty of fixture arguments. Their allocation changed across the nine releases. This chapter explains the choices, assumptions and gaps.

Slot bands and assumed times

Step 5 gives each game a weekday and time band: day, twilight or night. Later versions also record an assumed start time for each slot.

The site leads with “Saturday night”, for example. Any clock time appears underneath, marked modelled. It is not an AFL-announced kickoff time.

Early releases found slots that followed the rules, without preferring particular games for particular slots.

From 18 September, releases also modelled TV coverage: national free-to-air games, pay-TV-only games and local state coverage. These are proposals, not announced allocations.

The rules that set limits

The broadcast checks cover:

• Pay-TV-only Saturdays through Round 8 nationally, Round 10 in Queensland and New South Wales, and all season in Victoria.
• Local games returning to live free-to-air from Round 9 in South Australia and Western Australia, and Round 11 in Queensland and New South Wales.
• Season-wide free-to-air minimums and an average minimum of live games per round.
• Early Thursday nights and designated marquee games on free-to-air TV.
• Separate slots for same-state clubs, allowing local coverage without clashes.

These reported 2025 settings are labelled assumptions for 2027. The AFL’s published 2027 settings will replace them.

How prime time is chosen

Within the rules, the current release prefers higher-ranked games for Thursday and Friday nights. Four protections prevent it concentrating those nights too heavily:

1. Club limits. At most seven Thursdays and eight Fridays per club. Thursdays are spread across the season’s three parts.
2. Recent patterns. Each club’s weekday counts stay within its 2023 to 2026 range, with the realism report’s allowed adjustment.
3. Weekends. At least six Saturdays and three to twelve Sundays per club. A test run found little cost in raising the Sunday minimum from two to three.
4. No fading season. First, improve the round with the lowest combined prime-time appeal ranking. Then maximise the season total.

What “appeal” means

This policy ranks clubs using recent prime-time allocations, ladder form and manually chosen popularity groups. Recent seasons count most. Membership and attendance informed the groups but do not determine them.

Essendon’s 2026 form ranks its games low. It gets no Friday nights on either calendar and more Saturday afternoons than in any recent season. The release names this outcome instead of changing the groups to hide it.

Viewing predictions and their limits

From 30 September, Step 5 searches in two passes. First, it maximises a free-to-air viewing prediction from a model fitted to published TV ratings. Then it maximises match appeal, allowing only a small, declared reduction in that prediction.

The predictions use model units, not measured viewer counts. We do not publish the numbers.

Two limits matter:

• Missing predictions are unknown, never zero. Some games lack a prediction for their state, most often South Australian and Western Australian games. They keep reference slots, stay out of the slot search, and are named in the release. This explains Port Adelaide’s few Saturday nights on the Wednesday-opening calendar.
• Pay-TV-only games stay separate. Their figures never contribute to the free-to-air prediction.

Any “proven best” result covers only the slot choices left after games with missing predictions are set aside.

Comparing with the real thing

We plan to check the AFL’s 2027 fixture with the same checkers used on ours.

A difference from our assumptions will be called an assumption mismatch, not an AFL breach. Games left undecided will be not recorded, never counted as passes. Structural differences, such as Opening Round, will be reported as not comparable.