Like it or lump it, the AFL’s wildcard finals are here to stay

The numbers will tell you wildcard weekend was a roaring success. For the AFL that is all that matters.

The league’s case for the wildcard round is a business one. As a business case, it was a phenomenal success. As a sporting case, where integrity, fairness and finding the best teams remain important – flimsy imperatives in a competition with a fixture where compromise is the rule, not the exception – the justification remains doubtful.

As a case of theatre, the wildcard was box-office drama and the most compelling argument the AFL could have hoped for.

The numbers will say that on both nights the footy was the third-top program viewed nationally after channels Seven and Nine’s news bulletins.

About one million people watched on Friday night – 800,000 on free to air TV, another 166,000 streaming and an untold number watching on Foxtel (untold that is because they won’t tell us. Fox is cagey about these things).

On Saturday night, there were 720,000 watching free on TV and another 153,000 streaming.

On Friday night more than 81,000 people were at the MCG; on Saturday night 91,000 squeezed in.

In recent years, there would have been no men’s footy on this weekend at all. Instead, 172,000 people went along and millions more watched on TV. This is actually a flimsier argument than it sounds. The AFL created the bye weekend a few years ago, and now it uses the wildcard as an answer to fixing the problem of having that bye. Groucho Marx might be consulting.

The business case says the raw numbers, the money generated, the people attracted to watch the game make wildcard an overwhelming success. Clearly the biggest wildcard round they’ve ever had!

By comparison, the NRL this week had viewing numbers about half the AFL’s. Cute.

So the reasoning is the eyeballs are on the AFL and not drifting to other things, and those huge crowds engendered excitement when otherwise (for male football, there is still the AFLW) there would have been the high drama of … a legends’ match.

But this year they had Collingwood one night and Carlton the next. Of course they got crowds and TV numbers like that.

If next year’s wildcard round is North Melbourne v Gold Coast and GWS v Port Adelaide, and the numbers are barely a fraction of this year’s, will the AFL say “well that didn’t work, look at the crowds”?

For the team that finishes 10th in a competition of 18 to be rewarded with a chance to play finals remains illogical.