For more than two decades, Canadian software engineer Rick Stone has been helping formulate the AFL’s fixture after a chance meeting with a league executive on a bus in Michigan.

Stone had heard of the Australian competition and even seen a few games while flicking through late-night TV in Canada. Though he did not fully understand the rules, they seemed complicated.

He would soon discover the logistics behind it were far more confounding.

The AFL announced on Wednesday the make-up of the final two rounds of this home-and-away season. The pending addition of a 19th club (Tasmania) in 2028 is set to test even further the limits of the league’s fixture – already one of the most complex mathematical equations of any sports competition worldwide.

Stone, Fastbreak AI’s chief scheduling officer, said the league easily ranked in the top 10 – potentially even top five – most complicated sports competitions of the roughly 90 he helps design schedules for globally, with the NFL among the few that trumps it.

“The AFL is definitely unique,” he told The Age. “Every year they seem to add some new wrinkles.”

According to Stone, there are several factors that set the AFL apart from most overseas competitions, including the fact most teams share home grounds and several have secondary “home” venues, the high number of special rounds and marquee matches, and players’ stringent travel limits and rest requirements.

While other competitions have pre-determined opponents, the AFL’s model matches teams based on ladder position – an approach Stone said made the fixture more even, but “substantially more complex”.

There are currently more than 400 “rule sets” governing the AFL fixture, each weighted differently and containing numerous sub-rules. Stone said it took months of data analysis, and hundreds of options sent back-and-forth, before the league locked in the final version of a fixture.

With the addition of the 19th club in 2028, Stone said the AFL was approaching a point where it would need to start making tough decisions around what trade-offs it was willing to accept.

“It’s essentially a large, large math problem … There are billions and billions of possible schedules out there when you’re starting, but for every rule that you add, you’re cutting off a portion of that universe, and so there’s fewer and fewer and fewer possible schedules out there, and as you continue to add more and more and more rules, you get to a point where there’s just nothing left in the universe,” he said.

“At this point, I think we’re still fine, but yeah, in the trajectory that we’re going right now, every year it becomes more complex and more rules. We’re still managing to find schedules at this point … but having an odd number, it complicates things … 20 is a lot nicer number to work with.”

The AFL has floated four potential options for a 19-team fixture: a 22-game season plus finals, a 24-game season plus finals, a 20-game season leading into a pre-finals group stage, or a 20-game season plus finals with a separate in-season tournament.

The AFL’s head of strategy and scheduling Josh Bowler, who has the final call on each year’s fixture, said significant weight would be given to how easy a fixture was for a fan to understand, a factor that would favour a 22-game or 24-game season, as they were closest to the current format. This was also the format that was modelled when the Devils were approved to join the league.

AFL Fans Association President Ron Issko said generally the less disruption, the better. He said most supporters he had spoken to did not like the in-season competition concept because they felt teams would not take it seriously. This masthead reported in mid-2025 on the league considering the introduction of the secondary tournament that would run during the premiership season, award millions of dollars in prizemoney and could even offer the winning team a spot in the finals.

But Issko said the biggest concern among fans was the floating fixture – a change brought in during the pandemic to allow the league greater flexibility to make late decisions about venues, dates and even match-ups. After pushback from fans, the AFL agreed to lock in the first 15 rounds, but games from round 16 onwards are announced as the season progresses.

The league previously pledged to release game details at least six weeks out, excluding the final round – round 24 – which is what it did last year. But this year, the timing of round 23 games were only locked in a fortnight out. A league spokeswoman said this was due to the introduction of the wildcard round.

“With clubs potentially moving straight from round 24 into finals football, we wanted to retain flexibility to properly manage breaks between matches, recovery periods and overall competitive balance leading into the wildcard round and finals series,” she said.

“The AFL’s preference remains to provide clubs, fans and broadcasters with as much certainty as possible, however this year’s competition structure required a different approach. Future timing of fixture announcements will continue to be assessed as part of the fixture development process each season.”

Issko said it made it difficult for regional and interstate fans to plan travel. He said there was also broad dissent around opening round – something the AFL Players’ Association has also flagged concerns around due to shrinking time for players to rest and study – and the sale of Saturday footy.

“Fans know they need the broadcasters to pay the big bucks to keep things affordable, but sometimes they don’t get the balance quite right … to think if you can’t afford Foxtel you can’t watch footy on a Saturday night grates on them,” he said.

Early estimates from people inside the clubs and media indicated the AFL had lost hundreds of thousands of weekly viewers in the first few months of 2025 when this change was introduced. As of 23 July this year, the league said viewership sat at 111.9 million, which was on par with 2025, “give or take a few thousand”. It did not provide equivalent year-to-date viewership data for 2024. Previous reports said around 141 million people tuned in over the course of the entire 2024 season.

Bowler indicated both the commercial Saturday footy deal and the floating fixture were here to stay.

But he was less bullish on the future of opening round, scorned by fans from the get-go as a lacklustre and uneven start to the season, but would not commit to dropping it.

Ultimately, Bowler said he felt the AFL was still striking the right balance with its fixturing, and that this season was on track to hit attendance and viewership targets, tallying a record 6,147,830 fans attending games this season at the end of round 19 – about 10,000 more than the same time last year.

Bowler said he was still keen to see more marquee games for clubs currently missing out, and felt there was space for this in the back end of the season. He said he was also working on ironing out the introduction of AFL/AFLW double-headers – something the AFLPA pushed hard for.

But with another team on the horizon, he acknowledged that something had to give.

“When you put something in, generally something will have to drop off, and so you just want to make sure whatever it is that has to drop off isn’t at a level where it’s starting to have some consequential impacts,” he said.

“We’re not there yet, but there are always some trade-offs to make each year.”

Whatever those trade-offs may be, two things are certain – some will be disappointed, and Bowler will be the first to know about it.