The AFL is weighing up the addition of a mid-season tournament, in the mould of the NBA Cup, according to Nine journalist Sam McClure.
The spotlight is on the current season, with essentially only nine teams remaining in the race for the top eight, meaning there will be nearly 20 games across the rest of the season with no stakes.
With Tasmania set to enter the competition in 2028, this concept would be part of the AFL's transition away from 24 rounds, with the length of the season reduced to each team playing each other once, plus a rivalry round, Gather Round, Opening Round and this tournament.
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Would fans care about a mid-season AFL tournament? Getty
NBA Cup games count for both regular season wins and separately as either pool games or elimination matches for the in-season tournament. It all culminates in four teams heading to Las Vegas for the finals.
The winner of the tournament receives a cash prize, spread amongst the players and the franchise.
McClure says the AFL likes this model and sees it as a new revenue source they can tap into as well, given they could sell naming rights for the tournament for potentially millions of dollars.
"The AFL is concerned about teams essentially having the back-half of the year as dead," McClure told Nine's Footy Classified.
"There's also an opportunity for a completely new stream of revenue.
"The AFL are using the NBA Cup as a bit of inspiration and looking at how to keep teams eliminated from finals invested.
"The NBA's deal with Emirates for the NBA Cup was worth $500m."
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AFL legend Jimmy Bartel speaks on Nine's Today.
Jimmy Bartel. Nine
Geelong champion Jimmy Bartel however is not moved by the idea, saying the AFL has a lot of issues already on its plate that it should be dealing with before biting off such a monumental shift to the way the competition is structured.
Already this year the league has come under fire for umpiring and suspension debacles, as well as internal communication errors that embarrassed the executive team.
"I think the AFL has got a lot of other things to take care of first," Bartel said.
"I like ideas, I like the big picture moving forward, but pace it slowly and not just off the back of this year."
Every struggling team bar Fremantle in ninth is likely already out of the finals race.
The Brownlow Medallist believes this season is more of an anomaly than the norm when it comes to late-season dead-rubbers.
"If you go back to 2023, you were only two games out of finals from 13th and last year you were only two games out from 14th," Bartel added.
"We've had two pretty competitive seasons. We've had bad seasons for the last 100 years, we've had bad games, that's just footy."
McClure suggested that the AFL has considered spicing up the tournament by granting the winner automatic finals qualification.
Bartel dismissed this however, saying that prize would be pretty worthless for the top teams, given they're most likely to win the tournament and qualify for finals regardless.
"But what if Collingwood wins it? Then we're left with a spot that doesn't go to anybody," he said.