Oval ball, 36 players on the ground, six points for a goal and a 2.30pm Grand Final. There are a few elements to the game that haven’t changed whatsoever in the past 50 years, but what does footy’s next half-century look like?
DYLAN LEACH has some thoughts.
In 1976, League football was a 12-club competition built around six games played at often muddy suburban grounds, and the only way to follow it live – if not at the game – was on the radio.
Fast-forward to 2026, and it is an 18-club national league with nine matches a round (mostly) with all games available to watch live on TV, your phone, tablet or computer.
Instead of two umpires there are four and the media cycle, fuelled by endless TV shows and 24-hour sports radio, is relentless.
Fifty years from now, in 2076, futurist Bernard Salt sees 24 clubs, AI in the coach’s box, a more global code and stadiums being climate-controlled cities within cities.
Picture the 2076 Grand Final.
The roof is closed over the MCG, the temperature is perfect and the surrounding precinct contains restaurants, shops, businesses and perhaps apartments.
A head of AI is feeding scenarios to the coach, players receive instructions without a runner and supporters can watch from almost any virtual angle. Then a kick scrapes the post – or perhaps it does not – and the entire futuristic structure is drowned out by a football argument as old as the game itself.
BARASSI THE VISIONARY
Everything around the game may change – the person convinced the umpire has cost their team a premiership probably will not.
Football has never lacked people willing to predict its future, but few carried the authority of Ron Barassi.
Writing in the book World of Sport in 1976, he looked ahead to 1987 and forecast full-time coaches, professional players, a national competition, greater opportunities for women and a faster game.
Nineteen years later, in 1995, the Football Record handed him the crystal ball again, this time to predict 2005 – some calls proved remarkably accurate, including larger coaching teams, video analysis and full-time players.
Others missed: fewer clubs, Melbourne merging with Richmond and four goal umpires.
His broader conclusion held up though – football would keep evolving, supporters would keep arguing and the game would remain as compelling as ever.
Barassi’s hit rate matters less than the exercise ... he was not naming the next premier; he was reading the direction of travel.
Professionalism, national expansion, technology and the women’s game were already visible.
The specifics moved around, as specifics tend to do, but the forces reshaping football were there.
Bernard Salt is a demographer, social commentator and futurist.
I must admit, I was hoping that meant meeting a Doc Brown-like figure, climbing into a DeLorean and firing up the flux capacitor for a journey to 2076, with a quick stop in 1976 along the way.
Ideally, we would return with a copy of Gray’s Sports Almanac or, at the very least, the AFL Record Guide to Season 2076. I could learn the next 50 premiers, Brownlow medallists and upset results – and give my future bank balance a considerable boost.
Sadly, it was not to be.
Futurism is less about time machines and sporting results
than examining long-term data, demographic shifts, technology and changing social behaviour to build plausible versions of what comes next – it is scenario planning, not fortune-telling.
Before we spoke, I sent Salt a set of notes comparing football in 1976 and 2026 across a handful of measures: clubs, crowds, venues, scheduling, media and technology.
His method is equally simple.
When a chief executive asks him to talk about the next five or 10 years, his first question is: ‘where were you five or 10 years ago?’
“If you go back, then you can see the sort of things that can change within that timeframe,” he said.
So, back to 1976. The VFL had 12 clubs, six games on a Saturday afternoon and suburban grounds.
Fans and even players could
work until noon, grab something to eat, get to the ground for the two o’clock start and still be home in time for dinner.
Grounds became mud baths, radio carried the scores from elsewhere and the Grand Final was not televised live into Victoria.
There was also a new two-field-umpire system, and people were angry and confused about it.
Fifty years later, we have four field umpires, score reviews and
the ARC, and people remain angry and confused.
The more footy changes, the more it finds technologically advanced ways to create the same argument.
Australia’s population has roughly doubled since 1976.
The competition grew from 12 clubs to 18, the VFL became the AFL and annual attendances climbed from about three million to the eight or nine million range.
Saturday afternoon became Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday in several instalments
and Sunday at whatever time
the fixture computer has decided suits everyone except the person trying to attend.
The game has been
nationalised, professionalised
and commercialised.
The supporter, however, remains familiar: optimistic before the first bounce, certain during the contest and aggrieved at something by quarter-time.
A 24-CLUB LEAGUE
The easiest future to picture is a bigger competition.
Tasmania is due to become the 19th club in 2028. Then the map becomes interesting.
If Australia’s population is 40 million by 2076, Salt sees room for another four or five teams.
His first pick after Tasmania is the ACT, then he looks north to a Top End team that could reach beyond Darwin into the Northern Territory, Kimberley and Pilbara.
It would lack a Melbourne-sized population but offer football culture, regional identity and resources sponsors.
Broadcast reach, commercial backing and community representation will count.
Salt also likes North Queensland.
Put Mackay, Townsville and Cairns together and there is a sizeable population with its own identity, economy and healthy suspicion of being treated as an extension of Brisbane.
Living in Queensland, I am well aware of that argument.
The Sunshine Coast and Newcastle-Central Coast corridor are on his board too, while he also wonders about a stronger second tier, even promotion and relegation, involving Ballarat, Bendigo, Albury and Bunbury.
“There’s probably scope for another four or five teams,” he said.
The list is not the point.
In 1976, a national league and a Grand Final outside Melbourne would have been like a confused dream ... today’s map should not limit tomorrow’s competition.
A bigger league creates the familiar finals argument.
How many teams is too many? There is not much joy – or money – in telling most clubs that September is none of their business.
Salt sees finals differently. They sell hope.
He then offers a suggestion that is often seen as taboo among some of the more hardcore supporters: by 2076, having a second team might be normal.
One club remains the deep allegiance. Another might be the interstate team, a family connection or simply the team for which you have developed a soft spot.
“Wouldn’t that complicate things?” I asked. Yes. Raise eyebrows? Absolutely. But Salt believes loyalties are already less rigid, and a second allegiance gives more games meaning.
As a long-suffering Saints man, Salt is not immune to people telling him St Kilda is their second-favourite team.
The sentiment is genuine and the soft spot is real, but he also knows there is a considerable difference between being someone’s second team and their first love.
THE CODE WARS GO GLOBAL
Salt hears globalisation in footy’s language. Terms such as ‘midfielder’, ‘defensive structure’, ‘zones’ and ‘corridor’ are now standard, but in 1976, they would have sounded foreign.
He does not remember ‘midfielder’ being used when he played country footy, while zones and defence carry an American accent borrowed from basketball.
The foreign language of 1976 came from closer to home.
Victorians were bemused when South Australians called a curling kick a ‘checkside’ – in Melbourne, it was a banana.
The code wars meant VFL versus VFA, two competitions fighting for players and crowds and the right to play on a Sunday afternoon.
Fifty years later, the borders
have shifted.
Earlier this month, on September 11, the San Francisco 49ers and Los Angeles Rams played at the MCG in the NFL’s first regular-season game in Australia.
The 10.35am Friday start made it Thursday night television in America and put another football code on our most famous ground.
The NFL did not arrive cold – the Super Bowl, streaming, fantasy leagues and merchandise are part of Australia’s sporting landscape.
A teenager in Wangaratta can support an American franchise as intensely as a local club.
The MCG game simply made a digital influence physical.
AFL clubs visit the NFL, NBA, Major League Baseball and the Premier League for ideas about coaching, recovery and performance, while India and China may exert more influence over the next 50 years.
Elite sport steals good ideas.
The complication is the leagues we learn from are also competitors.
The code wars are no longer VFL v VFA, or only AFL v rugby league.
Salt said the NFL should view Australia as a rich, sports-mad market comparable to a large American state.
“I would be treating Australia a little bit like Texas,” he said.
The AFL therefore has to play attack and defence: import the
best ideas in world sport while protecting what makes Australian Football impossible to replace here.
The naming debate has already started at home.
Increasingly, the game itself is called ‘AFL’ at every level, from school and junior football to suburban and country leagues.
There’s no shortage of people who point out that the AFL is a league, not a sport and the game is Australian Football, or simply footy.
Language, however, has a habit of ignoring the rule book.
If the game chases a global market, even its name may become an issue. Salt doubted ‘Aussie rules’ would travel as the name of an international code. A location-free brand might sell more easily.
Perhaps. But this is the tension. Remove too much place from football and the product becomes broader but thinner. The game can go global only if its clubs remain local enough to mean something.
THE COMPUTER COACH
By 2076, Salt expects every on-field movement to be captured.
A computer will run live scenarios and recommend what should happen next.
Move one player behind the ball; release another from stoppage; change the rotation.
The coaching box might include a head of AI beside the analysts and medical staff.
“I could imagine real-time AI decision-making,” Salt said.
The coach survives because football is not a spreadsheet, players are not dots and people skills still matter.
Any recommendation remains a probability, vulnerable to injury, weather, nerve, an umpiring decision and an oval ball’s bounce.
The coach interprets the model, sells the decision and carries the blame when the computer’s winning move does not win.
Salt cannot see the Grand Final permanently leaving the MCG.
He briefly forgot the pandemic deciders had been played in Brisbane (2020), Perth (2021) and Waverley (when the now Shane Warne Stand was being built in 1991), or during wartime.
I reminded him, but he seemed staunch the biggest day in football would never leave its spiritual home on a permanent basis.
“Do you think the Pope would move from the Vatican?” he asked.
“No, the Vatican is the Vatican.”
The Grand Final would move to a night game, with the 30-year (plus) debate we are still having in 2026 done and dusted, and the MCG could acquire the roof Salt thinks
is inevitable.
Other states will continue to bid and complain, but football’s holiest day still returns to its cathedral.
WHAT ABOUT THE AFLW?
I also asked Salt where the women’s game might sit in 2076.
That requires more care than simply asking if AFLW will one day look like the men’s competition.
In 1976, women were deeply involved in football as supporters, volunteers and family members,
but were generally presented as viewers rather than players. The Football Record’s ‘Girl of the Week’ competition captured the prevailing attitude: women had a place around the game, but rarely at its centre.
Fifty years later, AFLW includes all 18 clubs and, in 2026, has a 12-round season.
The transformation has been enormous, even if the national women’s competition remains in its first decade.
Salt’s view is the gap will narrow substantially without disappearing.
The men’s game has had roughly 170 years to develop skills, crowds, pathways and media ecosystem.
He believes physical differences will mean the competitions retain distinct styles.
That is Salt’s forecast, not a settled fact, and any 50-year prediction about women’s sport risks carrying today’s assumptions too far into the future.
The more useful argument is about oxygen.
AFLW must keep earning space in a crowded calendar through better scheduling, stronger pathways, longer seasons, better pay, deeper lists and serious media coverage.
I put it to Salt that following AFLW while expecting a copy of the men’s game is the wrong approach.
By 2076, the women should not require constant comparison.
It can be fully professional, widely watched and technically advanced while remaining its own version of Australian Football.
The respectful future is not one in which the women’s game becomes the men’s game, it is one in which girls growing up with AFLW never have to wonder whether football has a place for them.
THE RECORD
The future of the AFL Record is the most relevant part of Salt’s forecast to the thing you are holding.
In 1976, the Football Record carried the teams, numbers and information a supporter needed.
In 2026, your phone updates a late change before the ink dries and delivers live statistics, commentary, video, analysis and thousands of opinions nobody requested.
So why would a printed Record exist in 2076? Because, Salt argues, it is no longer competing with the phone at the same task.
He calls the Record a catechism: instruction book, souvenir and symbol of participation.
The Season Guide is football’s Bible. The Grand Final edition says this game mattered and you were part of it, whether bought outside the MCG or 1500km away.
“It’s not the Record as such,” he said. “It’s a symbol of participation in a religious event.”
The digital future should add to that, not erase it. A Record might unlock alternate camera angles, archival footage, live data, audio or an interactive match view.
Paper could become the front door to a larger digital product – as information becomes temporary and weightless, the object may gain value because it can be kept.
The Record survives because it is more than a delivery system, it is folded into a back pocket, marked during the game, carried home and rediscovered years later with a score, a memory and usually an umpiring complaint attached.
Salt can imagine it still being printed in 2076 – it may be smaller, smarter and linked to technology not yet named, but it will still feel like something worth keeping.
KEEPING THE FAITH
Here Salt’s predictions become less about AI, population and stadiums, and more about why people care.
As religious affiliation, corporate loyalty and family structures weaken, he sees the football club becoming more important.
Clubs provide colours, songs, rituals, enemies and shared family stories-the machinery of a tribe.
“You want to feel part of a community, part of a tribe,” he said.
That is worth remembering if you are asking long-suffering Essendon, Carlton and, of course, St Kilda supporters when will their club’s premiership drought break?
Their last flags came in 2000, 1995 and 1966 respectively.
Every new season invites belief, before reality arrives.
Salt himself chose St Kilda in 1966 because, as a boy, he picked the best team.
“Bad investment,” he says now.
He cannot provide the year of the Saints’ next premiership, but he said the competition must ensure that always feels possible.
During the first 25 years of this century, 17 of the 18 clubs reached a preliminary final.
Only Gold Coast, which did not enter until 2011, missed out.
A preliminary final is not a flag, but it has placed almost every supporter base within one win of Grand Final day.
Salt said drafts, salary caps and equalisation should give low-ranking clubs a way back.
Good administration still matters – there can be no “stuff-ups” – but each generation should get a legitimate shot at September.
Without that, he said, a club was condemned to “eternal damnation and frustration”.
Permanent winners and losers create a class system, at odds with the Australian idea that today’s battler can be tomorrow’s premier.
“You’re not selling hope,” Salt said. “You need to sell hope.”
By 2076 there may be 24 clubs, AI in the coach’s box and climate-controlled stadiums.
Late in the Grand Final, the ball will bend towards the post. The system will deliver a verdict. Half the ground will reject it. Strangers in matching colours will agree that the entire apparatus has conspired against them.
They will leave arguing all the way home, posting their outrage on a social platform we can’t even imagine and teleporting into SEN ready to rant with a Record tucked under one arm.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.