The Australian Football League is "under pressure to boost its pay offer to players" for the inaugural national women's season in '17 after the "spectacular television ratings success of Saturday night's all-star game," according to Roy Ward of THE AGE. But the league "maintains it is on track to eventually make players full professionals." Channel Seven's broadcast of the women's exhibition match between Melbourne and the Western Bulldogs at Whitten Oval "drew the best ratings of any Saturday night game." The AFL said that the game's peak national audience was 1.05 million viewers "while the average combined national audience was 746,000." Melbourne viewers averaged 387,000. These figures add to the AFL Players' Association's case for a "bigger pay packet after the union rejected the AFL's latest offer for the seven-game plus finals competition next year." AFL GM of Game & Development Simon Lethlean declared the game a "success but cautioned against expectations jumping too high for the first season considering Saturday night's game involved the best players in he country and fell during the AFL pre-finals bye." Lethlean said, "It was a stunning success with all the good players playing well and unbelievable TV ratings." But Lethlean did not "step back from the AFL's line of needing to create a competition that could be sustained into the future" (THE AGE, 9/5).
