Australian Football League CEO Gillon McLachlan said that Tasmania is "simply too poor to support its own AFL team," according to the AAP. Dashing "any Tasmanian hopes" that some of the league's A$2.5B ($1.8B) broadcast deal windfall "might be spent establishing a side on the island state," McLachlan said on Wednesday that economics "stood in the way of a Tasmania-based side." McLachlan: "Tasmania deserves its own team. It just does. Their participation rates, their ratings, their attendance, they are as passionate as any state." It is "the business case McLachlan can't see working in Australia's smallest state." He said, "The brutal reality right now, the economy and scale of growth mean they financially can't support their own team playing 11 games, you need A$45 million ($33.1M)." McLachlan said the broadcast deal "secured the current 18-team format" and he could not envisage "any changes to the AFL clubs for at least a decade." McLachlan: "With respect to expansion, I believe we have the right number of teams in the right slots for the foreseeable future and the foreseeable future is 10 to 15 years" (AAP, 8/19).
