The Australian Football League "has been quietly developing a modified form of Australian Rules that is played on a soccer field," which it trialed in a secret match between two Victorian Football League teams last weekend, according to Larissa Nicholson of THE AGE. With the working name AFL X, "the new version of the game allows just seven players from each team on the ground, far fewer than the usual 18-a-side, and is part of a broader plan to become a year-round sport." AFL CEO Gillon McLachlan said that "the concept had come from a brainstorming session with his staff." He said that "the idea behind AFL X had been to attract non-football fans to the game and enable it to be taken to venues where football could not normally be played because they did not have an oval." AFL GM of Game & Market Development Simon Lethlean stressed that AFL X "was still very much in its infancy." He described it as an "internal think-tank" project, but said that it had the potential to "fill a gap between a full-scale AFL games and the recreational AFL-9s format." By fielding smaller teams and playing on a soccer pitch, he said that "it was easier than full-scale football to take overseas and may one day form a part of the AFL's international expansion plans" (THE AGE, 9/7). In Melbourne, Marika Dobbin wrote AFL X "provoked strong reactions among the footy-loving public." Despite the context for a smaller version of the game, some Australian fans "reacted with anger and even horror on social media to the AFL X experiment." Kay Willett from Melbourne said, "Stop stuffing up the footy." Debra McCristal from Boronia wrote, "Leave it alone morons. It was a great game before it became a business!!"
Those outraged by the concept "were countered by those who pointed out that many professional sports such as cricket and rugby had found success with a shorter format." Early votes of a reader poll suggested opinion on the AFL X concept "was fairly evenly split," with 49% agreeing it was a good idea and 51% disagreeing, with more than 5,000 votes cast (THE AGE, 9/7).
