The AFL's holy grail: the quest for an even competition

The Australian Football League (AFL) and its forerunner, the Victorian Football League (VFL), have implemented a number oflabour market controls including metropolitan zoning, country zoning, a transfer system and more\ud recently, a salary cap and draft system. The restraint of trade doctrine requires that any party implementing labour market controls be able to show that such restraints help to achieve the stated objectives of such controls, namely the creation of more even competition. This paper therefore examines how the evenness of a competition such as the AFL may be measured. The author's study involves measuring the number of different teams that have won premierships in the various decades of the VFL-AFL, whether all teams have\ud made the finals at least once in these decades, and how many teams have fulfilled their 'fmals quota' in a given decade. It is suggested that the figures obtained from this study indicate that the AFL has been successful in creating\ud a iuore eyen competition during the 1990's, one that is continuing into the present decade