Just months after it told FFA not to go treading on its turf, the AFL has put its giant footprint all over another sport with its plan to stage its Grand Final in the first week of October next year.
While FFA's World Cup bid team, usually busy handing out pearl necklaces, was told that the AFL season was sacrosanct and could not be compromised for one of the biggest sporting events in the world, when the shoe is on the other foot and the league needs to make room for its expansionist agenda, it's too bad for the spring racing carnival.
The Melbourne sports calendar has been set in stone for many years. The Grand Final, with a few notable exceptions, is on the final Saturday in September. It then follows that the spring racing carnival gets serious the following week with the Turnbull Stakes meeting at Flemington.
In that week, footy fans can turn their attention to celebrating the spectacle of the Grand Final into a pursuit of the punt. The racing industry gets six weeks a year to make its bucks and until now has had that window largely to itself. That period is crucial to the profile and overall operation of a major Australian industry.
But now the AFL, unable to find a solution to its issue of having 17 teams and fitting it into its regular timeslot, is pushing the boundaries and asking racing to take a back seat for another week so that it can work out its fixture to the preferred model.
While it insists it is only a one-year solution, there are those who will tell you that it is part of a broader AFL plan to expand the season to a 30-week model similar to that of the NRL. With its expansion to 18 teams, the AFL's belief is clearly the more product the better and it is hard to believe that if it thought it was in the sport's interests to expand the season, it would miss the opportunity.
Never mind the fact that the most successful football competition in the world in terms of corporate sponsorship, revenue and crowd support, the NFL, runs a season for just 17 rounds, plus a four-week playoff system. It starts in August and is finished in January.
It has realised that in an ultra-competitive sporting market, quantity does not equate to quality and giving its competition, the MLB, NHL and NBA, some airspace does not hugely effect its own market.
The growth of sports betting in Australia, much of it on AFL, has already imperilled the future of racing in Australia and now the growth of the league itself threatens to do the same.
If the AFL can't take six months to determine a winner of a 17-team competition, why should it be to the racing industry's detriment?