For more than 20 years, a Canadian software engineer has been one of the most influential — and least known — figures in Australian football, quietly shaping the AFL fixture after a chance encounter with a league executive on a bus in the United States. Rick Stone, now chief scheduling officer at Fastbreak AI, stumbled into the role having only a passing familiarity with the game from late-night television, and discovered that while the rules seemed complicated, the logistics of organising the competition were something else entirely.
A chance meeting that changed AFL fixturing
Stone was on a bus in Michigan when he crossed paths with an AFL executive — a meeting that would draw him into one of sport's most mathematically demanding scheduling challenges. He had caught glimpses of Australian rules football on Canadian late-night TV and found the rules perplexing, but nothing prepared him for the complexity of organising an entire season.
Today, Stone works across roughly 90 sports competitions globally, and he places the AFL firmly in the top 10 — and potentially the top five — most complicated competitions he deals with. Only a handful of competitions, including the NFL, surpass it in scheduling complexity.
"The AFL is definitely unique," Stone said. "Every year they seem to add some new wrinkles."
Why the AFL fixture is one of sport's hardest mathematical puzzles
Several factors combine to make the AFL fixture extraordinarily difficult to construct. Unlike many overseas competitions, most AFL clubs share home grounds, and several teams also play at secondary "home" venues in different cities. The league features a high volume of special rounds and marquee matches, and players are subject to strict travel limits and rest requirements that must be factored into every scheduling decision.
Perhaps most significantly, the AFL does not use pre-determined opponents. Instead, teams are matched partly based on their ladder position — a model Stone said made the competition fairer but "substantially more complex" to schedule than rival leagues.
There are currently more than 400 rule sets governing how the fixture is constructed, each weighted differently and carrying numerous sub-rules. Stone said it took months of data analysis and hundreds of back-and-forth iterations before the league locked in a final fixture each year.
He described the process as an enormous mathematical exercise: "There are billions and billions of possible schedules out there when you're starting, but for every rule that you add, you're cutting off a portion of that universe … as you continue to add more and more rules, you get to a point where there's just nothing left."
Tasmania's arrival in 2028 set to push the fixture to its limits
The pending addition of a 19th club — with Tasmania joining the competition in 2028 — is expected to significantly intensify the challenge. Stone said an odd number of teams complicates scheduling considerably, noting that 20 is "a lot nicer number to work with." While he believes the AFL is still managing to find workable solutions, he warned the league is approaching a point where it will need to make deliberate trade-offs about which rules it is prepared to relax.
The AFL has put forward four potential formats for a 19-team competition: a 22-game home-and-away season plus finals; a 24-game season plus finals; a 20-game season leading into a pre-finals group stage; or a 20-game season plus finals alongside a separate in-season tournament.
The AFL's head of strategy and scheduling, Josh Bowler, who holds final approval over each year's fixture, said significant weight would be given to how easy a format was for fans to understand. That consideration favours the 22- or 24-game options, which most closely resemble the current structure and align with the format modelled when Tasmania's entry was approved.
The AFL Fans Association has also weighed in, with its president indicating that members generally prefer less disruption to the existing format, and that most supporters consulted were not enthusiastic about an in-season competition concept, concerned that clubs would not treat it with full seriousness.
With the AFL announcing the final two rounds of the current home-and-away season this week, attention is already turning to what the competition will look like when Stone and his team face their biggest fixturing challenge yet.
