If you support West Coast and live in Victoria, you already know the frustration: your team barely seems to show up on free TV. It's not in your head. FootyTonight counted every AFL 2026 home-and-away broadcast (all 23 games per club) by state, and the gap for some clubs is enormous.
West Coast get 18 of their 23 games free-to-air in Western Australia. In Victoria, they get 2.
Free-to-air games per team, by state (23-game season)
| Team | VIC | NSW | WA | SA |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Western Bulldogs | 14 | 10 | 10 | 7 |
| Geelong | 13 | 14 | 11 | 8 |
| Collingwood | 13 | 12 | 12 | 5 |
| St Kilda | 13 | 13 | 8 | 6 |
| Melbourne | 12 | 9 | 9 | 9 |
| Hawthorn | 12 | 11 | 10 | 7 |
| Adelaide | 11 | 10 | 8 | 16 |
| Carlton | 11 | 11 | 9 | 4 |
| Sydney | 10 | 19 | 6 | 4 |
| Essendon | 9 | 11 | 7 | 9 |
| Brisbane Lions | 9 | 8 | 7 | 4 |
| Richmond | 7 | 7 | 4 | 6 |
| Fremantle | 7 | 7 | 15 | 5 |
| Gold Coast | 7 | 6 | 7 | 6 |
| Greater Western Sydney | 5 | 18 | 5 | 5 |
| North Melbourne | 5 | 7 | 3 | 2 |
| West Coast | 2 | 2 | 18 | 4 |
| Port Adelaide | 2 | 5 | 3 | 19 |
Every club plays 23 games in the home-and-away season. Read your team's row against your own state's column, not the other columns, and you'll see the real number that matters for your household.
Your own state's team gets shown the most
The pattern behind these numbers is the same one behind Seven's regional broadcast split: free coverage is heaviest for the club that belongs to the state watching it. Three clubs make the effect impossible to miss:
- West Coast: 18/23 free in WA, but just 2/23 in VIC. If you're a West Coast fan who moved to Melbourne, you've lost free access to 16 of the 18 games you used to catch at home.
- Port Adelaide: 19/23 free in SA, but 2/23 in VIC. Almost the entire Power season is free in Adelaide; almost none of it is free in Victoria.
- Greater Western Sydney: 18/23 free in NSW, only 5/23 in VIC. Sydney's second AFL club barely registers on Victorian free TV despite being nearly ever-present on Sydney's.
Sydney Swans show a milder version of the same thing: 19/23 free in NSW against 10/23 in VIC. The gap is real but smaller than GWS's, and our data doesn't tell us why — only that it's there.
Why some clubs barely move between states
Clubs based in Victoria — the Western Bulldogs, Geelong, Collingwood, St Kilda, Melbourne, Hawthorn and Carlton among them — don't show the same swing. Western Bulldogs (14 in VIC, 10 in WA) and Geelong (13 in VIC, 11 in WA) still skew toward home, but nowhere near as sharply as West Coast's 16-game gap (18 in WA versus 2 in VIC) or Port Adelaide's 17-game gap (19 in SA versus 2 in VIC). With ten AFL clubs based in Victoria, no single one dominates the state's free slate the way West Coast dominates WA's or Port Adelaide dominates SA's — that much the table shows directly. Why Victorian clubs individually swing less isn't something our broadcast data can explain.
North Melbourne and Richmond sit low almost everywhere (5/23 and 7/23 in VIC respectively). Their free coverage doesn't concentrate strongly in any one state in this data, which is its own kind of answer if you support either club and have been wondering why they feel scarce on free TV no matter where you live.
What to do with this if you're picking a subscription
If your team's free count in your state is high (West Coast fans in WA, Swans or GWS fans in NSW, Port fans in SA), free-to-air alone may cover most of your season. If it's low (West Coast or Port fans anywhere outside their home state, or North Melbourne and Richmond fans generally), a subscription service is doing more of the real work than the free channels are, regardless of what your state's overall free-to-air share looks like.
For the state-level picture behind these team numbers, including how the Round 6 western derby and Melbourne-Brisbane matches split between WA and VIC free TV on the same weekend, see our companion piece: free AFL coverage by state.
Check your specific team's page for the current 2026 fixture and confirmed broadcast channel per match, for example /afl/teams/west-coast, and cross-reference kickoff times with /afl/fixtures or coverage options at /afl/how-to-watch.
Data and methodology
Figures cover all 207 AFL 2026 home-and-away matches (23 per club), with broadcast coverage confirmed for 207 of 207 games. A game counts as "free" in a state if a free-to-air channel (Channel 7, 7mate or 7plus) was listed as a viewing option there in the AFL's official broadcast guide, normalised by FootyTonight. This piece covers Victoria, New South Wales, Western Australia and South Australia only, the four states where the home-state effect is clearest in the data. NRL broadcast data in our database is not yet complete enough to publish equivalent team figures. See how we source data for more on where these figures come from and what we don't publish.