The 2026 AFL season kicks off at the SCG on Thursday night, but AFL chief executive Andrew Dillon is already thinking six years further down the road. Speaking in Sydney on Monday, Dillon flagged his intention to lobby for Australian rules football's inclusion at the Brisbane 2032 Olympics, telling reporters he had spoken at a high level about the prospect with Brisbane 2032 Organising Committee president Andrew Liveris.
"Our sport is a sport that should be on that stage," Dillon said, according to the Sydney Morning Herald and ABC News. "We'll work closely with the Olympic Committee on what form that takes."
It is a bold ambition, and Dillon is leaning on history to make the case. Australian rules football was a demonstration sport at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, played before a crowd of up to 30,000 at the MCG. The match, between the Victorian Amateur Football Association and a combined VFL-VFA side, drew attention from around the world, if not universal admiration from international visitors unfamiliar with the oval ball and the high mark. The sport has not appeared at the Games since, in part because the IOC eventually abolished the demonstration sport category altogether.
Getting Aussie rules back onto the Olympic programme in 2032 is a far more complex proposition than that 1956 exhibition. Any formal inclusion would require recognition through international federation structures and genuine global participation — two areas where the code faces honest questions. Still, the AFL is not alone in its Olympic ambitions. The NRL has also been in talks with Brisbane 2032 organisers about some form of rugby league inclusion, and cricket, netball, squash, and flag football are among other codes jostling for spots on the programme. The field is crowded.
Dillon's Olympics pitch came as part of a broader Sydney promotional push for the AFL's Opening Round, which this year features home games for all four NSW and Queensland clubs. He defended the format against critics who argue it short-changes Victorian, West Australian, and South Australian fans in the opening week of the season. The numbers, he says, tell a different story.
"The last two round ones have been the two highest attended rounds we've ever had of over 400,000 — last year 451,000 people attended, a record for round one," Dillon said, as reported by ABC News.
Queensland is now the nation's second-largest AFL participation state, with more than 91,000 registered players, and national participation hit a record 625,000 in 2025, according to the AFL. From a purely commercial standpoint, the northern-market strategy is producing results that are hard to argue with.
Dillon also addressed the AFL's international ambitions more broadly. A recent trip to India left him encouraged, with nearly 10,000 boys and girls playing the game there and a national championship involving 10 states already established. He was careful not to commit to AFL games being played in India in the near term, offering a deliberate contrast to the NRL's Las Vegas Opening Round model. "We do things differently," he said.
On the question of State of Origin, Dillon was equally firm. The revived interstate competition — which returned to the calendar for the first time since 1999 when Victoria defeated Western Australia at Optus Stadium in February — is here to stay, he said. It is a position that will please fans in Queensland, where Origin footy carries a cultural weight all of its own.
The honest reality is that Dillon's Olympic dream faces steeper terrain than his domestic ambitions. The IOC's sport selection process is fiercely competitive, and Australian rules football's global footprint, while growing, remains modest compared with codes that have secured or are chasing 2032 inclusion. The code is played at grassroots level in more than 50 countries, but participation numbers in most of those nations are thin. A modified format, something along the lines of how rugby union adapted to sevens for Rio 2016, may well be the path that the AFL is quietly exploring.
Whether it gets there or not, the Olympics conversation signals something meaningful about where Australian football sits in 2026: a code confident enough in its domestic strength to reach for a global stage, and pragmatic enough to know the work required to earn a place on it.