The AFL remains at loggerheads with Essendon and four of their top officials over what punishments should be handed out over the club's supplements scandal.
Nearly eight hours of talks into Monday evening failed to reach any conclusion and discussions will resume on Tuesday morning.
The club, coach James Hird, senior assistant Mark Thompson, veteran club doctor Bruce Reid and Bombers football manager Danny Corcoran are facing AFL charges relating to conduct unbecoming and bringing the game into disrepute.
There is widespread speculation that the AFL wants to strip the club of this season's premiership points, ban Hird for 12 months and also dock Essendon of valuable draft picks.
One of the sticking points is the Supreme Court writ that Hird took out last Thursday against the AFL.
While the writ is alive, it is understood the AFL's position is that it will not let Hird coach the team.
Hird is conceding he faces some sort of penalty from the AFL over the 2011-12 supplements program at Essendon.
But he and the club will not tolerate any suggestion that they are drug cheats.
Thompson also said if Hird was banned for the 2014 season, the senior coach would find it difficult to come back.
"If he was to lose 12 months it'd be disastrous," Thompson told Fox Footy's AFL 360 program.
"He's a young coach who is learning his way and he didn't deliberately set out to do anything wrong.
"I would think if the AFL knocked him out for 12 months, he would struggle to want to get back."
Thompson, a two-time Geelong premiership coach, said he had not considered a possible one-year role as head coach in Hird's absence.
"It hasn't been offered to me. It hasn't been talked about," Thompson said.
"James is our coach and we're going to try everything we can to help him ... get a fair sanction for what he's done."
Thompson said he was locked away in a room at AFL House with his lawyers from about 1pm to 6pm.
Reid and his legal team were the first to leave league headquarters just before 7pm, with senior club officials locked in talks with the AFL until 10pm.
Hird was seen driving away from the AFL, with wife Tania in the passenger seat.
"We've just been negotiating all day basically," Thompson said, adding his case was nowhere near being resolved.
"I just turn up tomorrow in my suit, go back in my little office and try to negotiate another deal."
Officially Monday's proceedings were an AFL Commission hearing to rule on the charges against the Bombers.
But clearly much of the time was taken up in negotiations between lawyers.
The league is determined to finalise its case against Essendon before the September 6 start of the finals.
Former Essendon great Tim Watson, the father of current captain Jobe, said the draft pick penalties were a sticking point.
"My reading of this now is they think it's too harsh in terms of the draft-pick penalties thrown in on top of the individual penalties on top of the fact they will lose their points," Watson said on Channel Seven's Talking Footy.
"That is done. They'll lose their points so they won't participate in the finals and then there's also the fine on top of that and then it's a negotiation in terms of what they're prepared to accept in terms of the draft-pick penalties."
AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou was supposed to appear on the Talking Footy program as a panellist, but he was unavailable following Monday's extended talks with Essendon.
While the AFL said the talks would resume at 11am on Tuesday morning, Essendon put out a statement saying they "are expected to reconvene tomorrow".
Watson also remains convinced that the AFL has planned for the penalties to be decided immediately before the finals.
Essendon remain under an Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority investigation, with the AFL laying its charges after receiving an interim ASADA report.
"They (the AFL) have engineered this in a way that it will be completed in a time that suits them," he said.
"I've always thought that this was going to be the week before the last game that Essendon played so they could wrap it up neatly before the finals.
"You can imagine had this happened eight weeks ago, and they handed the penalty of taking the points away from Essendon and they couldn't compete in the finals, then all those games (Essendon) would have played, they would have been dead games.
"I'm not being disrespectful to the AFL in any way. This is the way they chose to handle it and I think it's probably an okay outcome for them to handle it this way."
Watson said the Bombers had been placed in the position that if they took the issue beyond this week and disrupted the finals "they are the bad guys about that".
