Love it or loathe it, AFLX is here to stay, albeit with a few tweaks, after a largely positive response from coaches, players and administrators.
Traditionalists lamented the lack of stoppages and contests, and the emphasis on running and booting 10-point goals from over 40 metres.
But players and coaches were generally supportive of the fast-paced, seven-a-side, 20-minute a game concept, which drew almost 43,00 fans across the three tournaments.
A crowd of 9892 at Sydney's Allianz Stadium on Saturday followed attendances of 22,585 at Melbourne's Etihad Stadium on Friday and 10,253 at Adelaide''s Coopers Stadium on Thursday.
"Overall we feel very positive with the whole AFLX tournaments," AFLX project manager David Stevenson said.
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"If you look through the crowd numbers that we got at each of the three, through the player feedback, through the club feedback, through the (TV) ratings, it very much exceeded our expectations, so we feel really good,"
Asked if AFLX was here to stay, Stevenson said "Yeah, certainly.
"We wouldn't have put all this effort in if we thought it was just a one-year proposition.
"There's definitely some things we'll change and we'll tweak along the way.
"We learnt some things that we'll improve and we'll get some feedback from the players.
"We'll do a post-mortem next week and we're going to go out and survey all the clubs and the players, and the fans and broadcasters, and work out what worked and what didn't, and what we'll change for next year."
Questioned about potential changes for 2019, Stevenson said "There's a couple of things on field. Trying to create some more high marks which will be great, some more contested football would be good, how can we use the corners more,"
One issue set to be reviewed is the fixtures and the short time between the last pool game and the grand final, with Hawthorn and Sydney having around a 10-minute break before their respective decider.
"The model we took was to fixture all the games out, so an alternative could be to have a more fluid fixture so you could try and engineer the live games a little bit earlier and give the teams a break," Stevenson said.
He wasn't overly concerned that most clubs named just a handful of established stars.
"We think the game was really strong even without all of those established stars," he said.
"I felt we had a good mix, established stars, and we saw some new names that I think will give us some pretty good excitement as the year goes on."
