‘It’s the biggest weekend of the year for us’: AFL’s Gather Round in Adelaide is only going to get bigger

On Thursday night, over 45,000 AFL fans packed Adelaide Oval to watch their team lose – but there was an air of celebration nonetheless.

“It’s the biggest weekend of the year for us,” Michael Neill, general manager of Fox Footy tells Mumbrella of Gather Round, in which an entire AFL round is played out in Adelaide over a four-day blitz on the capital city.

“It takes months and months of planning. We build stages out on the hill here,” he says pointing across the action. “We do AFL 360 from one of the function rooms here at Adelaide Oval, for a couple of days. Then we’ve got other events at new venues like Norwood Oval, and Mount Barker. Once a year they get built and ready to go, so we’ve got to come up and put our stuff in and make sure that all works.