Virus outbreaks resulted in restrictions on crowds and the relocation of forty games outside their originally fixtured states, but the season was played without suspension and with only minor disruptions to the scheduled dates of matches.

The premiership was won by the Melbourne Football Club for the 13th time, after it defeated the Western Bulldogs by 74 points in the 2021 AFL Grand Final, which was played at Optus Stadium in Perth.

The country had largely settled into a paradigm of most states maintaining zero COVID-19 cases outside of their international travel quarantine systems; and when this was the case, it allowed matches to be played in front of crowds (albeit with reduced capacity) and unhindered interstate travel was permitted without quarantine.

However, the different state governments often responded quickly to small numbers or even single virus cases being discovered in the community; this meant that border restrictions or quarantine periods were often re-imposed at short notice, impacting interstate travel for matches; and, in some cases, that city- or state-wide lockdowns were imposed within the impacted states, precluding football activities altogether.

[1] Short 'snap lockdowns', lasting between three and seven days in a given city, became a common response to the first few cases in the community as governments adopted 'Zero-COVID' policies.

This new interpretation made it more difficult for the man on the mark to influence a subsequent sequence of quick-running play, opening up freer ball movement.

However in light of changing domestic border restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the series was reduced to one weekend in March 2021.