Salaries will have to be cut across the board - including AFL boss Andrew Demetriou - to cater for the players' association's proposed reduction in regular season games, Brisbane Lions coach Leigh Matthews says.

AFL Players' Association chief executive Brendon Gale has suggested the introduction of Gold Coast and West Sydney teams would provide an ideal chance to reduce the regular season from 22 to 17 rounds so all teams could play each other once.

But four-time premiership coach Matthews believes it would be "impossible" to fund a reduction in regular season games under the current system.

"Does everyone take a third cut in their salary, was he proposing that?," Matthews asked in Brisbane.

"I would think the game's finances are based on the fact that there are 22 rounds of six games - 176 (regular season) games - to sell to fund the footy world.

"So if you are going to cut the games by a third then the funding has to be cut by a third as well.

"The funding of it would make it impossible I would have thought (to cut to 17 rounds) unless everybody takes 25 per cent less - Andrew Demetriou does, I do, Jonathan Brown does, Brendon Gale does, everybody - that's reality isn't it?"

Matthews said he could see the appeal of playing fewer games and liked the idea of teams playing each other once.

"There's less stress on players, that's an obvious tick. But I would have thought that everything else is a cross (if they reduced the regular season to 17)," he said.

Matthews wondered aloud how the AFL would juggle the regular season following expansion.

"You could alleviate that by going a bit more rounds. (But) most people are thinking that the amount of footy played at the moment is the maximum," he said.

"I look at the modern game and velocity in which it is played and think 'how can a guy do that for 15 years from now on?'.

"It has picked up in the last year or two. The massive rotation of interchange creates the sort of speed and movement that has gone up another gear again, so you wonder how players are going to play that for 10 or 15 years.

"That aside, if you had 24 (regular season) games instead of 22 and completely scrubbed the pre-season - had only intra-club games up until round one - most of the conditioning people would say the extra two rounds are much harder than four weeks of pre-season.

"It's a pretty complicated issue."

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