The 2023 AFL season will go down as one of the all-time greatest years of footy seen in our code, with countless high-profile storylines generated on the field and off the field.

On the field, we saw controversy, comebacks, clutch moments, big games and maybe the greatest Grand Final ever.

Off the field we saw drama, sackings, major acquisitions and a Brownlow Medal count out of a fantasy novel.

With endless headlines to pick from, see below what we picked as the top 10 AFL stories of the 2023 calendar year.

3. Score review controversy shapes the eight

While officiating errors are obviously a blight on the game we watch, the impact and controversy generated by a multitude of score review fiascos in 2023 lands the AFL Review Centre (ARC) in the top three stories of the year.

The first of the two major season-altering decisions came in Melbourne's Round 22 clash with Carlton where, with 41 seconds remaining, a Christian Petracca bomb from outside 50 looked to give Melbourne a one-point lead.

The soft call of a rushed behind led to a score review which provided three embarrassingly unclear camera angles to decide the fate of the match. The ARC left it to the umpires call and Carlton brought home their eighth win in a row.

Had this result been flipped to a Demons victory, the finals series would have changed drastically.

Melbourne would have risen to second on the ladder and hosted Brisbane in a qualifying final at the MCG while Carlton would have potentially fallen to seventh and faced an elimination final against the Giants away from home.

The more outrageous controversy however, comes in the following week's clash between Adelaide and Sydney, where a Ben Keays set-shot snap from the boundary squeezed past the post before Crows players flocked to celebrate what should have been a four-point lead with under 80 seconds remaining.

Stunningly, the kick was definitively called a behind and was not sent upstairs for further investigation, Sydney kicked out immediately and the match continued.

Goal-line footage of the kick showed a clear gap between the post and the ball as it sailed over the line, confirming the Adelaide robbery.

Again, the ramifications of this result were huge. Sydney squeaked into eighth place by two premiership points, while Adelaide's finals hopes were extinguished.

The Western Bulldogs and Essendon were mathematically eliminated from finals contention, reducing the stakes of a whopping five matches in Round 24 to close the home and away season.

Essendon vs Collingwood, Geelong vs Bulldogs and West Coast vs Adelaide all became dead rubbers, while Sydney vs Melbourne and Carlton vs GWS were reduced to placement games for only one team in either match.

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