To some, this week’s to-and-fro between former Collingwood president Eddie McGuire and Sydney midfielder Isaac Heeney re-opened old wounds. To others, the blood has never stopped flowing.

“Eddie’s probably not going to like this, but it was for the academy that I pursued AFL,” Heeney said on Nine’s Footy Classified. The childhood rugby league fan was referring to one of the defining features of AFL’s development over the past decade: the establishment in 2010 of academies now run by the four northern clubs.

The academies emerged with twin goals: developing high-end talent and strengthening the code’s presence in non-traditional markets. But part of the deal has always been that the clubs get priority access to these players, a source of angst on the streets of Melbourne.

Few know the system better than Luke Curran, who managed the Lions’ academy for a decade and is now head of sport at Brisbane’s Redeemer Lutheran College. “There always seemed to be knee-jerk reactions to one of the New South Wales or Queensland clubs that might have had a good year or some talent coming through, and all of a sudden the other clubs are very quick to make noise to the AFL that they were going to win the next 10 AFL flags and were going to have this massive pipeline of talent, which just simply wasn’t true,” he said.

Over the years the AFL has made it more difficult for northern clubs to select their top academy prospects by tightening the price paid at the draft. And it has leant on the northern clubs to develop not just high-end talent but maintain programs that involve – at least in Sydney’s case – close to 700 young footballers across both boys and, since the inception of the AFLW, girls.

But there remains frustration for Melbourne clubs – none of which finished higher than sixth this season – that Sydney, Brisbane, Gold Coast and GWS still enjoy too much of an advantage. That sentiment reached a crescendo last year when the Suns took four locally-developed, high-end talents in the draft.

In response, the AFL is undertaking a “competitive balance review”. Chief executive Andrew Dillon said his organisation has “done a power of work this year”, and the outcome will be considered.

“That review is continuing, but I bet there will be no knee-jerk action to a one-off grand final,” Dillon said. “What we wanted to try and do is continue to make the competition as even as possible and we’ll look at that, but the Swans and the Lions are absolutely there on their merits, and they’ve been both incredible clubs for a number of years.”

Lions co-captain Harris Andrews is perhaps the Brisbane academy’s biggest success, offering proof to young Queenslanders that the Lions have a legitimate local connection.

“[Academy kids] can say they’ve played footy and trained with Harris Andrews,” Curran said. “They become advocates for the club and for the game by being associated with the talents who come through.”

In addition to Andrews, the Lions also include academy graduates Eric Hipwood and Jack Payne, as well father-son selections Jaspa Fletcher and Will Ashcroft who were involved in the club’s programs. For the Swans, Nick Blakey, Errol Gulden and Braeden Campbell as well as injured captain Callum Mills are products alongside Heeney.

Though they are partly funded by the AFL, and naming rights sponsorship offers another potential revenue stream, the academies are logistical and financial challenges for the clubs. Curran fears rule changes out of the competitive balance review will make it less attractive for the northern clubs to operate the kinds of broad academy programs today that now act as touch points for close to 1,000 children and their families.

“The clubs would have every right to say, ‘hey, actually we’re just going to focus on the top 200 [kids], not the whole thousand,” he said. “That would be an interesting conversation with the AFL to go back and say, ‘actually, we think our brand is strong enough now to attract talent, we don’t need to have the large base in numbers’”.

The AFL’s first tweak as part of the competitive balance review landed last month and gave Victorian clubs the same priority draft access to talent from their “Next Generation Academies” – programs focused on multicultural and Indigenous teenagers in largely arbitrary catchment zones around the country – as the northern clubs have over their local prospects. But that alone won’t appease impatient club officials who are watching the grand final on Saturday from home.

AFL head of football Laura Kane said there would be no more player movement and list management changes to come, but a decision on the future of academies will be made over the off-season. “Some of the topics are things that I think we’ll talk about forever, and so we should,” she said.