His comments follow an escalation in tension between the state government and the AFL last week, after league boss Gillon McLachlan wrote to Mr Gutwein to tell him that a review of the Tasmanian AFL taskforce's business case for a team would be undertaken and completed by early 2022.

This angered the Premier, who has demanded that the league provide Tasmania with a timeline for a team of its own, or else it would walk away from multi-million dollar contracts with Hawthorn and North Melbourne.

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Ahead of a meeting with Mr McLachlan this Friday, Mr Gutwein doubled down on his ultimatum to the AFL.

"We won't be finalising those contracts until we have clarity," he said.

"I would hope that the CEOs and the chairmen of both [Hawthorn and North Melbourne], who have both publicly and privately said that they support our aspirations for our own team, what would be useful is if they would make that message clear to the AFL."

A pre-season game between the Hawks and Kangaroos was scheduled to take place at the University of Tasmania Stadium in Launceston on Saturday, March 6, but the AFL announced yesterday that the match would now be played in Melbourne to minimise player movement before the start of the home-and-away season.

The AFL has reported a $23 million loss in its financial results from the 2020 season, which was marred by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In his letter to the Premier, Mr McLachlan said the review into Tasmania's business case would be "important" and necessary because "while the AFL respects your desire for a timely decision, we also need to ensure we have greater certainty around the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our AFL economy".

But economist Saul Eslake, who was a member of a Tasmanian government AFL steering committee in 2008, said any argument that now was not the time for a new team was "frankly, bollocks" and " typical of the obfuscation and pathetic excuse-manufacturing that has been the hallmark of the AFL's response to Tasmania".

"It wasn't the right time when the AFL was rolling in cash following the signing of their billion-dollar TV rights deal, it isn't the right time now that the AFL has taken a (relatively small, in the grand scheme of things) financial loss due to COVID - it will never be 'the right time' as far as the current AFL hierarchy is concerned," he said.

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