Sydney will take their fight to enter the 2015 trade period without restriction to the commission before the end of this month and have not ruled out taking the AFL to court.

Conceding his club should never have accepted the AFL's compromised sanction at the start of this season, Swans chairman Andrew Pridham again accused the commission of "policy on the run".

Pridham insisted that although legal action was not something he condoned or was planning, the club had received "numerous offers of pro bono advice" regarding litigation which specifically dealt with what the Swans maintain is a restraint of trade.

"We are seriously aggrieved by this," said the Swans chairman. "Our football department has always been very upset by this and felt very, very strongly that this was entirely unfair. We have also received ongoing and massive feedback from our members saying we should not accept this.

"We've been very poorly served by the commission. In retrospect we should not have accepted the new relaxed restriction but we were trying to be diplomatic and we had fought hard to have it relaxed. Why accept having something relaxed when it shouldn't be there in the first place?"

Although the current trade restriction on the Swans would prevent the club luring Gold Coast ruckman Zac Smith and would make it difficult to trade out the soon-to-be-out-of-contract Lewis Jetta, Pridham said the club had chosen to fight the commission ruling on a matter of principle. He said there was a good chance Sydney might not even operate during the trade period.

With the AFL again on Monday failing to respond to accusations it had been dishonest over the circumstances which led to the trade ban, the Sydney view is that the ban was imposed by chairman Mike Fitzpatrick with the strong support of his former commissioner Bill Kelty.

The club believes another commissioner, Chris Langford, who was present last Friday night when Pridham launched his attack on the "senseless sanction" before the Sydney-Collingwood game also supported the ban.

The commission is understood to have moved independently of AFL executive Andrew Dillon who put forward a submission to the commission during the 2014 season proposing the phasing out of Sydney's cost of living allowance.

Sydney believes the commission moved after being told by rival clubs it was moving to mount a bid for free agent James Frawley or even Paddy Ryder, suggestions the club vehemently denied at the time.

After the trade ban was imposed the club fought it leading into the second trade period -2015 — and was handed the fight only to trade in players earning the average AFL player wage of about $350,000 or below that amount.

The club appears to have the strong support of most other clubs and also the AFL Players Association whose boss Paul Marsh told Fairfax Media: "We thought at the time it was unfair on the players. There's no doubt it's a restriction on the players in Sydney and the players who want to get to Sydney."