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Put your money where your mouth is on women's footy, AFL

Expert
1st September, 2016
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Daisy Pearce (left) and Katie Brennan (right) are two of the women's AFL competition's most high-profile recruits. (AAP Image/Julian Smith)
Expert
1st September, 2016
108
2291 Reads

Excitement about the inaugural season of the AFL’s National Women’s League (NWL) in 2017 has taken a pretty significant hit this week with the news coming through that female footballers will be paid a pittance for their services and given no insurance cover.

The vast majority of players in the league will be paid just $5000 for their services across an eight-week season – a pay rate of about $625 a week, not accounting for pre-season training in the lead up to the season.

» Women’s AFL league on The Roar
» All the teams and squad lists for the women’s AFL
» Complete 2017 women’s AFL fixtures

By comparison, male AFL players qualify for an automatic $3605 bonus on top of their existing base salary for every senior match they play. The lowest-paid male AFL players still make more than $50,000 each year before any of these bonuses come into play.

The combined salary of the entire 25-person list of each women’s team will be about $190,000 – that’s less than two-thirds of what the average individual male player makes each year.

Simply put, that’s rubbish. We’re talking about women who are giving up significant portions of their life to play football – taking big chunks of time out from their families and their other employment or studies, only to be paid less than they would if they were flipping burgers instead.

However what’s even more concerning is that the AFL will not be providing NWL players with private health insurance.

That means it will be up to these women to either provide their own cover – which could cost as much as half of what they make from playing – or go without.

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Any significant injury could then mean serious financial jeopardy for the player involved – but they’ll be left out in the cold if they expect the AFL to help, it seems.

It’s true what they say, actions speak louder than words. The AFL talks a good line about promoting equality and supporting the women’s game but it’s pretty clear from their actions that they have little interest in either.

Daisy Pearce Melbourne Demons AFL Women NWL 2016

So why not speak their language and ask them why they’re making such a poor business decision by failing to invest in women’s footy?

Let’s get one thing straight here – this is not an organisation that is by any means struggling to pay the bills.

Just last year the AFL signed a six-year broadcast agreement worth the handy sum of $2.5 billion. The combined salaries of all female players over that six-year period currently adds up to 0.36 per cent of that.

The League has sunk millions upon millions of dollars into the creation of two expansion teams among the largely uninterested Gold Coast and Western Sydney populations.

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Remember the dollar bills that were flushed down the toilet on the doomed-to-fail signings of Karmichael Hunt and Israel Folau? Those blokes made more dollars off the AFL each year than the entire combined women’s league will.

The NWL has the potential to be immensely more successful than those ventures are ever likely to be.

If the AFL can afford to splash its cash on those kind of moves, surely it can afford to pay its female footballers a living wage and provide appropriate health cover.

After all, where’s the logic in fronting up the big bucks to try and convert more followers in the northern states, only to suddenly become stingy when literally half the population of the country is on the line?

That is just bad business from the AFL. If they don’t come to their senses, the NWL may prove to be nothing more than a missed opportunity.

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