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Fyfe deserves sympathy amid modern-day contract drama

Dockers captain Nathan Fyfe applauds the crowd after their Round 5 AFL match between the Fremantle Dockers and the North Melbourne Kangaroos at Domain Stadium in Perth, Saturday, April 22, 2017. (AAP Image/Travis Anderson)
Roar Rookie
1st May, 2017
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When the forensics are conducted on Nat Fyfe’s career – and hopefully that’s a long distance from now – it will be this season that arguably uncovers the closest truth to life as a modern-day footballer.

Fyfe’s natural abilities have been poured over during a career that has earned him the game’s highest individual honour and the respect of every self-respecting football follower.

But after proving himself to the football world, Fyfe finds himself in a strange dichotomy that is the domain of this new age of restricted free agency.

In straight-talking terms, Fyfe is this season playing to prove something no fan or media observer can grant him in admiration – his market value.

If that aches at a bygone era, when how hard you hit the contest or backed your mate in battle mattered more than anything else, then the new-age fan should not be fooled by the noise that will surround Fyfe until he signs his next contract.

The 25-year-old has preached, in words, nothing but commitment to Fremantle since he first walked through the doors at the club. It was an assertion he reiterated with chest-beating pride when he was bestowed with the club’s captaincy in February.

It was an honour he dreamt of as a country kid in outback Western Australia.

Cut Nat Fyfe in half – and make no mistake plenty of opposition players have tried – and he bleeds purple.

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So why then would he delay on signing a new deal for the club he loves?

It’s a fair question.

Put simply, the outside influences of modern-day football. Or more substantially, the understandable outside influences of modern-day football.

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Fyfe will end this season as a restricted free agent and this grants him the opportunity to do something very few of us in our workplaces get to measure.

His value as an employee. His market value.

At the end of this season Fyfe will be priced like a commodity. His value determined by the opposition clubs he has thwarted so regularly during an eight-season career. It will then be up to Fremantle to match that. That is their right.

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It is understandable that Fyfe would like to welcome that valuation when it comes to signing a new contract.

Almost certainly it will be with Fremantle, but it is pure common sense that he would like to know what he should expect at the negotiation table when he sits down with the Dockers’ backroom staff to talk about his future.

Make no mistake, the contract offers from other clubs will come in, and make no mistake Fyfe’s management will make sure that Fremantle know exactly their worth when it comes to negotiating his next deal.

That is the way of modern football. That is the way of modern sport.

Having worked in the media industry in the UK for the past ten years, the oldest trick in an agent’s book is to release a bit of ‘fake news’ to a media source that will too readily ‘break’ the story. It helps to bump up the value of their player.

Bring in an opposition club that could benefit from seeing a rival over-pay for a player contract and you have yourself the media circus you’re after without ever having to put your name to it.

It was from that textbook that a story emerged in Perth in Monday morning, that Fyfe had apparently signed a deal with St Kilda.

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Cue a back-page story. Cue more talk about Fyfe’s future. Cue more pressure on the Dockers to get a deal on the table for Fyfe. A deal that will ensure any interest in their best player is dismissed and the media frenzy that surrounds it to disappear.

That sort of deal doesn’t come cheap. That sort of deal is what agents are paid to get.

It is puppeteering from the back seats. It is modern-day football.

It is, of course, a journalist’s job to verify such a statement from a second source and if it is a lesson learned in that regard then the cynicism of the football public should not remain only with the radio station.

There is an element of shooting then messenger and while there is no assertion Fyfe’s management, or the Saints, were involved in Monday’s story, his agents will not have minded the morning’s events.

When a journalist did make the call to Fyfe’s agent for verification they dispelled the story with a win already achieved. The media had made an unsolicited claim, more fool them, and their player’s future was again in the spotlight.

If that all sounds a bit disingenuous, and that Fyfe might want to disconnect himself from such game playing, then it is worth remembering his recent past.

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The skipper knows only too well that a player’s career is short after spending almost all of last year on the sidelines.

A footballer’s career is vulnerable to the whims of injury and misfortune and for Fyfe, one of the most marked players in the league, playing the odds and earning his market value while he can is a reasonable consideration, especially as he enters his prime.

Certainly after earning the respect of the AFL public he has earned that opportunity.

Until that figure is determined he will most likely be attacked for a perceived lack of loyalty to a club that he has shown nothing but pride in playing for.

It is a strange irony of a modern-day AFL footballer, but that is the price he must pay until he learns the price others are willing to pay for him.

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