Is the AFL out of touch with NSW and Queensland?

QLD under 15 boys were in the grand final of the national schools comp against a full Victorian side last year and only went down by 5 pts. 5 of those boys made the All Australian side. This year the majority of that team now field an U16 team in Div 2 of the championships. Certainly not taking QLD football seriously when they don't get to play the best. The gap between the standard will increase if these boys cannot play a better standard of football more consistently.

According to the Fin Review, McGuire asked the following qn during his afternoon quiz show “According to the OECD Economics Unit, which is the most expensive Australian city” The winner was Sydney but having run the Nine network and lived in Sydneys eastern suburbs for 14 months while he boned the place for sale the day after the foreign ownership rules changed in Oct 2006 (the Nine owner gave Comms Minister Helen Coonan a $100K Crown Casino directors job as a return favour) and complained about the cost of Sydney living while he was there eg $25 a day airport parking etc, the irony was lost on the great Ed....

Brillaintly put

The A-league have always had good crowds in Melbourne. A lot of soccer fans also are fans of an AFL club. From my observation, there is not the code war mentality that dominates Sydney media. The code that should be worried about A-league crowds & publicity is the NRL. - esp in Sydney. The 1st weeks have seen crowds averaging more than Sydney NRL games. It can be argued that Sydney NRL crowds are low. There is the old argument that Sydney people don't attend sport - but the A-league is disproving that. The AFL will also produce a fixture that restores their Melbourne crowds. This year was just a blimp caused by experimentation in the fixture. Altho crowds still increased, thanks to Adelaide Oval. The AFL exec got a shock & won't make that mistake again.

Vic AFL fans are seeing the A-League soccer kick on & comparisons of the game experience are across talk back radio. The AFL will not allow another year of declining crowds & I'd expect the 2015 to reflect that sentiment. Expect their Vic centric decision making to increase over the next season. I question the ability of the current AFL Commission to deal with the football issues relating to the Northern states, too little footy experience outside of Melbourne & somehow this needs to be addressed.

At the end of the day, the AFL can get away with treating the four clubs from the northern states any which way they want because it's never going to make the headlines in the media over there because the two states are dominated by rugby league news. The average Joe Blow wouldn't know or care too much their states' respective AFL teams. Whereas, if the AFL tried to ban any other club from the traditional states it would simply be outrageous and would not be tolerated.

the a league is played in the summer does not affect rl at all

the swans and gws have academies rl junior reps eg u16 and u18's there are up to 18 teams in each comp the rl talent academies will continue to prosper and grow the game of rugby league

The irony of Hawthorn and Sydney is that Hawthorn has exploited Free Agency and trading in from other clubs - Lake/Frawley and Hale, Gibson, Gunston etc. And Hawthorn has exploited father-son with the pre-Sydney academy Sydney scholarship system with Will Langford. The academy system in Sydney and Brisbane is a vital element in development for what are somewhat isolated talent pathways. The TAC cup dominates the minds and draft picks of Victorian AFL clubs - and that's understandable. How do you rate players outside of the TAC cup system? NSW and QLD don't even play Div 1 in the national U16 or U18 championships so that doesn't much help. Irrespective Isaac Heeney - from Newcastle - with a dad who was a Leaguie (Rugby) - has been rated by some as a 1st round draft pick. And the Swans are taking him. And yes - there needs to be a 'for the good of the game' component in NSW and QLD. Were Heeney to end up at Richmond, Hawthorn, Port or the Eagles he would become largely invisible to the market that produced him. As it is - few NSW folk would realise that 10 of the 44 players to take the field in this years AFL GF were NSW products. Granted largely from the Albury-Wagga region - however, also a sprinkling from Sydney and even up to Nelson Bay. I do wonder how many NSW folk realise that much loved and recently retired St Kilda star Lenny Hayes was a Sydney boy - okay, granted - from 'southern' parents (North Melb fan dad). Still - he had to learn the game and develop his talent somehow. He would have been an amazing captain of the Swans. However - here at least - Sydney Swans have over their time had two captains from Albury, 1 from Wagga and 1 currently from Sydney. In over 15 years the Melbourne Storm has produced what? 1 Vic developed player full stop. The shame of the COLA issue is that Collingwood has been a great beneficiary over the journey of luring players away from Sydney and Brisbane (Rocca, Licuria, O'Bree and Buckley in particular), and a strategic beneficiary of father son - Cloke (*3), and even the Shaws (who they ironically have moved on). Collingwood doesn't have nearly the responsibility of game development that is thrust upon the Swans and Giants across Sydney, Canberra, Newcastle etc let alone more regionally. And it's clear that the Swans have had to manage their list, and push players out the other end to bring in Franklin and Tippett. The knee jerk reaction from the AFL would make us believe it was the Swans who lured Frawley. Hawthorn however are just smarter. Clearly. AFL - big PR fail.

The AFL will struggle if it doesn't have a decent market in NSW and QLD. You can fill out those stadiums every week but sponsors won't bother if they don't think anyone in NSW and QLD is taking notice.

Hmmmm, ok then, you win the award for the day's most naive comment. Not sure what sort of response you're expecting (or trolling for...) How about this: NSW & QLD fans don't fail to grasp that at all. They realise their teams are a small part of the cog (10 Vic teams versus 4 in the northern states combined), and if anything, a much less profitable one. However, the AFL also realises that Sydney is the largest potential viewing audience in the country, with Brisbane/GC 3rd behind Melbourne. So Sydney (and hopefully soon GWS, GC and Brisbane) performing well is far more than icing on top of the Victorian Cake. Big viewing audiences in the Northern states will significantly raise national totals, thereby giving the AFL a perfect bargaining chip for the next tv rights negotiations. The current deal is $1.25 billion over 5 years, and there have been suggestions the next deal could be as much as $3.5-4 Billion over 10 years. NSW & QLD are huge growth areas for AFL, whereas in Victoria you grow up knowing all about the game. Most Northern state kids grow up playing League or Union, hence the huge investments the AFL is making in those states. Victoria is already saturated with AFL, with very little competition, so if the AFL wants to increase participation and viewers, NSW & QLD are the obvious areas. As for your hogs comment, any Swans or Bears/Lions fan from the 80s & 90s can tell you the difference a bit of AFL love can make, both on and off field...

What people from NSW and QLD just fail to grasp is the major bulk of money pouring into the AFL is from the southern states. Sydney doing well is just icing, but not that important. Personally giving the massive leg up to the NSW and QLD clubs is like feeding caviar to your hogs, would they even know the difference up there?

"Players don’t care if they get $100k of which 9.8% is COLA, or $100k of which 0% is COLA." I think players will care. Imagine this scenario: Player A earns $100k/yr while leaving in Melb. Player A moves to Sydney and gets paid $100k/yr as you described above. Now, cost of living in Melb is, for arguments sake, $50k. Player A comes out with $50k Now, cost of living in Syd is, for arguments sake, $60k. Player A come out with $40k. Would those players be happy with a $10k reduction? Would you be happy with the same reduction if you moved cities for your job?

Problem with the COLA is it is there to offset the higher cost of living in Sydney, but it doesn't cost Buddy and Tippet an $60000 a year to live than it does for say Gary Rohan who would get about $25000 in COLA payments. COLA should only be paid to players earning less than $300000 a year and then nobody would have a problem with it, but it needs to be applied across the board to all states, so if it ends up costing more to live in Melbourne than Sydney in 3yrs all Victorian clubs should recieve it and not the NSW clubs, fairs fair

That the NRL are a pushover, or do you mind read

Genuine question, as I'm new to the COLA debate due to general lack of interest. But does such a mechanism exist anywhere else in the world in professional sports involving salary caps?

And (yet another!) final point. Both Tom and slane are asserting that, apart from rookies and draftees the Swans do not pay COLA as an additional amount, only as a subsidy to the normal salary. (I'm pleased that you now accept that the players in these two categories must, as a legal right, be paid COLA on top of their CBA-mandated salary). Neither of you have provided either factual or anecdotal evidence for this. You just assert it must be the case. Well some anecdotal evidence that is consistent with this not being the case: both Mitch Morton and Andrejs Everitt came to the Swans through trades and both would have had agreed salary packages. Both are now back in their home states (WA and Victoria respectively). Both have spoken in support of the COLA paid by the Swans saying it was really important to them living in Sydney. Are you saying that both hadn't been aware, or else hadn't been concerned by, the fact that they were not actually getting anything extra from COLA? Don't you think they might have been angry if that had been the case? And therefore would not have spoken in support of the Swans?

This is for Slane. I hope it lets him know once and for all there is no way whatsoever the COLA can be lain aside in some form of 'slush fund' to pay a players salary. Sydney has exactly the same salary cap and exactly the same access to Additional Service Agreements (ASAs) as every other club (except GWS and the Gold Coast which have larger caps during their developmental stages). Sydney is also subject to exactly the same rule in the use of these two capped amounts – that they must pay a minimum of 95% and a maximum of 100% of these combined amounts to their list of players. Sydney’s COLA is a separate amount of money funded by the AFL and distributed through a standard clause (written by the AFL) in every player’s contract. It is simply not possible to take the COLA fund and give it to one player as salary. Some commentators here are arguing that the Swans have effectively cut the salary component in most contracts and used COLA to provide players with a total payment equal to the amount they would have been paid elsewhere, thereby ‘saving’ salary to pay Tippett and Franklin. Firstly it is not possible to do this for draftees and rookies as their minimum salaries are set by law through the collective agreement with the AFL players association. Secondly it seems most unlikely that every player would accede to such an arrangement, particularly as the players concerned are the ones with the most bargaining power and they use agents to negotiate their contracts. And finally many contracts were already in place before Tippett and then Franklin were recruited and had been drawn up in the context of the requirement that the club pay out a set minimum of the total salary cap, thereby constraining the possible alleged ‘savings’. The salary cap rose from $8.787m in 2012 to $9.139m in 2013 to $9.632m in 2014, and the total ASA amount rose from $613,000 in 2012 to $852,000 in 2013 to $963,000 in 2014 (see p.62http://www.aflplayers.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/CBA-2012-2016-FINAL.pdf). These increases in themselves provided the Swans (and every other club) with a total additional amount of $591,000 which could be paid to players in 2013 (when Tippett was recruited) and a further total amount of $604,000 in 2014 (when Franklin was recruited). As well the Swans cleared salary cap space by reducing their senior list to 38 players and for 2013 letting go six players (Seaby, Spangher, Dennis-Lane, Moore, Meredith, Gordon) while apart from Tippett, recruiting four lower paid draftees (the highest at pick 22) and upgrading a rookie. For 2014 they had two big retirements (Bolton and Mattner) and let go five other players (Mumford, White, Everitt, Armstrong, Lamb). Their ‘ins’ this year as well as Franklin were four draftees (the highest at pick 15) and two de-listed free agents, none of whom would be highly paid. The Swans’ list management has also included tactical use of timing and length of contracts, additional service agreements (particularly for Franklin), and veteran listings which allow any club with players who qualify to pay a fixed amount outside the cap. It has been legitimate in the past to debate whether Sydney or any other club should have had access to a COLA but this debate is now largely redundant as it is being phased out. It is not legitimate to continue to assert that Sydney has used COLA to recruit one or two super stars. The Swans have used COLA as the AFL intended it to be used and is now phasing it out as the AFL has directed. There is no justification for this arbitrary ban on the Swans access to the trade period on the same terms as every other club.

This is the way the AFL should have handled the transition phase from COLA to housing assistance for lower paid players: 1. Gone through existing contracts that have a COLA clause to calculate the amount required for the next two years (which Andrew Ireland has said the AFL did). 2. Paid COLA for only those players. So if 3 of those players leave at end of 2015, the amount provided for 2016 is cut by the relevant amount. 3. Announced now the salary cut off point and conditions for payment of housing assistance and started to pay it from 2015 to new qualifying players, and in place of COLA to existing qualifying players in any cases where they would be better off (with relevant downward adjustment then made to the total COLA amount). 4. Any players recruited through trade or other means for the 2015 season and beyond who do not qualify for the housing assistance get nothing on top of their negotiated salary. This would be a standard and fair way to introduce a new policy over a transition period. There would be neither need nor justification for a trading ban durning this period.

Sorry slane but you are the one with the explanation problem. You can only save the $900k once, you can't save it anew every year. The only way you would have an additional $900k every year (for new player/s or to spread it again over existing players) is if the AFL increased COLA by $900k every year - which clearly they don't. For example, if I am supposed to earn $50,000 pa but my employer only pays me $40,000 (so saving $10,000) to make savings to use to pay someone else, the next year s/he can't use the same $10,000 to pay a third person, nor could s/he come back and cut my salary to $30,000. And if I leave s/he could only replace me with a $40,000 person not some super star, highly paid person. And you say "IT DOESN’T MATTER IF IT IS THE COLA SAVINGS THAT PAID FOR TIPPETT OR BUDDY, what matters is the extra cap space it creates that can be spent on whoever!" Of course the Swans get additional money - but it does matter how it is spent. The persistent allegation has been made that it has been used as a recruitment fund to pay Tippett and Franklin. The Swans say they use it how it is intended - to pay COLA on top of the contract salary to each player on their list. Nothing you have asserted has shown that what the Swans say is not correct. And as I have demonstrated, COLA could not have provided anything like the savings needed to recruit firstly Tippett and then Franklin. And if you can't understand what I am saying, then we will have to leave it as an unresolved disagreement as nothing either you or Tom has said has shown me that your assertions are valid.