The Grima Rule: Let AFL clubs sign players whenever they like

Essendon signed the last of their top-up players on Thursday, bringing an end to the AFL’s first experiment with a longer signing window. It begs the question: why shouldn’t every AFL club be allowed to do this, every year?

On Monday night, AFL CEO Gillon McLachlan appeared on 3AW in Melbourne to talk all things football.

For footy junkies, his regular radio spot should be essential listening, in the same way that high ranking politicians should be but aren’t.

Gil is great value in a media setting – he pulls few punches, likes to joke around, but can handle any and all questions lobbed at him with a remarkable levity.

He eviscerated a certain chief football writer on a special edition of his nightly magazine show earlier this year, in one of the more memorable performances I’ve seen from a CEO in any industry.

This interview, with Gerard Healy and Dwayne Russell, touched on a range of topics, but the most significant was buried at the end of the interview. McLachlan reckons it’s time some of the arcane player listing rules that exist in the AFL are reviewed.

“You look at different things… such as how the rookie list interacts with the main list, and I think there’s a number of anomalies which exist now. There’s an opportunity to review that now, with a view to getting a bit more flexibility in there,” McLachlan said.

There is, indeed, plenty of scope to get a bit more flexibility in there.

Right now, clubs must list a minimum of 38 and maximum of 40 players on their full list, and between seven and nine rookies depending on how many are required to get to the magic number of 47 total players on a club’s list.

Two of those players are ‘nominated rookies’, who can play at any point in the season, while the remainder must wait until a long-term injury occurs to be elevated to the full list. Rookies can only join a list through the rookie draft, which occurs following the national draft, while players who are already on a club’s rookie list can only be elevated to a full list if their club uses one of their national draft picks.

All of this occurs before the a deadline of November 30 when all clubs must have their 2016 playing list finalised, nearly four months before the start of the season proper. As flexible as an unbendable girder.

Essendon’s travails have seen them granted extraordinary powers to sign up to 10 top-up players as a result of losing 12 players to season-long doping bans. The Bombers closed the book on this yesterday, signing ex-Brisbane ruckman Sam Michael.

Their most controversial was ex-North Melbourne defender Nathan Grima, who at 29 years of age called time at the end of last year due to a debilitating back injury, and was set to begin a career in the media.

To the testament of the rules designed by the AFL, the Bombers’ 10 top-ups will at the very least provide their young players with a flak jacket as the other 17 sides come after them chasing percentage.

Here they are:

Ryan Crowley
James Kelly
Jonathan Simpkin
Matt Dea
James Polkinghorne
Mathew Stokes
Mark Jamar
Sam Grimley
Nathan Grima
Sam Michael

Putting the issue of whether they should have been granted this power aside for now, why shouldn’t every club be given until March 5 to finalise their list, every year?

Be (as) prepared (as list management rules will allow you to be)
A lot can happen between the time a club finalises its list and the first game of the season. The Essendon decision is a once-in-a-lifetime event – fingers crossed – but it is one of many uncertainties that can rear their head over summer. There is only so much that a club can do to make contingencies.

Last season, the West Coast Eagles and Western Bulldogs lost critical players in Eric McKenzie and Tom Liberatore during the pre-season. Now, both seemed to cover the loss of these players effectively, but it meant they were both down a player heading into the season before the season itself got underway.

When West Coast lost fellow defender Mitch Brown in Round 1, funnily enough against the Bulldogs, they were left with a single key position defender on their list, Will Schofield.

It lead to Jeremy McGovern, who had been mostly languishing on the team’s rookie list, being thrust into a critical role in the Eagles’ scrambling, small defensive unit. It paid off for them, but if we hooked coach Adam Simpson up to a lie detector, I reckon he would admit to preferring the flexibility to bring in another tall defender as cover when McKenzie went down.

The Liberatore situation was less of a concern for the Dogs, as despite his talents he plays in the one part of the list where most clubs have lots of depth: inside midfield. In many ways, his absence has likely accelerated the development of other players, like Jack Macrae, Mitch Wallis and Luke Dahlhaus. What is this group going to look like with Liberatore involved now?

To this point, it isn’t a particularly compelling case. Long-term injuries to these critical players forced the front offices of both teams to get creative within the constraints that they had, and it ended up producing equal or better results. For all we know, West Coast wouldn’t have gone small down back if they had one of the league’s best tall stoppers available.

The other issue is more intangible: shutting the signing window in November ensures players are available for the whole summer, so they can be integrated into the schemes and systems of their new team.

For all of the (relative) positivity surrounding Essendon’s signings, this is the nagging doubt we should all hold. For all of their flaws, Carlton and Brisbane, two teams that are popular candidates to perform worse than the patched up Dons this season, have had full pre-seasons together. Essendon have not.

This is intangible, so who’s to say it matters to the same extent as player quality. It is likely important, though.

But don’t let hypotheticals and intangibles dismiss this line of thinking. The real question that should come to mind when considering when players can join teams is: why shouldn’t clubs and players be able to find each other right up until the few weeks leading up to the season proper?

As far as I can tell, and based on what McLachlan said on Monday evening, it appears the current listing rules are such because that’s how they’ve always been. They are more suited to the early AFL days, when players were paid just enough to be considered professional, clubs more closely resembled state league organisations, and the game wasn’t the 24-7 spectacle it now is.

Players, for the most part, now treat themselves as elite professional athletes, which extends to levels below the 800-odd listed to play at the pinnacle of the sport.

It would give players like Nathan Grima, who retired due to an injury, more time to get themselves in playing condition before starting the season. It would give state league players and delisted players more time to show their worth to clubs.

More critically, extending the signing window would prevent situations like last season’s tall defender dearth at West Coast from arising – or more specifically, the club would be given the flexibility to respond to it in any manner, rather than putting together a piecemeal response that happened to come off.

Listed players have been given more and more flexibility as reform has been introduced – free agency, trading future draft picks – but to date the clubs are still mostly bound by restrictive practices. As I speculated in my 2016 Collective Bargaining Agreement feature, there is plenty that the AFL and its clubs should seek to extract from this round of negotiations.

In recent days, moving the listing deadline forward a few months, from November to, well, any time of year, seems to be on the league’s agenda.

Some movement at League HQ
According to a report in The Age on Thursday, there is some genuine movement on the list management reform front being pushed by the AFL. It is reported that the league has proposed two changes, which may not be mutually exclusive: a mid-season draft, and the introduction of short-term injury cover contracts.

These would be packaged with the abolition of the rookie list, and an expansion in the full list to 48 to 50 players.

First things first: a mid-season draft is a terrible idea.

What would it achieve? If the intent is to allow clubs that have injury issues to cover them with state players, or players carving it up at their affiliate club, then surely the short-term contract reform is a much simpler and effective mechanism. The clubs seem to agree, according to Fairfax.

The abolition of the rookie list is the common sense reform out of all of this, and segues nicely into talking about how this additional flexibility might work in practise.

Making the AFL dream a reality
So if the AFL were to widen the signing window, what would that mean in practise? As a first step to making team list fully flexible, my suggestion is to allow clubs to sign unsigned players right up until sometime in March – effectively extending the list finalisation deadline from November 30 to, say, March 10.

It would certainly spell the end of the rookie list, and the associated rookie draft. Instead, and as the AFL appears likely to do, the full playing list should be expanded to at least 47 spots so there is no reduction in the number of opportunities available to players seeking a career in the AFL.

A further reform may be providing the clubs with some flexibility as to the number of players they may like to sign for a particular year – set the minimum at 47 players that must be signed by the March deadline, but allow up to 50 players to be signed on during the season if the club sees a few players it likes in the state leagues.

The abolition of rookies and the rookie list would necessitate some additional changes to the draft.

As it stands, the are two avenues to a player joining a list: the national draft and rookie/pre-season draft. With the abolition of rookies and the rookie draft, the only way players could join a list is through the national draft, which occurs in October.

Players who have been delisted by their club retain their eligibility to be picked up as a delisted free agent in the window of time between their delisting and the signing window date, but after that they must rejoin a list as a rookie or in the national draft.

This would necessitate a relaxation of listing rules, to the extent that state players can become eligible to join an AFL list. One mechanism, which was raised when I was discussing this with some friendly folks on Twitter last week, would be that once a player has nominated for the draft once, and has been passed over, they effectively become a free agent, and can sign with a club of their choice.

This would not preclude a player nominating from the draft in proceeding years – not every player is drafted at 18 years of age – but it would give an alternative channel for them to make it onto a list.

When a player is drafted for the first time that ‘drafted’ status sticks with them for the remainder of their career, whether that is a 15-year AFL career or a two-year stint on an AFL list. It means they can re-join an AFL list as a delisted free agent at any time.

The other concern may be the way contracts are designed. As it stands, a draftee is provided a two-year deal, whereas delisted free agents can be signed for as little as one year. Rookie contracts tend to be two years as well, but at much lower base rates (around 75 per cent of a third round draft choice).

The abolition of rookies would require the introduction of a new base rate for all non-draftee contracts, while the AFLPA may not like the idea of some of its youngsters being signed on for a single year as could be the case if they were to become undrafted free agents.

This could be ameliorated by the introduction of three-year contracts for draftees – as recommended in my CBA feature – and two-year contracts, with a salary floor, for players that enter the league as undrafted free agents.

Delisted free agents, who have had a multiple year opportunity presented to them at least once, become masters of their own destiny and have nothing but a salary floor and basic contract provisions collectively bargained for them.

None of this should impact upon the timing of the AFL’s other player movement mechanisms – the trade period and regular free agency – at least right now.

The league’s more traditional player exchange mechanisms have been changed in recent times, and there is no burning platform for further reform, perhaps beyond reducing the service eligibility thresholds for free agency.

There could be some merit in introducing a trade period throughout the season, but not right now. That would be too much for the generally conservative AFL and its fan-base to handle.

Change is coming
But as football fans, we should all be bracing for change. By his actions in the first two years of his reign, we know Gil McLachlan is a reformist. The advent of a new collective bargaining agreement, and the surge in league-wide revenue that will be enabled by the 2017-2022 broadcast agreement, will revolutionise the game in more ways than we can predict.

List management rules are one area absolutely ripe for the picking. As the story of the new CBA evolves throughout the year, stick with The Roar‘s AFL team, who’ll bring you in-depth analysis, untouched by the politics of AFL House, of what’s in play, and what it means for the game.

For now, all that’s left is to give this reform to list management a name. Let’s call it the ‘Grima Rule’, in honour of the positive outcome that the temporary introduction of a longer free agency window has created.