Priority picks, draft concessions and compromise: How to overhaul the draft

So in effect, we hold two opposite views on what a sporting landscape should look like. We will agree to disagree, until the cows come home. Good chat, only thing missing was the beer and sharing a shout or two.

Ah now we get to it. Free market fanaticism. Actually team sport has little to do with a free market, at least in its foundations and principles. And the AFL is not formed on market principles. In general team games grow from a community contract, one that creates clubs and leagues and endorses a collective agreement about rules. They are played in stadia built from the public purse in front of crowds conveyed by publicly built roads and public transport. Elite athletes are developed as youngsters by thousands and thousands of hours put in by volunteer coaches and administrators in junior clubs and by school teachers working mostly in public schools. Clubs do not work without community involvement. It’s true wealthy individuals hover around football clubs, sometimes as benefactors, often as social climbers. Leagues and clubs have to be financially savvy.But a league is not a market. It’s another kind of competition altogether based on athletic skill, tribalism and passion. One of the explicit roles of the AFL is to conduct the sport as a national game. No club in Australia runs as a profit making enterprise. Almost all barely succeed or just fail at breaking even. The AFL constitution explicitly requires the League distributes to all its clubs money and other support. In so far as fairness is an issue, it’s an issue about the AFL maximising emotional reward for members of all clubs who keep the game afloat with their subs and attendance. If we look abroad we see American sports thrive ( and profit their owners) because if they are markets, they are highly regulated.markets. And in European soccer we see market failure with clubs like Barcelona with unsustainable debt or Manchester United where supporters are in a civil war with out of touch owners.

I think it will depend on who you ask about the La Liga comparison. Ask any Spaniard or American and you will no doubt get two distinctive and different answers. I will agree with you that expressing an opinion is never a going to win an argument. In truth it was never my intention to try and persuade an AFL fan that the system they use is unfair, as a sporting contest. In such a small market that Australia is, the likes of Celtic or Rangers scenario taking hold I believe is extremely unlikely. There are too many individuals at various other clubs to allow that to happen. I am certain that in a free sporting market, the likes of Collingwood, West Coast, Adelaide, Port Adelaide, Richmond, Geelong would share the majority of the Premierships, then you throw in Carlton, and or Melbourne who also have serious money people available to them, and the Premierships will still be shared around.It may mean the Northern clubs may have to either stand on their own two feet or disappear, but in a free market, that is what should happen.

Well you can’t “prove” opinions on what is or is not a better competition. Opinions are not fact and therefore unprovable. You might mean you are unpersuadable but that has nothing to do with logic or proof. I do think however 9 out of 10 people would disagree that a competition which in which the biggest budget determines the winner or habitual top tier is not “fairer”. Unconstrained money has nothing to do with fairness. I also think that the danger of money and traditional power in a small market can lead to absurd leagues like the Scottish Premier League in which one of two teams has won every year since 1985. It’s bizarre to call that a “fair” or desirable competition. And though I prefer football to gridiron I defy anyone to say that La Liga with no salary cap or draft is a more even, exciting, or fair competition than the NFL.

@k2K - you have generalized re the European situation, but that's OK most of the leagues over there last season and there are 55 different leagues we are talking about now, didn't have a 'traditional' winner of their league. Yes England did, and Germany did, Spain and France and Italy did not. Many will argue that those seasons are the exception not the rule. That would be a fair comment. I still say that their system is a much fairer sporting contest than we have here in the AFL. Under the current AFL system it would be fair to assume that North Melbourne, Adelaide FC and the GC Suns will win a flag within the next 18 years, so in fact their turn will come around sooner or later. Not by them doing some development of any players who they can retain, but simply because it will be their turn, and the AFL system thinks it is better that it is shared around rather than them doing something for the game. I know i am not going to convince anyone of that, just like it is most likely no one will come up with a sound proof argument to prove me wrong.

There’s an argument for Father and Son concessions being abolished. They are based purely on history and sentiment and favour older clubs which dominated before current equalisation. More importantly they don’t add a single player to the game. But there have to be concessions for academies which bring in players who would have never played the sport otherwise. Australian rules, a wonderfully quixotic game in just one market, relies on larger teams than virtually any other code except maybe gridiron. It’s looking to add a 19th perhaps 20th team. It has a relatively small talent pool and competes with soccer, rugby league, rugby Union and basketball for talent. The identification, training and investment in an Isaac Heeney from the age of 12 when he would have otherwise played Rugby League has to be rewarded – in the same way there are rookie allowances for identifying and recruiting Irish players.

The rationale for drafts and salary caps is pretty simple. Sports competitions around the world that have no equalisation measures, no draft or salary caps, become ludicrously distorted with only 4 or 5 teams in each competition ( sometimes as few as two) rich enough to win premierships. Those few teams dominate for years even decades even if they occasionally swap around.. European football ( soccer) is the chief exhibit. There super clubs dominate in a way that disenfranchises millions of fans and worse means the top clubs get so expensive they become trophies for petro-billionaires, completely removing any sense sports clubs belong to members or fans. Meanwhile domestic competitions become so predictable that rich club owners seek breakaway elite leagues ( which nearly happened in Europe this year). Eventually the costs in this system become unsustainable, even for billionaire hobbyists. The idea of drafts and salary caps comes from United States, the home of unrestricted free markets. And it works. In the NFL and NBA over 5 years any team can rise to compete to win the competition. And these are much healthier, vibrant and financially stable competitions than say Spain’s La Liga.

Free agency brings problems, not just in the capacity of desirable teams being able to poach elite players from lower teams . Another less discussed issue is the inflationary effect for clubs who pump up contracts to keep players with whom they’ve a long history. New contracts for Josh Kelly at the Giants and Luke Parker at the Swans must put extra pressure on those salary caps. The AFL abolished its short lived but sensible veterans salary cap allowance to keep the salary cap simple. So there’s no relief for extending a player on high wages well into his thirties to keep him. Players have to be allowed club movement and free agency is here to stay. But when teams lose players or have to pay over the odds to keep them there’s a problem that is not solved by draft concessions which bump down everyone else’s draft position. Personally I think compromising the salary cap with a version of a veterans allowance is better than compromising the draft, though admittedly if a player is determined to go some other relief is also needed.

You are right to a degree Richie, the same old 'money' clubs seem to rise to the top of the EPL, La Liga, Serie A and the Bundesliga. With the occasional not so rich clubs snatching a title here and there. The question has to be asked, is this a good thing or not. If you support one of those clubs then I'm sure you would answer YES, however if you grew up supporting a community based club, then you would be screaming for change, most likely. Some sort of middle ground may be, to ensure clubs 'have to' nurture their own next crop of players, do away with the draft as it now is. Then reward those clubs with some sort of financial incentive in their salary cap, for every player they play that has emerged from their own youth structure. Something we all have to realise is that the AFL doesn't have a hold on young people other than those in the 3 Southern States. The 4 clubs North of the Murray River will most likely suffer more than most, just due to a lack of numbers playing the game early enough to get a feel for it. One big bonus the AFL has going for it is that the very best players in the world are on show every week and [pre COVID-19] we could go and watch them live or on on FTA TV, something most other codes would love to have, but as it has been stated 'ad nauseum' is that it is driven by people wanting to see those games.

Nope, no priority picks. The funding thing is a moot point - the AFL doesn’t generate its own revenue; all revenue is actually generated by the clubs and their players. The AFL merely administers the revenue on behalf of the clubs. They power they hold over the game and clubs is unwarranted.

I reckon the deal will be McAsay and pick 5 for no 1 pick and a second rounder.

That’s a different matter. The game is definitely not equitable regarding fixturing. In face it’s demonstrably unfair. The AFL doesn’t know the meaning of the word integrity. I don’t agree with giving clubs a hand up though; the draft does that already. The only thing it’s skewed by is the NGAs and father-son. In the interests of equity the NGAs should be abolished. Father-son helps to maintain a small amount of tradition so I’d like see that kept but it could be fixed up with bidding through draft points. The inequity in the AFL comes about from their manipulation to maximise revenue not from the draft.

Geelong are not the oldest club in the AFL. That would be Melbourne.

You make a good point. I guess most of us look across at the EPL and not want to see the same thing happen in the AFL with only a few clubs ever finishing top. Perhaps landing somewhere in between would be best.

The current system does provide equity. What is doesn’t provide is protection from poor management.