Beware of the false prophet of the midseason trade period

Patrick Dangerfield has joined the call for a midseason trade period. Calls for widespread change are not uncommon in our dynamic code, but when considering change, the AFL has to be careful that they don’t lose what’s great about our game in the process.

Dangerfield, who is also the president of the AFL Players Association, tweeted a poll asking whether it is “time to introduce a mid-season trade period in the AFL” because it “helps rebuilding clubs” and “teams often pay overs to acquire talent”.

Let’s start with Dangerfield’s first point. Just how would a midseason trade period help rebuilding clubs? If you are North Melbourne or West Coast, are you really going to go all-out to recruit players from other clubs if the current season were a write-off?

What’s more, are players even going to want to come to your club? It’s one thing for cellar dwellers to sell prospective recruits in the off-season on a long-term vision for the club, offer them more opportunities in their preferred position and maybe throw in a nifty pay rise while they’re at it. These players will quite often seriously consider it and may be prepared to endure a year or so of losses if it will set them up for a long-term career.

But they also hope this build will be as short as it can be and maybe, with a new year and some other new players, they can turn things around pretty quickly for their new club. But it’s a bigger ask to get them to leave their present club midyear to get belted for the remaining ten rounds.

Imagine you’re a player at the fringe of selection at a leading club, like Geelong’s Esava Ratugolea. Ratugolea played four senior games for the Cats last year and unsuccessfully requested a trade to Port Adelaide at season’s end. He was pragmatic enough to know that the best thing for his career may be a move away from the Cattery.

But here’s the thing: would Ratugolea have made the same trade request midyear? For as bruising as it would be for his ego to be confined to the reserves for most of the season, Ratugolea would have known that he was only an injury to Tom Hawkins or Jeremy Cameron away from playing in a premiership.

Quite likely, fringe players at contending clubs would be prepared to stay put for the moment for a shot at the ultimate prize rather than putting all their stocks into a rebuilding team.

Worse still, a preseason trade period could see struggling teams have their talent harvested by the contenders.

Imagine you’re Damien Hardwick. You’re right in the thick of the flag race and then Dion Prestia goes down. Do you give one of your depth players, like Riley Collier-Dawkins, a run or do you look on the market for someone who could be as good as Prestia or maybe even better? And who better to target than a star player at an underperforming club who is frustrated by lack of success and thirsty for September glory?

The Dangerfields of the world would say that that struggling team would be compensated for their loss, presumably with draft picks and maybe another player – though, again, who would want to go there midseason? But there’s a danger for those that are footy-obsessed to inflate the importance of draft picks and forget that the primary aim of footy clubs should not be maximising their draft capital but building a list that will contend for a premiership. Draft picks, in the end, are academic and don’t necessarily correlate to success.

Take Gold Coast, for instance. They have had 15 top-ten picks in the last decade yet never played finals. Every couple of years they look like they are maturing as a side, then there’s another exodus followed by a bottoming out. A new crop of talented youngsters is drafted to the club and touted as the great white hope for the Suns before the cycle repeats itself.

(Photo by Russell Freeman/AFL Photos via Getty Images)

You might say that that’s already the case – that the big clubs are already harvesting players from frontier clubs like the Giants and Suns. Why have these players stay an extra ten weeks when they’re leaving anyway?

Imagine you’re Matt Rowell or Noah Anderson and you’ve gone into the off-season thinking that fortunes are changing at the club. You’re training hard and you can see an air of optimism around the place. Then the season begins and it doesn’t go to plan. The positivity at the club doesn’t last and there’s a disconnect between the players.

Richmond make a quiet approach through your agent and you dismiss it at first – you want to stay the course. But the club’s fortunes are not turning around and you’re struggling with the expectation of being the game changer. So you agree to a quiet chat with Richmond. The Tigers don’t need you to be anything more than a solid contributor – they already have a system that has endured, and you can slot right into it. You won’t get tagged each week, won’t get hailed as the saviour of the club, and you’ll be featuring in September.

The temptation would definitely be strong.

But picture that scenario under the present system. Yes, a player like Rowell or Anderson can still go, but the choice is less stark. The Suns and Tigers are, theoretically at least, starting from the same position in the new season and the Suns can sell their players on the continued improvement of the club.

And in the event that one of these players did opt to leave in the off-season, the Suns would be in a better position to replace them than midseason. As I said already, Gold Coast’s ability to attract rival players would be stronger in the post-season rather than midseason, as the prospect of playing finals would still be open while they would also have a better idea of the players they are interested in drafting as the draft would be only a month away by then.

That’s the chief concern about a midseason trade period – that the rich would get richer and the poor would get poorer. It’s the clubs with enormous pull factors – premiership contention, geography, exposure – that would be able to pull themselves out of their list management holes, while things at the developing clubs would go from bad to worse. A cursory look at the highest profile free agents in recent years shows that they tend to go to teams at the top half of the ladder.

(Photo by Michael Willson/AFL Photos via Getty Images)

I like that when the first ball is bounced in March there is nothing more that the list managers can do for their club that season and it’s over to the coaching staff. I like that every coach, whether they be at the Cats or Kangaroos, has to work with the players that they’ve got and there is nothing more the list manager can do to plug holes in the list they have been building that off-season. And I like that coaches are forced to take risks and redevelop their game plan when things don’t go to plan. That to me is a truly egalitarian part of our game, and it shouldn’t be easily disregarded.

What’s more, I also like to watch struggling teams begin to play with renewed freedom once they are out of finals contention and challenge the contending teams in the back half of the year. For players disillusioned with the club, they have a choice between continuing to sulk or putting their best foot forward to showcase their talents to rivals for the end-of-year trade period. The risk of bringing this forward to midseason is that teams out of contention could fall dramatically off the cliff midway through the year once players have nothing to play for. Gone would be the tales of stoicism and resilience as battered teammates banded together in the final weeks of the season to give their supporters some hope to take into the off-season. As Eddie Maguire put it, a midseason trade period could lead to “legalised tanking”.

There are those who argue that midseason trades have been a thing in American sports and those competitions haven’t been compromised. But do we really want to go down the American path? Australian football has endured for a similar amount of time to baseball and basketball, and one of the things that’s great about Aussie Rules is the pride in the jersey.

Yes, player movement has ramped up in the last decade since the introduction of free agency, but it still pales in comparison to the MLB, NFL, NBA, various international football codes and even AFL’s main rival at home, the NRL. That is a good thing. While player movement is a fact of life in any professional sport, I see no reason why we need to make it any easier for players. I don’t want to see players held against their will, but I also don’t want to see changing clubs become too normalised. The romantic in me wants to see the phenomenon of one-club stalwarts like Joel Selwood, David Mundy and Travis Boak continue.

Besides, the trade period is already so player centric that nine times out of ten the players get where they want to go – just look at Blake Acres, Tanner Bruhn, Jacob Hopper, Jason Horne-Francis, Luke Jackson, Tom Mitchell, Dan McStay, Izak Rankine and Tim Taranto in last trade period. All of these players ultimately got to the club that they wanted to play for. Is it too much to ask that they wait until the end of the season before making their move?

(Photo by Michael Willson/AFL Photos via Getty Images)

I’m also sceptical about Dangerfield’s assertion that a midseason trade period would help rebuilding clubs since other clubs often pay overs to acquire talent. While the last part may be true, it’s also true that clubs also often pay overs to retain talent. Although pragmatic thinking from a rebuilding club may be that a senior player will not be part of the club’s next premiership run, it’s also difficult for a club to maintain sponsors and members when they are bleeding their marquee talent. Adding a midseason trade period could open up a new can of worms. A high-profile player approaching free agency could use the midseason trade period as a bargaining tactic to drive up their price, and clubs, eager to avoid the circus of trade speculation, may cave to such calls. To understand this as a real possibility, the AFL only needs to look as far as the Payne Haas saga in the NRL.

What’s more, one of the great things about our trade period is that it happens outside of the season. While I’m not naive to the fact that list managers work all year round and players talk to rival clubs throughout the season, I like that clubs are stuck with the list they’ve got throughout the regular season. That means that, for as much talk as there was about Collingwood going after Dan McStay, for the remaining weeks of the season he was a Lion and Collingwood had to do their best to win without him. It meant that although Richmond were in the race for Tim Taranto and Jacob Hopper throughout the year, the question about whether the Tigers were closer to another flag or a rebuild was one that we wouldn’t know the answer to until after the season.

If a midseason trade period were introduced, then the game would shift further away from coaching and player development and even more towards list management.

That’s not to diminish the work of list managers. One of my favourite parts of AFL is the science of building a list that combines youth and experience and has the depth to withstand the inevitability of injuries. I like the complexity and nuance of it, the fact that one star player is almost never the difference between winning a premiership and falling short and that clubs must strike a balance between contending now and rotating young players into the team to give them enduring relevance.

This leads to my next point: a midseason trade period could upset the natural ecosystems of clubs. In theory the relatively large list sizes in the AFL allow for a club to build for the future. Yes, players leave and not every player works out, but the idea is that players are drafted to the club in order to eventually replace the senior players. Often it’s only short-term exposure to senior footy when an established player goes down with injury. Then perhaps there are a few longer stints in the seniors. Eventually that young player challenges the older one for his spot in the 22. But if clubs keep recruiting externally to fill temporary gaps in the list, then the player who’s next in line to come into the 22 will constantly be pushed back.

Yes, you could say that the midseason trade period will give opportunities to unwanted players on the fringes to fill gaps in other clubs’ lists, and to that I would say: yes and no. There are diamonds in the rough who thrive at new clubs – Ben Keays, Lincoln McCarthy and Tyson Stengle, to name a few – but it’s also difficult for players who haven’t had a lot of opportunities to attract rival interest.

Moreover, if you’re Samson Ryan or Tom Berry, are you really in a position to relocate interstate midway through the season? It’s different in the NBA, where a rookie player earns something akin to what Patrick Cripps earns and can afford to pack up and go wherever the opportunity is. But over here a midseason trade period would likely push a lot of fringe players back as they struggle for opportunities to prove themselves.

This rise of short-term thinking could incentivise clubs to make bold plays in the present rather than taking the slow and steady build to a premiership. It could mean that Geelong miss out on finding the next Patrick Dangerfield in their backyard because of the lure of external talent and, as a result, overlook developing a list that will hold strong for the next decade.

Why do we need to mess with a game that is already great? The fact that the midseason trade is popular in American sports is no reason to follow suit.