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Jarryd Hayne’s ideas about image rights have nothing to do with cleaning up rugby league and everything to do with superstars making more money.
On Monday, Michael Chammas published an article in the Sydney Morning Herald detailing some of Jarryd Hayne’s ideas on image rights, player sponsorship and personal brand.
Hayne suggested that players should have full control over their image rights and be able to take whatever sponsorship they choose.
His argument is based on the idea that this would make players more accountable, because anti-social behaviour would limit their ability to “sell their brand” and make money. Hayne pointed to the NFL as the benchmark for this approach.
From a purely economic perspective, there’s a huge difference in operations between the NFL and the NRL regarding financial capabilities of individual clubs. The NFL is as close to socialism as an American industry is likely to get, with all kinds of revenue sharing deals in place related to broadcasting, licensing, merchandise and ticketing to ensure every single NFL franchise makes a profit.
This is significantly different to the NRL, where a number of clubs are struggling to stay afloat while the glamour clubs continue to turn a profit year upon year. On Wednesday, Steve Mascord wrote a great column detailing some of the issues Hayne’s ideas would create in relation to big-market versus small-market teams.
The ability for smaller market teams to recruit players is already an issue – just look at Canberra’s past few months of failure. Enacting a policy where players own their image rights would simply add another impediment to small-market teams and entrench an English Premier League-style ‘top four’ of rich, big-market clubs that smaller organisations would find impossible to break.
I’ve got nothing against Hayne. He’s a great rugby league player, talented, high profile and extremely marketable. As a superstar who could surely make more money than he does at the moment, I can understand how he might feel hamstrung by the current agreement regarding his image rights.
Some of his points have merit and he’s entitled to want to make money, but let’s not pretend that the agenda he’s pushing has anything to do with improving player behaviour. That’s just a straw man argument to forward his goal and improve his bank.
The 2014 NFL season hasn’t started yet and there are already ten players suspended for violating the league’s substance abuse policy. Two of the ten have previously been to the Pro Bowl. The list doesn’t include Josh Gordon, who led the league in receiving yards last year and is a star player by anyone’s standard, who’s facing a year out of the game for substance abuse issues.
And that’s just this year. It won’t be a regular season in the NFL if at least two athletes aren’t charged with a gun-related crime at some point.
Somewhere in Massachusetts, former star NFL player Aaron Hernandez is sitting in a cell, charged with three murders allegedly committed in 2012. In 2007, Michael Vick, at the time one of the NFL’s most high profile athletes, served 21 months in prison for his role in an illegal dog-fighting syndicate.
The NFL has a long list of athletes, all completely in control of their own image rights, committing acts that hurt themselves and their sport.
So let’s be clear. The idea that a player having control over their own ‘brand’ has any correlation to those individuals making better life decisions outside the game is a fallacy.
There will always be dumb athletes who do dumb things and smart athletes who make mistakes. Players having ownership of their own image has nothing to do with that.
If Jarryd Hayne wants to explore different ways for players to be able to make more money, great. Let’s have that conversation because it’s the athletes who make the game and deserve the most rewards from it.
But before we laud him for being so well spoken and articulating such a wonderful idea, let’s be clear what we’re really talking about.
It’s not player behaviour. It’s cold hard cash.
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