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- #751
The AFLW program is part time and small in scale — they do a lot more work than they’re paid for and many of the people employed in AFLW roles also wear other hats at the club.Does the club need to spend more money, maybe it does however if I read you right about the women's program operating on about half a million dollars then money alone isn't going to fix Essendon's men's program.
E.g. Georgia Harvey predominantly works with the AFL list management but she also did our list build for AFLW (with Harmit Singh, who is our AFLW recruiting manager and also JHA and community programs person). Ditto everyone else, from the boot studder to the physios.
And then you have people that are automatically covering both teams, like Josh Mahoney is paid under the existing cap but also oversees the people who oversee the women’s program, so you don’t need to duplicate his role and pay it twice.
Plus I don’t think AFLW has a lot of funding going into things like analytics or player development atm, and the players themselves are paid in a tiered system funded from the AFL I believe.
In terms of money we seem to be pretty much paying the full 6.9m that we are allowed to pay under the soft cap, with Rutten apparently one of the cheapest senior coaches in the place but that saving is then redistributed to the highly credentialed panel of assistants.
Then you have health and fitness, welfare, list management and recruiting, player development and the VFL program, analytics, strategists, statisticians, and the rest.
Apparently the situation is so dire that the league is haemorrhaging good people to other sports because we can’t pay market rates, and clubs are having to choose what to spend money on. So with an inexperienced playing list they might prioritise player development rather than analytics and strategists if you’re like Geelong or something.
There’s an age article I posted somewhere that goes into detail about all of it but lots of clubs are struggling with it (though not all can afford to raise it).
There’s also the fascinating comment from Rohan Connolly that our VFL program has been left to hang in the breeze since 2020 when it fell apart and then no one was in charge of it for a while and all the players left for security and opportunities elsewhere.