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If anyone want's to have a look at our local NWFL GF played between Devonport and Wynyard (always heaps of fights between these two teams), at my local ground, Latrobe, here you go. There are 1 or 2 players North have been watching on and off....

 




What’s behind AFL’s long-term contract craze​


Daniel Cherny


Not long ago, three years was considered a long-term deal in the AFL. More than double that is now being offered to non-All-Australians. DANIEL CHERNY investigates the contract length explosion.

At the height of his powers in 2009, when he was arguably the most valuable player in the AFL, the captain of the team unbeaten on top of the ladder and being courted by an expansion club about to enter the league in the region in which he grew up, Nick Riewoldt signed a four-year contract extension with St Kilda, taking him to just shy of his 31st birthday.

At the time, contracts didn’t come much longer. Close to if not the premier star of the league commanded a four-deal despite holding significant leverage.
A year earlier, when Jonathan Brown was 26 and similarly at his pomp as one of the league’s most commanding key forwards, there was tut-tutting about his demand for a five-year deal from the Brisbane Lions.

There were always exceptions; Alastair Lynch’s famous 10-year contract with the Brisbane Bears has stood the test of time as the yardstick for tenure, while Mark Mercuri’s five-year deal with Essendon proved problematic for the Bombers. But these were highly unconventional at the time. As one current AFL list manager said when contacted for this piece, three years used to be consider a long-term deal.

How times have changed. As it stands, more than 50 players around the AFL are currently signed to deals of five years or longer. If anything this figure looks likely to increase. While Lance Franklin’s nine-year contract remains the longest in the game and expires at season’s end, Greater Western Sydney expect Jacob Hopper and Tim Taranto to both head to Richmond on seven-year deals.

Both are excellent players at their best, but neither has ever been named in the All-Australian team. Are either even in the AFL’s best 20 midfielders? It is debatable, and yet the Tigers are willing to commit to them for the rest of the decade.

Even role players can get five-year contracts. No one could reasonably consider Adam Tomlinson, Aidan Corr or Rory Atkins to be stars of the league; indeed a couple of them are hard pressed getting out of the VFL, yet all are in the middle of five-year deals.

And yet at the same time, Collingwood is paying a sizeable chunk of Adam Treloar’s contract at the Western Bulldogs, and will do so for another three seasons after trading him out in their fire sale at the end of 2020 with five years to run on his contract. And the Magpies appear prepared to do the same with Brodie Grundy, who is only two years through the seven-year extension he signed early in 2020. Collingwood look set to end up paying more of what some in the industry call “dead money” (money tied up in a player playing for another club).

But that hasn’t stopped clubs from signing players to contracts of five or more years. James Sicily, Clayton Oliver, Rowan Marshall, Callum Mills, Daniel Rioli, Charlie Curnow. They keep rolling in.

How has the landscape been shifted so dramatically? We canvassed current and former list managers and player managers to understand how long-term no longer seems that long.

The power of free agency​

The most substantial change to the player movement market was free agency, which went live a decade ago as Brendon Goddard shifted from St Kilda to Essendon. Before free agency, the cost of acquisition for a player like Riewoldt or Brown (leaving to one side expansion signing allowances) would have involved the coughing up of first-round draft picks.

But free agency has encouraged clubs to splash greater cash to land a player for free. Even if the contract looks a little bit over fair value, it is offset by the fact the player would be coming for nothing, especially given how rarely clubs have matched offers for restricted free agents.

A look at the list of players currently signed to deals of five years or longer shows that most – although not all – players who are on these sorts of deals have done so around or before they become free agents. Oliver, Curnow and Mills have all in recent months agreed to monster long-term deals more than a year out from free agency, with their clubs keen to secure them ahead of their free agency year.

Hopper is set to join the likes of Lachie Neale and Dylan Shiel who were traded from their initial clubs after seven seasons, lured by long-term deals elsewhere in their “pre-agency” year. Both Greater Western Sydney (Shiel) and Fremantle (Neale) ended up with a more substantial haul than they would have received had they held their players to their respective contracts and coughed them up as free agents 12 months later.

Free agency explains a lot of the long-term contract phenomenon, but not everything. Fremantle’s Victorian defender Hayden Young, viewed as something of a flight risk in his draft year of 2019, signed a contract extension earlier this year tying him to the Dockers until the end of 2027, by which time he will hit free agency. Fremantle have similarly committed to Heath Chapman until the end of 2027.

Jordan Dawson signed a five-year deal with Adelaide last season, traded to the Crows when merely out-of-contract and not yet a free agent. Taranto would be another in that boat.

There are a few factors at play. Even when free agency is not closely linked, it tends to play a role. They glut of long-term free agent contracts has shaped the whole market. Without free agency tilting tenure in one direction, it is hard to conceive that the Western Bulldogs would have offered Tom Boyd seven years at the end of 2014, nor that North Melbourne would have stumped up their extraordinary nine-year offer for Josh Kelly in 2017.

The case of Josh Kelly​

Kelly’s is a telling case study. A No.2 draft pick who was briefly one of the league’s top 10 players, the North offer and further interest in the coming years put pressure on the Giants to come to the party, which they did, and then some, signing him to a two-year deal in 2019 with a further eight-year option he exercised in 2021. By this point GWS had heavily committed to the long-term contract strategy, signing Lachie Whitfield and Stephen Coniglio to comparable deals.

As one senior club list management official noted this week, these deals then normalise seven-year contracts. The official quipped that Hopper would “peer over the fence” and see the types of deals being dished out to his teammates, some of whom he has outperformed over recent years, and feel he is owed that level of commitment.

One club attributed some of the massive deals to the AFL’s underspend mechanism, initiated in 2014, which allows clubs to spend up to 105 per cent of the salary cap in any given season, provided they have underspent in the previous two years. It is another lever which promotes extravagant deals.

Another factor that has contributed to the trend is a general hunger for security from players. As one ex-list manager suggested, players tend to be comfortable taking slightly less per year than their top market value to lock away their long-term futures. Front-ended contracts are also preferred. As one agent pointed out, money in the hand is optimal, helping with things like mortgage repayments.

That is all well and good for players, as well as agents, but what about clubs, who can end up looking silly a couple of years down the track when players don’t live up to what they are being paid and still have a long way to ride out on the contract. Grundy, and Coniglio, who to his credit was significantly improved this year, are a couple of recent high-profile examples.

At one level, clubs seem to generally be happy enough to absorb the risk. Or perhaps more to the point, too scared to risk letting a player go to a rival and at some level pressured into bowing to the long-term demands of players.

Shuffling the cash​

However there is more to it. Some clubs bank on sizeable increases to the salary cap under the next collective bargaining agreement. The rationale is that by the time a player reaches years five, six and seven of their deal, they may actually be undervalued relative to the cap. Clubs vary in their approach to cap increases. While players can push for their contracts to be indexed to any salary cap increase, one agent said that some clubs are steadfast against such clauses, whole other clubs will only insert that type of provision if the club gets the first cut of any cap increase.

But while long-term contracts would seem on face value to limit flexibility for clubs, the flip side is that they provide greater certainty and actually allow clubs to be flexible by asking players on long-term deals to shuffle their money around between years if the club needs it. One player manager said that clubs have become considerably more aggressive when it comes to shuffling players’ money mid-contract over recent years.

This is still fraught though. Clubs like the Pies and Giants have run into trouble when deals are backended. There is an element of kicking the can down the road. As one senior club list management official stressed, there is an important distinction to be made between long-term deals and heavily back-ended long-term deals. CODE Sports learnt of one superstar player who was on as little as $200,000 per year early in a back-ended contract. The fact that list managers often commit to deals beyond their own secured futures at clubs also encourages short-term thinking.

The flexibility argument also has limitations. Take Grundy, for an example. While he has a potential suitor in Melbourne, the fact he is tied down for another five years on what has long been rumoured to be around $900,000 per years also limits his options, short of taking a pay cut. The money is guaranteed, but also something of an albatross.

Where clubs still feel as though they have real power however is that if they want a player out, they tend to get their way. Treloar was a prime example; he was keen to stay but was made to feel so unwanted that he eventually got his head around moving. Clubs will occasionally hold wantaway players to contracts – think Tim Kelly, Bryce Gibbs and Joe Daniher – but a player holding a club to a contract is harder to envisage. Perhaps this is the biggest reason clubs keep agreeing to these deals; they are confident of getting what they want eventually.

And as an agent argued; clubs are willing to roll the dice so that even if the last couple of years don’t work out, deals are still viewed as a success in totality. In the long run, few will remember that Franklin didn’t play a single game in 2020 if 2022 yields both the 1000-goal milestone and a premiership.
 
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