PLUS Your club board comp is now up!
www.bigfooty.com
Would be nice but I can't see it happening, Young hates us for playing hard ball at the trade table and the club hates Young because they feel he's getting in player's ears and telling them to leave and ask for trades.
Agreed.
I would also go as far to say that it is likely the leading contributor to to the near-constant injury crisis that has impacted the club over the past 2.5 years.
Among the AFL’s range of sub-committees last year [2021], the league created one to specifically focus on football department spending.It consisted of Adam Simpson (West Coast), John Longmire (Sydney), Graham Wright (Hawthorn), Geoff Walsh (Collingwood), Chris Davies (Port Adelaide), David Noble (Brisbane), Blair Hartley (Richmond), Chris Grant (Western Bulldogs), Tim Livingstone (Richmond) and Craig Vozzo (West Coast).The sub-committee recommended the soft cap should not be less than $6.8 million for 2021. Ideally, they argued, it should remain above $7 million.The AFL settled on $6.132 million, privately angering some clubs who hadn’t prepared for such a savage reduction and were forced to make brutal calls.
The inference is that the club had expected a very different outcome in terms of the soft cap back in 2021 and ended up having to rush through an additional $700k of spending cuts on top of almost $2M that had already been done.
Obviously such action is going to have an adverse impact on player outcomes, especially if it is effectively unplanned.
Things have gone downhill for the club on that front ever since.
And looking ahead to 2024, the soft cap will remain $2M below pre-Covid levels.
In 2022, AFL executives took home $11.8 million, compared to $10.4 million pre-COVID. Meanwhile, football department caps will sit at $6.95 million per club in 2023, down from $9.2 million pre-COVID. Disappointed clubs were told last Tuesday to expect only a $250,000 increase next year.
If it's good enough for the executives...
To be honest, my personal opinion is that there should be no cap on off-field expenditure at all - if the club can afford to pursue things in the belief that it may improve player performance, they should be free to do so at their own expense.
Indeed, I have wondered where the AFLPA sits on this, as it could be argued that having the soft cap could be viewed as a constraint on player development and potential future earnings if a player should want to move clubs early in their career.
The current situation where some clubs will travel more than fourfold the distance during the season as others, yet exist on the same expenditure allocation to manage the inevitable fatigue related to that travel, is completely absurd and needs to change.
The soft cap, in it's current form, is affecting the competition in two ways:
- "protects" financially insecure clubs by bringing the rest of the league down to their level - which in turn results in a degradation of on-field performance quality for the viewing public.
- advantages Victorian clubs over the rest of the competition, due to the way it ultimately acts as a tax against travel.
It is a blatant distortion to both the integrity and fairness of the competition, and exists without any justifiable financial basis. It is arguably as much a product of biased ideology rather than (in)competent administration.
The soft cap needs to go.
It's very fair - if you don't have to travel...
Let's be honest here - this is an outcome that has been deliberately baked into the competition.
Interchange started being mucked around with in 2011, when the number of interchanges was reduced from four to three and the much disliked substitute.
That wasn't enough however, and interchange caps came in during 2014 and have since increased in severity in 2016 and 2021.
The reason? Less interchanges increase player fatigue.
But don't take it from me, Steve Hocking declared as much when announcing the latest reduction:
“There are a lot of high pressure game styles which have kicked in, the pressure factors have increased, and have been on the increase for five years now, so our belief is we need to put a little bit of fatigue back into the system, and to recalibrate that part of the game and hopefully have the result of opening up the game.”
The current cap at 75 interchanges is just 55% of the competition average in 2013.
So player fatigue increases, what do clubs do in response? They spend more money on fatigue management of course.
Well, we can't have that - what's the point in making pointless changes if clubs can just buy their way out of them?
So in 2015 we get the Football Department cap on spending, with multimillion dollar tax punishments following shortly after in 2017.
Ok then. That sure showed the clubs - player fatigue is on the up and there is nothing they can do to stop it. (Too bad scoring remains on the decline...)
So where does that leave those clubs who are already facing an uneven playing field with fatigue, due to the lop-sided travel requirements that exist?
Well, they're doing it tough:
View attachment 1733861
Prior to 2011, across all competition, it could be expected on average, that a win would occur for every 2,100km of travel undertaken.
This was consistent for the better part of a decade before AFL HQ decided to meddle with things.
Since 2011 that average has shifted to just over every 2,300km. Now, that doesn't sound very much, but it's actually almost a 10% increase - when you expand that out to how much a WA club will travel in a typical season, it equates to 1.5 less expected wins per year.
This year is the perfect storm however. Many of the recent changes that have been effectively hidden under the Covid blanket are compounding on each other, imparting a massive impact upon the competition.
Thus far in 2023 the average for a win to occur is for every 2,900km of travel undertaken. That's a 40% increase on pre-2011.
No, fatigue related to travel isn't an issue at all...
But this is where we are, with an administration grasping at straws for problems that don't really exist, failing to address those "problems", and in the process further undermine the integrity of a competition that by many measures, actively rejects fairness.
Of the two Non-Victorian clubs that are currently placed inside the top 8, Port Adelaide have the second lowest travel undertaken in the competition to Round 17, whilst each of Brisbane's four losses has occurred on the road.
It's no small wonder that Victorian clubs are dominating the recent premiership list - they are the beneficiaries of more than a decade of incompetence over game play aesthetics without any goal that have at the same time been thoroughly punishing clubs that travel more than others.
Both the interchange and football department caps act to distort the competition in significant ways and reduce fairness.
They should never have been implemented and now need to be removed.
Any insights on the Eagles relationship with Mr Young? How many of our players are managed by him?
Cheers
Straight up was going to expect a 3rd round pick at the best, but if a club is willing to give up a 1st round pick for him I won't complain.
There's nothing worse in negotiations than someone accepting your first offer/demand.
Why would anyone choose to go to Norf?
They might not be the worst team but they're the worst club in the league.
