stui magpie wrote:...you need to put salaries in context.
These kids come straight of high school on around $100k pa. For that they give up all privacy, their weekends, get subjected to constant public scrutiny by armchair experts like us all about their character and worth, get told what to eat, what they can do when they aren't "at work" because they are basically on 24/7 x 365.
The average career is 3 years or less and each club list has around 40 players, many each year who do all that work and never get a game, then have to go out and find a job they have no training for.
Only the top 100 out of more than 700 players get over $500k pa, the best get more, and with free agency and trading, the market determines the price, within the salary cap.
Is any AFL player worth $1M pa? No. But the AFL earns billions from media rights and the players deserve a slice of that. Do actors deserve to get paid $20M for a movie when someone with potentially more skills but less profile is getting a fraction of that working in small productions? No. But again capacity to pay comes into it. If I star in a movie that makes $500M I want a slice of that, and it will be a lot more than if I star in a movie that breaks even with a budget of $50k.
I don't begrudge any of the players how much they earn. If you can score $1M pa for playing footy, go for it because once you pass 35 you won't be earning a fraction of that even if you go into the media and become a star.
It's a reverse career path. Most people start off earning a low salary, work their way up and maximise their earning capacity when they're 40+. Footballers are washed up and out of the system by then.
Great post and analysis.
No one likes massive disparities, but footy resides within a world where there are massive disparities, so it effectively competes with those exaggerated incentives (through basic economic opportunity cost and substitution) even if it's much more balanced.
Footy also has its own weirdo dynamics: it's competitive but within a very limited space; it's commercial yet also a community entity sponsored by members; it's a brutal and very limiting career choice at the most crucial time for career development, incentivised by admiration, potential glory and short-term high earnings.
The AFL has the dynamics about right in my view. Compare it to the pseudo-competition of the Premier League (and other European football leagues) with its massive disparities between clubs (and between chances of winning), and it is a vastly superior 'competition' in the strict sense of the word.
The athletes, competition and spectacle are phenomenal considering its market. I always use the AFL as an example of an organisation that focuses on
quality of competition, which pretty much captures my own politics and economics: the right balance between access, incentive and evenness of competition, all of which are necessary.
Within that you get some clubs and players that do very well, but there are no deranged billionaires flying to the moon with spare change. Meanwhile, there is no club that can't win the cup, while young, modestly talented and older players are taken care of far better than ever before. On top of that, you get a massive community contribution and a great product (culturally, athletically, as pure entertainment, etc.).
I think people forget that the competitive bidding element that inflates contracts is part of that overall balance, as annoying as it can be in single instances. Also, the human element is still every bit as real in terms of some clubs paying too much (especially, ahem, when that player is crucial in the mind of a coach, and in turn the coach's success is crucial in the mind of the club president), and in terms of players doing better under different coaches and club cultures.
Combine those dynamics with injuries and mental health considerations, and a player can very quickly become a scapegoat for those lacking in world insight and self-control, as we've seen with Grundy.
