David Penberthy: AFL execs have completely lost touch
If the head honchos of our nation’s most popular sport truly believe that their jobs are worthy of their eye-watering incomes, then frankly, they’re nothing short of delusional, writes David Penberthy.
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Next time you’re selling one of your kidneys to pay for a round of beers at an AFL game, you might want to loft your pint glass wryly in the direction of AFL House.
With every passing year, the simple act of following your football team is becoming a more expensive proposition.
Memberships, merchandise, food and beverage prices continue to go up and up. Even the mere act of watching games on TV now comes at a price if you want to see your team playing in real-time, as live game rights are sold off, benefiting those of us who are affluent enough to afford Foxtel.
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The coverage might be vastly better than free-to-air, but for working-class people, the old grassroots footy fans, the cost of subscription puts a simple joy out of reach.
As life has become more expensive for the average fan, it’s become increasingly cushier for the executives who manage our game.
Figures released this week showed that the AFL’s 12-person executive team took home more than $10.73 million in wages last year, including $3.56 million in bonuses.
This windfall equates to an average annual salary package of $894,000 for the game’s top brass.
Further, we don’t know what the AFL’s chief executive officer gets paid any more. His salary was last disclosed two years ago, when he was earning $1.74 million a year.
We can probably guess that it’s now topping $2 million, but have no way of knowing for sure as the AFL Commission chairman Richard Goyder decided that it’s no longer in the public interest.
This is an inadequate level of transparency.
It’s a criticism that’s especially true of an organisation that pays no company tax on account of being a not-for-profit business, even though it’s got profit coming out of its ears.
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And it’s made even more pertinent by the fact that, despite its proven ability for generating a whole stack of revenue, and paying its own big brass exceptionally well, the AFL still goes cap-in-hand to governments to leech even more money off the public through taxpayer assistance. That assistance is often staggering.
The league’s official accounts revealed this week that the Victorian Labor Government has already paid the AFL $10 million of a promised $225 million in taxpayer funds for the redevelopment of Docklands as Marvel Stadium.
That money is being kept in a “separate interest-bearing account”, which means that the AFL can generate more money by banking taxpayer dollars ahead of that project being completed.
I love AFL and I am not trying to inject the politics of envy into the management of the game. But I am warning the AFL that it appears so out of step with the tenor of the times that it risks bringing scorn upon itself.
Our major institutions have been shamed into recognising that the excesses of the past will not be tolerated. It is 15 years since John Howard, rightly, at the behest of the then Labor Leader Mark Latham shut down the old parliamentary pension scheme.
Much of the recent Royal Commission into Banking went to the obscene bonus-driven culture where executives were paid eye-watering sums for pushing customers into products not on the basis of need but a desire to maximise their own take-home pay. The AFL does not appear to have got the memo.
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The worst example of its aloofness on this issue is the secrecy surrounding the CEO’s pay, all while, at the same time, our 18 club presidents do their jobs for free, the equivalent of a full-time job on top of their day jobs.
I would also question whether the salaries paid to the AFL executives accurately reflect the difficulty of the task at hand. If you can’t make AFL a success in Australia, you must be operating with half a brain.
Four of our six states are hardwired to care about little else from March to September. And as much as we gripe about membership costs, match scheduling and rule changes, we all keep going anyway.
A monkey could make a success of our national game, yet we ain’t paying them peanuts.
The AFL is also inadvertently creating the perfect foundation for an almighty showdown with the players over the question of pay. This game would be nothing without the men who put their bodies on the line every weekend.
The most fun I have had at a footy game recently was the Adelaide-Geelong preliminary final in 2017, when former Crow Patrick Dangerfield had what could be described by way of understatement as a tough day in the office.
With the Crows controlling the game throughout, the most telling moment came just on halftime, when his former teammate Rory Sloane flattened Dangerfield in front of 50,000-odd screaming fans. The feeling at the Adelaide Oval that night was akin to what it must have been like in one of those Roman amphitheatres.
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Dangerfield earned every cent of his salary that evening. But despite being one of the best players the game has ever seen, his salary doesn’t even put him in the million-dollar club, and he earns less than any of the 12 execs who sit around a table at AFL House, promoting a game that we already love anyway, with no prospect of receiving a beautifully executed and richly deserved hip-and-shoulder from Rory Sloane and being ridiculed by feral Crows fans as he slinks wearily back to the hotel.
Dangerfield is now the head of the AFL Players Association. A persuasive and intelligent head he is, too.
The next time he sits down for what the unionists calls a pay-and-conditions meeting with the bosses, he has every right to kick things off by asking: So fellas, how are things working out for you financially?
The rest of us can ask the same question next time we pay 10 bucks for a beer.
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