AFL plan to be Australia’s No. 1 domestic sport is certainly made easier when Jared Polec can earn $750,000 a year
AFL players did indeed win big from the new collective bargaining agreement signed last year — as highlighted by the godfather offers to Port Adelaide wingman Jared Polec
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MALCOLM Blight is in his 50th year of league football. When he started at Woodville in 1968 his $14-a-week covered his beers on a Saturday night with his mates at the Woodpeckers’ social club.
For context, those $14 equated to the national average weekly earnings of $70.
Six years later, with a Magarey Medal on his resume, Blight moved to VFL club North Melbourne on a phenomenal $10,000-a-season contract (while the average annual wage was $7618).
Jared Polec is in his 10th year of league football (he started in the SANFL’s top flight as a 16-year-old at Woodville-West Torrens). He too would have been on beer money at Oval Avenue in 2009 — $200 a game while the average weekly wage was $1201.90.
A decade later, with possibly a Port Adelaide best-and-fairest to be added to his honours next month, Polec could following Blight’s path to Arden Street to collect $750,000-a-year from North Melbourne. For context, that pay cheque overshadows the average Australian annual salary of $82,436.
And it might make Blight wish he was born in another era (for the record, he repeatedly says he would not swap for the big dollars for the priceless memories of that remarkable era for Australian football in the 1970s).
Good luck to Polec. This is the age of the truly professional footballer blessed by a record $2.5 billion television deal that has underwritten the richest AFL players’ collective bargaining agreement in the game’s 160-year history.
If North Melbourne — or St Kilda — wants to load his pockets with big money (leading many to question how “desperate” AFL clubs can get with their list management to rise from the bottom 10), Polec is indeed one of the most-blessed young men in Australia. And he answers the AFL’s agenda to make Australian football the No. 1 domestic sport chosen by young men and women when soccer, basketball, tennis and golf can offer much more money and the world.
Polec’s godfather offer from the Kangaroos — $3.5 million across five seasons — is the moment that forces every football fan (and even some recently retired players such as Kane Cornes who repeatedly says the current contract offers to AFL players proves the world has gone mad) to recalibrate their thoughts on player salaries.
The $400,000 “norm” of recent AFL seasons is now $600,000.
The six-year collective bargaining agreement signed at Adelaide Oval last year delivered $1.84 billion to the AFL players. AFL chief executive Gillon McLachlan presented the CBA as being more than just “the money” being tipped to Australia’s fastest-growing band of millionaires. But it is so much about the money.
The average player salary last season immediately jumped 20 per cent, from $309,000 to $371,000, while most Australian workers — those buying tickets and club memberships — are lucky if their unions can win an extra two per cent.
Many can — even should — question Port Adelaide’s list-management that has put significant, well-paying contracts to Tom Rockliff, Jack Watts and Steven Motlop in the past year and drawn a line at $600,000 a season for three years to Polec.
But what does it mean when a good player — rather than elite — as Polec can be courted by four clubs, one offering $750,000 a season? Or a year ago, Jake Lever from Adelaide for $800,000 a year from Melbourne.