Footy’s salary cap explained and which clubs are ready to strike this off-season
The salary cap secret is to save your pennies until you’re really in contention. So which clubs have mastered the art and are ready to strike, and who’s been left behind? Jon Ralph lists the status of every club.
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Carlton’s problem this year isn’t the Millionaires Row that has the club paying five players seven-figure sums and Tom De Koning and Zac Williams over $800,000.
The issue for Carlton is that it has paid vast fortunes for a bunch of million dollar players delivering cheap-as-chips performances.
The club’s list profile is top-heavy with highly paid stars as Patrick Cripps, Jacob Weitering, Harry McKay, Charlie Curnow and Sam Walsh taking home the big bucks.
But as one veteran list manager said this week, paying your stars is never a problem under a salary cap and marketing fund that will combine for just under $20 million by the 2027 season.
They just have to perform every single week or you are dangerously exposed.
“You can just about pay your top 10 players 50 per cent of the cap and get away with it if they play in the right positions,” the list boss said.
“A key forward, a key back, midfielders. A ruckman if your coach rates them.
“You just have to ask where you are in your cycle. Can you compete for a flag? Are you rebuilding? Then you need real clarity about what positions are important to your coach? Then you pay players in those positions the most.”
As footy’s salary cap reaches record heights, salary cap management still remains one of the game’s most important arts.
Not for nothing has Chris Scott said that his club’s salary cap management is one of its most underrated skills.
Carlton list boss Nick Austin has done brilliantly well to ward off opposition interest in Curnow and McKay by signing them as pre-agents before their free agency year, to lock Weitering until 2031 and to secure a dual Brownlow Medallist in Cripps for great but not list-ruining money.
In isolation every one of those deals makes sense.
And yet not one of them are in the top 21 players in the AFL Coaches Award this year.
So Carlton will be faced with the kind of decisions the Pies pondered when Wright last acted to fix Collingwood’s salary cap crisis – with a wage bill not justified by performance.
Clubs have come a long way since that Collingwood calamity as list boss Ned Guy was forced to fix problems others had created.
Collingwood signed up Brodie Grundy on a $7 million dollar deal it instantly regretted amid divergent views between board and football department about whether paying ruckmen top dollar was a priority.
Mid-tier players like Tom Phillips were given healthy best-and-fairest bonuses that once secured were added to the next year’s base contract.
Now list bosses use the negotiation skills of their legal backgrounds while balancing spreadsheets to ensure their salary caps are tight but not overflowing.
The secret is to saving your pennies until you are truly in contention.
This year’s cap taking into account injury payments is $17,761 million, rising to $18.293 million in 2026 and $18.44 million in 2027 (the last year of the current CBA).
An additional services agreement of $1.267 million is added on top of that figure, which is paid to players for marketing work and appearances they must justify with the AFL.
The minimum salary for a player other than 1-3 year players and rookies is $145,000 this year, $150,000 in 2026 and $155,000 in 2027.
A handful of players on each list would be on that minimum deal plus $5000 match payments.
But by their fourth year player managers are free to negotiate deals with guaranteed money that could include incentives like $50,000 for All Australian representation or best-and-fairest finishes on a sliding scale.
Draftees from the 2024 national draft are paid $140,000 as a base wage as a pick 1-10, $130,000 as a pick 11-20, $120,000 as a pick 21-50 and $115,000 as a pick 51 onwards.
Their match payments are $4000 for the first two years and $5000 for their third year.
If they play zero matches in their first year they still get a $10,000 rise in base salary for 2026.
But they secure a $25,000 rise in base for 6-10 matches and $35,000 rise for 11-15 matches.
From there it is a juggle with some of the recent top-10 draftees on about $700,000 in their fourth seasons given they have been paid unders across those mandatory three-season deals.
So consider the Lions with young matchwinners like Levi and Will Ashcroft, Logan Morris and Jaspa Fletcher still on mandatory deals and you get an idea why they have some cap space for Oscar Allen and or Sam Draper.
Clubs down the bottom of the salary cap cycle are allowed to pay only 95 per cent of the salary cap in any given year – roughly $900,000 this year.
They can bank that cap space for two seasons but then must use it by the third season.
But many clubs simply front-end deals to save cap space.
What does front-ending mean?
Essendon signed Ben McKay on a six-year $4.8 million deal but paid him $1.4 million in his first year, $1.1 million or so this year, around $1 million next year and then somewhere under $500,000 in his last three seasons.
That deal will save them as much as $1 million of total cap space in the 2026-28 seasons if a Harley Reid type does come calling.
It will help McKay pay his mortgage off early and give the club a chance to get aggressive when they are in flag contention.
St Kilda’s capacity to not only bank cap space but pre-pay stars means they will already have a chunk of savings they are squirrelled away to help pay Tom De Koning’s deal.
Clubs assisted by the AFL without healthy balance sheets are much keener to pre-pay contracts than use the AFL’s ‘banking’ arrangement, aware their boards might see that $900,000 as a potential saving in the future.
With the salary cap having gone up by around 37 per cent over the life of the current CBA, the power clubs have had the cash to retain their stars while clubs like St Kilda have had to offer $12 million contracts to lure players like Tom De Koning with very few high best-and-fairest finishes.
Now comes the question everyone wants to know – will Harley Reid become the AFL’s first $2 million a season man as a player who takes up 10 per cent of his club’s salary cap.
Originally published as Footy’s salary cap explained and which clubs are ready to strike this off-season
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