How the AFL has developed a culture of concealment

“I certainly appreciate the interest in player payments and salary caps, but it’s not a topic we talk about. We don’t discuss the complexities of the TPP, we don’t discuss the details around the salary cap.” – AFL general manager of football operations Laura Kane on Footy Classified when asked whether Angus Brayshaw’s contract payment would be outside Melbourne’s salary cap after his forced retirement.

It was a question that the AFL easily could have answered.

Given that Brayshaw was forced into retirement by an objective medical assessment of his brain, it seems inconceivable that the Melbourne Football Club’s multimillion-dollar payment to him will be entirely counted in the club’s salary cap.

The AFL used to release information such as the CEO’s salary. Not any more.Credit: Getty Images

Logically, some or all of Brayshaw’s contract will be excluded from Melbourne’s player-payments cap; otherwise, the Demons will be playing with a smaller salary cap than the rest of the competition for five years. This would represent a penalty to a club that has lost a valuable player, through no fault of the player or his club.

Kane followed the party line that “we” – despite what the clubs and fans might think they should know – don’t talk about salary caps.

It is a blanket position. Presumably they don’t talk about it because if you open up that topic, there will be more questions about other players forced to retire by head knocks.

It’s also a fair chance that the league hasn’t worked out precisely how much goes into the cap.

The AFL’s revised response, as of late Tuesday afternoon, was that Melbourne had not yet made a “formal application for the treatment of his TPP (total player payments)“.

So, it doesn’t have a policy governing it?

It is hard to see how telling the public that at least some portion of Brayshaw’s contract will be outside the salary cap would hurt anyone or compromise the final result. I would contend that forthright communication is necessary in particular areas that involve public trust, such as the salary cap rules.

But the AFL doesn’t have to tell us, and so it doesn’t.

Over the past eight years, a number of basic facts that the AFL once reported have been removed from the public gaze.

Facts that were reported during the sometimes-stormy reign of former CEO Andrew Demetriou – who cared little about personal criticism or public noise – were suddenly not available in Gillon McLachlan’s more consultative, yet also more public relations-focused tenure. There is no sign that this will change under McLachlan’s temperate and prudent successor, Andrew Dillon.

Here are four items – once aired to the football public – that are either off limits or, in one case, hard to uncover and obfuscated in a fog of financial figures:

1. In 2016, we knew that the AFL’s then chief executive, McLachlan, was paid $1.72 million during 2015, his second year in charge of the competition. Since then, the amount that the CEO is paid – and it was more than $4 million (due to bonuses) in his final year – can only be estimated or sourced via the backdoor.

Former AFL CEO Andrew Demetriou.Credit: Penny Stephens

Demetriou’s wage, which counted bonuses, was on public record until he stepped down. Today, the AFL publishes (in the annual report), only the aggregate salaries of all 10 AFL executives, which reached $13.6 million in 2023 – an increase the league attributed to “transition costs” from one CEO to the other after the release of the annual report.

2. In 2015, we knew the number of AFL players who had what was euphemistically known as drug “strikes” – detections, or positive tests, in AFL terminology – under the AFL’s ever-contentious illicit drugs code.

Since then, that number is secret, largely because the players felt that media discussion about the drug-testing regime was not helpful to their cause. Without saying it, the players felt that a “law-and-order” mindset (including from clubs) was polluting a health-first model of drug detection and treatment by experts.

3. Clubs are not routinely informed of what their 17 rivals exactly receive from AFL headquarters in “variable funding”. This masthead consulted several CEOs or presidents on this topic, with two CEOs saying outright that they did not see what other clubs received.

One club boss said there was a brief chance to ascertain the correct amounts for all clubs, but it required subtracting different amounts from a table of figures that the clubs were given. It was a messy process.

This column published a full table of the variable funding two years ago, after much digging. The AFL annual report details what clubs received from the AFL, but it includes extraneous funding that is not variable – such as prizemoney and travel dollars and even AFL membership (which the clubs self-generate).

It is well-known that Gold Coast and Greater Western Sydney are funded well in advance of the other 16 clubs, that the Brisbane Lions were third-highest and that the Saints were clearly first in the Victorian ladder for funding until 2022 – last year, North Melbourne took that baton from St Kilda.

We know that four clubs – West Coast, Collingwood, Hawthorn and Richmond – were given only the base funding (ie, no extra funding) from 2020-23.

4. In 2024, for the first time, the AFL has chosen not to publish the weights of male players. The explanation has been that publishing player weights – which routinely happens in most professional team sports – could be detrimental to players’ mental health.

In each of the examples, the AFL doubtless can find justifications for removing information from prying eyes of the media and the public.

The most justifiable example of secrecy from those four items is actually removing the weights, since this plays no part in shaping the competition and there is no public trust at stake or need for accountability. But fat-shaming, if it is a genuine issue in these more mental-health-cognisant times, is far less damaging to the wellbeing of AFL footballers than stat-shaming for players who are out of form or less talented or injured.

There are a number of ways in which the critiquing of AFL players is more pointed than in the listing of their weights.

The AFL is unrepentant on the score of rendering players weight-less. When I point out that there are more damaging criticisms they cop, the rejoinder is that the harsher criticisms come from our side of the fence (the media), although I maintain the nastier stuff is now in the social media sewers.

Collectively, however, this pattern of removing information represents a culture of concealment that has steadily taken hold. The AFL is expert in brand management and will go to considerable lengths to avert or mitigate reputational damage.

No longer releasing the players’ drug “detections” – and that word is more accurate than “strikes” since no one has ever been struck out, on a three or two-strikes policy, by testing – was a case in which the players agreed to changes in the policy, in return for more secrecy.

It is hard to fathom why the 18 clubs aren’t told exactly what each of them receives in variable funding. The clubs, after all, are the AFL’s shareholders and have a right to know.

The AFL promotes the notion that it is community first and second, that it is all about grassroots and volunteers, rustic ovals and wholesome Auskickers in the suburbs.

When it suits, however, the league turns quickly into a private commercial entity that jealously guards commercial information, such as the CEO’s salary, the divvy-up of stadium returns and anything that will inflict perceived – as distinct from actual – reputational damage.

Reputation and revenue are the golden threads that took precedence in the time of McLachlan, who was extremely successful in keeping the game afloat during COVID-19, negotiating broadcast deals and sponsorships and in creating a more equal playing field.

But, relative to his more combative predecessor, McLachlan’s AFL was less transparent and open about the brutal business of football.

Dillon, if he wants to differentiate his stewardship, could start by presiding over an AFL version of glasnost. Or at the least, allow us to see some of the numbers and facts that were put out of sight.

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