AFL Rich 100: Who are the highest paid players in football?

The 2023 AFL rich list is in. See the new faces, the megastar who has fallen 99 spots in two years and everyone in between, plus full contract details.

Legendary New York Yankees catcher and manager Yogi Berra once famously declared, “A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore” when trying to make sense of the ever-changing value of money. He may have mangled the words, but not the meaning.

It’s worth remembering that catchphrase as the AFL and the AFL Players’ Association shadow box over what percentage of the pie the players will receive in the league’s next Collective Bargaining Agreement.

The fascination over what the 800-plus players who put on the show are paid has reached fever pitch in recent seasons.

Some player contracts are front or back-ended, most have a set of bonuses in-built; match payments can push the figures significantly up or down depending on performance, and some deals are structured to ward off potential rival poaching raids.

SCROLL DOWN TO READ THE FULL AFL RICH 100 AND HAVE YOUR SAY ON THE BEST AND WORST DEALS IN THE LEAGUE

TheAFL Rich 100 – a comprehensive examination of the best-paid 100 players as well as those who narrowly missed out – tries to dispel some of the salary myths.

Given we are just beyond the halfway mark of the 2023 season, we don’t yet know what incentives clauses the players will reach, so it is impossible to know precisely what each player earns.

So these figures are based on what we expect players to earn without incentives attached.

That’s the reason for the Rich 100 List being presented in $100,000 bands, which reflects the fact that almost all of the players’ end-of-year salaries are dependent on performance bonuses.

Compiling the list required hundreds of calls to industry figures and those “in the know”, as well as weeks of tireless cross-checking and reassessment.

Players remain acutely sensitive about their pay rates but as this year’s list shows, many of the game’s elite have agreed to take considerably less money than most footy fans would believe.

And in the billion-dollar industry that is the AFL, it seems strange that just more than 10 of the game’s elite are likely to earn $1 million or more without their incentives.

Is it any wonder given the collective salaries at AFL HQ that the players feel as if they aren’t getting their due percentage, as former Collingwood skipper Scott Pendlebury said recently.

The AFL releases the yearly pay breakdown of players and the updated free agency lists to its own media arm, but does not publicise each of the players’ actual pay rates.

The AFL Rich 100 attempts to put those salaries into perspective and provide context around the most talked-about and speculated deals in the game.

Originally published as AFL Rich 100: Who are the highest paid players in football?