In a League like the GVFL Clubs rely heavily on volunteers in order to raise the funds to run a Club successfully and one of the largest expenses each year is the payment of players.
Readers may be aware that AFL Victoria has been doing work across the State in order to try and slow or stop the escalation of this significant expense .This included a survey of all Clubs in the State where 83% of the 370 Clubs that responded said that some form of statewide action needed to be taken.
The primary elements of a system are, firstly a system of points allocated to a team each week based on the relative experience of the team a Club selects. This means that a team will not be able to exceed a limit set by the League. By way of an example an ex AFL player straight out of that competition will have a value of six points and a local junior one point. There are a range of adjustments, say if the AFL player returns to his junior Club his value reduces to one point, and for other players, for each year he remains at his Club his value reduces by one point.
The points system will be coming in for in 2016 and last Monday the clubs had a meeting to discuss how this would operate. This followed each Club doing a test run to see what value their teams would have had for the first 14 rounds and the discussion was very open and we now have broad agreement on how it will operate, with some checking to be done on how our numbers stack up against other Leagues with whom we might compete with for players. There needs to be some consistency between competitions and the implementation needs to be State wide for it to be truly successful.
The system is expected to reward Clubs that invest in local talent or that can retain players over a number of years.
The second element of the system is a Salary Cap, the implementation of which has been deferred until 2017 to allow for proper systems, checks and balances to be put in place. There is a fair variation between what Clubs pay but once again the Clubs have been up front and provided data which enabled an open conversation and broad agreement has been reached about how it will operate in 2017. Once again there is some fine tuning and comparison with other competitions to be done before the system can be finalized.
The combination of these two measures is designed to take some of the financial pressure off clubs and assist in evening out the competition.
I would like to thank the Clubs for the openness and maturity shown in having an open and frank discussion with the Board on this matter.
Last Modified on 27/09/2016 17:46