Salary cap drama overshadows big picture

Perth and East Perth face season-ending 12 point penalty

It is the time of year that WAFL football managers are exceptionally nervous.

No, they are not worried about their players getting into serious strife off the field.

That happens so rarely that it barely registers on the social outrage scale.

And while they are committed to attracting and retaining the players who will underwrite their next premiership charge, the reality of AFL recruiting is that nothing can be guaranteed until the national league has its every last crack at the talent pool.

What is keeping the footy managers awake at night is their TPP, the Total Player Payment schedule that records the benefits paid to or on behalf of those players.

WAFL clubs could pay up to $245,000 in 2024 and will match it next year. That about what the AFL’s biggest stars get in a month.

Fremantle partner Peel paid a reduced amount of $159,250 while stand-alone West Coast coughed up a maximum $147,000 to come last for the fourth straight year.

The WAFL financial year ended on October 31, the individual returns have been lodged with the WA Football Commission but for the managers, the overworked, underpaid and mostly frustrated glue keeping the football parts of their clubs hanging together, it is a fraught time.

They are all exceptionally worried that a recording error, an accounting oversight, or a failure to register a critical detail could queer their entire operations for a year or more.

Most clubs have one individual responsible for the salary cap. It sits alongside their equally onerous job descriptions to manage recruiting, coaching, football and ground operations, compliance and the numerous daily and weekly challenges – small and large but all time-consuming - that arise from overseeing a group of 100 or so mostly young, ambitious and intense individuals.

And next year, when female players receive payments for the first time, the managers’ workload will increase even further.

Is there any wonder that two WAFL clubs are currently facing extreme penalties for salary cap breaches while two recent premiership winners were forced to pay a high price after running foul of head office for their own errors?

East Fremantle lost four premiership points this year – one game – after being sprung for failing to record $18,903 in super payments, a sign-on fee and football boots as match awards.

Their penalty was only half that issued to South Fremantle a year earlier for not recording $12,051 spent on a coach without required accreditation and a welfare payment to assist a player whose career was ended by a broken neck sustained during a match.

Now Perth (about $20,000 in unrecorded fringe benefit tax payments) and East Perth ($20,000 in legal fees for a player who recorded a match-day positive to a banned stimulant) are facing the draconian penalty of 12 premiership points being stripped from them next season.

They are likely to be told their fate this week.

Perth could start next WAFL season on minus 12 points.

If that happens, and the WAFC is never in a rush to announce sanctions of this magnitude, it is possible one or both of them will become the first club in the league’s 140 seasons to finish with negative points.

Allocating existing resources – rather than creating new ones – is the primary challenge in numerous walks of life.

There is enough food produced on the planet to feed every one of the 8 billion individuals who inhabit it.

Yet one billion of them go hungry every day while numerous millions gorge themselves.

The food is not spread evenly, and will never will be, which is why some people starve and others get fat.

The same applies in sport funding.

While Indian wicketkeeper Rishabh Pant is about to be paid $4.9million to bash sixes in the IPL, and a couple of dozen AFL players will receive at least $1million to get a kick in that league next year, their sports have to maintain a delicate balancing act to extract maximum value from their finite resources.

The WAFL football managers, who are having to do more and more with less and less, are on the front line as a war is waged to balance the equation between the demands of the sport’s high profile top end and the needs of the battlers keeping the foundation of the game alive and thriving.

One person who has managed to extract a massive dose of cash for a vital project is former Australian wicket-keeper Ian Healy who helped put together a $35million package to redevelop his Brisbane club Northern Suburbs.

Shaw Park is now the best equipped club cricket facility in the country with three exquisite ovals all featuring television-quality lighting, a breath-taking practice facility and a simple but effective clubhouse.

Ian Healy was recognised after helping raise $35million to redevelop Northern Suburbs.

It has already hosted one Sheffield Shield match and is sure to hold more depending on what happens to the Gabba as the new Queensland government contemplates the infrastructure needed for the 2032 Olympics.

“We operated out of two dongas when I played here,” Healy told me during a recent trip to Brisbane. “It used to be the worst club ground in Brisbane; now it is the best in Australia.”

Healy said the project took 10 years of hard graft from conception to completion and needed a big stick at one point.

“Cricket Australia were dragging their feet and we had to threaten to go it alone and find the funding ourselves,” he said.

“They eventually got involved and backed us, federal, state and local governments came along and now we have a magnificent asset that will benefit the community for decades to come.”

Healy’s success indicates there might be enough resources to spread across the sporting landscape though maybe it depends on who is doing the asking?