Salary cap dramas a distraction with WAFL future at stake

Building sandcastles while a tsunami is approaching

The inequity and inconsistency of the recent salary cap penalties meted out to the WAFL’s two Fremantle teams is one thing.

The looming shadow of a potentially devastating AFL reserves competition is quite another.

The WA Football Commission is on the brink of decisions that could make – or break – footy in this state for many years to come.

And while there is a suspicion that the WAFC is more comfortable tinkering around the edges of significant issues, rather than charging full-chested at them, they may not have the luxury of taking short steps in this challenge.

Let’s look at salary cap matters first.

East Fremantle have just been penalised four premiership points and fined $10,000 for breaching the WAFL’s player payment rules last year.

In one of the sport’s most curious anomalies, the rules were broken last season, investigated this season but the club will not be penalised until next season.

Having won the premiership in the period between crime and punishment, any East Fremantle remorse should be weighed with caution.

In this case, they doubled up superannuation payments worth $14,721, disguised the supply of boots to players by providing vouchers worth $2182 as match day awards and failed to declare a $2000 sign-on fee to Hugh Dixon who was later drafted by West Coast but returned to help win the 2023 flag.

The total of their breaches was $18,903 and caused the club to bust the salary cap, the worst crime that can be committed in a competition based on fiscal equalisation.

East Fremantle claimed the errors were the product of ignorance and incompetence, a novel defence if nothing else, but they could not have been far short of deliberate cheating given that the WAFC described some of the boot awards as “not made entirely on merit”.

There is a well-founded belief in football circles that the East Fremantle penalty was far more lenient than the one issued a year earlier to South Fremantle because of the substantial damage to that club this season.

The Bulldogs started 2023 with minus eight points and a $25,000 fine for making payments totalling $12,051 outside the system.

The first was $4498 to player Nick Suban, who was paid as a coach despite not having the required accreditation, while another $7553 went in welfare payments to Zac Dent who suffered a spinal fracture in 2021 that will prevent him ever playing again.

South Fremantle deserved a whack for their breaches but not one that killed their season. Capital punishment should not apply to a marginal crime.

It took South a third of the season to get into the black and had the wind sucked from their sails well before that.

Having discovered the unforeseen consequences of their good intentions, the WAFC softened their stance for the second of the Fremantle felonies.

A sensible move, unless you are South Fremantle incensed at the inequity and inconsistency of the approach.

Yet how big were the crimes committed by either club, particularly when compared to the size of the AFL economy in which every player was paid an average of $27,788 per game this year?

The WAFC tinkering at the edges? They are building sandcastles while a tsunami is approaching.

There are far bigger challenges for WA football than whether a player with a broken neck gets a hand to pay his rent, or a promising kid gets his boots supplied for nothing.

When Port Adelaide, Australia’s most successful football club and a SANFL foundation member before branching out as an AFL expansion team, last week declared its interest in abandoning the South Australian league to join the ironically-named three-state Victorian Football League, it must have sent a shudder through every WAFL club and official.

If Adelaide’s two AFL teams withdraw their own reserve teams from the SANFL to join what would become effectively a national reserves competition, the pressure would grow rapidly for West Coast and Fremantle to follow suit.

And that is likely to have devastating consequences for a WAFL competition that survived threats from soccer in its formative years, world wars, economic busts and the arrival of the national competition, but may not stay afloat if it is relegated to third-tier status.

It is already hard enough to attract crowds, sponsors and media attention; dropping a level of relevance and standing would diminish those essential support networks even further.

Sure, none of the nine WAFL clubs has a substantial debt, and all are keeping their heads above water, but they have ageing and diminishing supporter bases that are mostly rusted on to pre-1987 loyalties, are overshadowed by the AFL juggernaut that monopolises football resources and eyeballs, rely on WAFC handouts and are always susceptible to a change of weather.

Should the Eagles and Dockers argue that a national reserves league without them would be to their competitive disadvantage, the pressure for them to depart the WAFL is likely to become irresistible.

And that would remove not only the hefty licence fees that help keep the other WAFL clubs afloat but the dozen or two AFL-listed players in action every week as well as a similar number of the league’s other footballers who might be tempted to become top-up players and try their luck on the doorstep of the AFL teams.

The one saving grace in this situation is that, unlike the South Australian AFL teams who bought their licences back from the SANFL and therefore control their own destinies, West Coast and Fremantle are still owned by the WAFC.

And it is unthinkable that the sport’s governing body would allow its two subsidiaries to act in a way that would probably undermine, and might even terminate, the league from which it sprang. Or is it?