Tools of the trade.

Tools of the trade.

GuyWhoLikesSport

We’re heading into round 11 of the 2024 AFL Premiership Season.

For football journalists like Sam McClure who don’t watch football, that means we’re in week 11 of the offseason.

The real stuff starts on October 7: the trade period.

Journalists like Sam, who have no insights in what is happening on the field and prefer to let us plebs in on big secrets like West Coast not selecting Harley Reid (never let this clip die).

Or Dustin Martin leaving Richmond/football in 2022 and 2023, they’ve started warming up for the real stuff.

He recently reported in his column The Scoop for The Age that Jacob Weitering was set to be offered a contract by St Kilda that would pay him $1.5m annually over 8 years.

Other journalists have gotten in on the act as well, with speculation about Will Hayward running rampant.

These reports suggest that clubs like Adelaide and Carlton are in the hunt for the Swans’ tweener forward offering money between $550,000 and $800,000 per season over 5 years.

I’m not going to delve into the wisdom of offering an oft-injured key defender an 8-year contract, or the value of the tweener type forward that Will Hayward is.

Both are good players and could be worth a long-term investment.

What I am going to say is that the talk of the money and the contract in general is totally irrelevant.

Nothing matters without the context like the state of a team’s salary cap, or the structure of the deal and how it might impact the salary cap.

In the AFL we have none of that, so these numbers are pure pie in the sky.

They are put out there, partly, to engineer reductive discussions about how footballers provide no social utility and make 10x what nurses make.

In a league like the NFL, the money truly does matter because we have all of the context.

Take the Dallas Cowboys and their quarterback Dak Prescott.

We know that Prescott signed a 4 year, $160m deal in 2021.

He was guaranteed $95m at signing, got a $66m signing bonus and basically ¾ of that deal was guaranteed by roster bonuses that he would certainly get as the starting quarterback of the team.

We also know that in 2021 he accounted for $17m on the Cowboys’ salary cap before his cap number moved to $19.7m in 2022, then $26.8m in 2023.

Now in 2024, the last year of his deal, he is a financial albatross counting for $55,455,000 against the Cowboys’ cap.

The Cowboys have gone through the offseason with Prescott accounting for 21% of the cap on his own, which has meant that they haven’t added any pieces to a team that is close but not quite there.

Why does he count for this much?

He’s a free agent at the end of the 2024/25 NFL season and is due for an extension.

If and when the Cowboys extend him, they would certainly move money into later years and restructure a significant portion of that cap number into signing bonus money.

By doing this they could prorate that money over later years to smooth over the financial burden of having a quarterback like Prescott.

The Buffalo Bills, for example, constantly restructure their quarterback Josh Allen’s contract so he does not count for as much against the salary cap.

Doing that means that the team has flexibility in building the roster around their quarterback.

There is more to say about the Prescott situation and Cowboys’ mismanagement, but the point of this column isn’t to call Jerry Jones cheap. It’s to point out that in the AFL we have no context.

What does $1.5 million for Weitering actually mean?

Is it the average annual value of the deal that St. Kilda have allegedly offered to Weitering?

Is the money front or backloaded?

What is the structure of the contract otherwise?

Is it a true 8 years or are there outs?

Does all of it count against the cap?

How does the cap even work in this sport?

Is the money tied to a cap that will spike dramatically in the coming years or is it a fixed rate?

These are all questions that we literally can’t answer, so debating the wisdom of the Saints allegedly making that offer to Weitering is useless from a financial perspective.

So, what can we get from these two reports?

The Weitering report reads like an advertisement for St Kilda’s “war chest”.

McClure is playing (a dramatically oilier) Don Draper for St Kila’s financial wherewithal.

The Saints and Ross Lyon can’t come out and say specifically “we have money and we’re ready to use it”, but they can tell Sam or some other journo with whom they have a cosy relationship to tell everyone “the Saints have money, and I’ve come to believe that they’re ready to use it”.

Similarly, it’s impossible to know whether Will Hayward is worth $800,000 per season because we don’t know what $800,000 means in the confines of an opaque salary cap and contract structure.

We do know that Hayward probably wants to stay in Sydney but would presumably like more than what Sydney is offering him, so it’s in his interests to leak that other clubs are offering him significantly more money in case Sydney is able to free up some extra cash to throw his way.

These reports, especially at this point in the season, are advertising for somebody.

The question is always, who.

Let me leave you, reader, with three things to keep in mind as you read and get annoyed by these columns designed to annoy you (which work on me constantly):

  • Debate the player not the money. We know the player, we can’t know the money.
  • Ask who leaked the story.
  • Read between the lines and decide who benefits most from that story being public.

These stories have value for us fans, but it’s not in the words. It’s in what lies between them.

 

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