Supporting the Players in AFL Pay Negotiations

They’re seemingly undeserving – overpaid young men with reputations as misogynist boozers who need a pay increase about as much as Ricky Nixon needs a job at Melbourne Girls’ Grammar. As a result, footballers fighting for higher pay can struggle to evoke sympathy from even those who would miss their mother’s funeral to link arms on a picket line.

However AFL players do deserve our support in their Collective Bargaining Agreement negotiations. They might not care for our health the way nurses do, or build our bridges like construction workers, or educate us like teachers. But they are similarly exploited, for entertainment, instead of something more tangible. And their working conditions are often grim, just like the rest of us.

The stereotype about high earning, fast living footballers does not accord with the reality for most players. The majority come from working class backgrounds; pay to train outside of school for years on end in the hope of getting drafted. If they do get a place in the AFL, only a few will earn enough to sustain them after retirement. In fact only a tiny 25 players earned more than $500 000 last year, while the rookies on the minimum wage took home only a $49 400 base payment plus $2800 per match.

The mean wage of an AFL player is around $180 000 and the average playing career lasts three years. Do the math and you’ll see that $540 000 is not enough to set you up for life.

The occupational health and safety risks of their profession are high - it is certain that they will suffer an injury at work and this often cuts short their careers. For those lucky enough to avoid injury, retirement by 35 is the norm, most leaving with no prospect of earning income from the skills they’ve spent all their lives developing.

Given all the facts, it’s hardly too much for the AFL Players’ Association (AFLPA) to ask for football players to be better looked after.

Their claim in this year’s negotiation includes player pensions to kick in 10 years after retirement until the age of 65 which would be the first of its kind in Australia. They also want a comprehensive post-career compensation scheme for injuries which is pertinent considering the issues with long-term brain damage seen increasingly in footballers here and in the United States.

Altogether the claim submitted by the players is for 25 to 27 per cent of the game’s overall turnover to be allocated to players over the three years of the deal. This is $200 million more than the AFL's offer.

The percentage requested by the AFLPA is reasonable, and, if anything, a relative pay cut from 2001, given the players received 27.5 per cent of overall turnover that year. If the AFL could afford it then, they can certainly afford it now with the $1.25 billion record TV rights deal signed, sealed and delivered.

But CEO, Andrew Demetriou (who earned a cool $2.2 million in 2010) is refusing to budge on the AFL’s offer, pitting fans against the players with assertions that ticket prices will have to rise to pay for any such increase in wages. Although I wasn’t invited to the meetings, I’m pretty sure Demetriou didn’t make the same arguments while receiving a 275 per cent increase in his pay since 2004.

Similarly, none of the AFL’s 11 executives who were paid a total of $6.2 million last year publicly announced their concern about rising ticket prices as a result of their exorbitant packages.

If Demetriou looked outside Australia he may be grateful that the AFL players have such low expectations. European soccer players’ wages constitute around 65 per cent of their game’s total revenue and similar figures can be seen in the US.

Within Australian sport, the story is very different. Athletes here receive a much smaller slice of the sports pie - generally 18 to 30 per cent of total revenue for team sports. Luckily Bonds have helped put food on the table for Stephanie Rice as swimmers receive only around 10 per cent of the total revenue that sport brings in. The athletes in more penurious sports will be watching the AFL dispute closely in the hope that the AFLPA’s campaign manages to raise the bar to help improve this situation. Solidarity has already come by way of Paul Marsh from the Australian Cricket Players’ Association who has publically contradicted some of Demetriou’s arguments. Let’s hope other athletes show their support as the campaign progresses.

For now, the AFLPA have all but ruled out strike action but have taken the unusual step of mobilizing their members for an all-in meeting to show that they serious about taking on AFL management. And, in what must be immensely annoying for the unprepossessing Demetriou, some of the most popular players in the League have come out publicly swinging, a move bound to rally public support. Dale Thomas, arguably the League’s most entertaining player told Nova radio, “The players and the players association have decided that if we have to play hard ball, we will.” In the same interview he also managed to put some important pressure on the AFLPA, “We won't be bullied around, I think in the past we've been bullied around.”

If they do play hard ball, the AFL players will need their fans support and may even call upon it. And if this happens, anyone who supports workers rights should support the footballers in this campaign.

Players take tackling homophobia into their own hands

Hanging up the footy books for the rainbow flag isn’t the norm in 2011 but Ben Cohen isn’t your normal international rugby player. He's proud of the fact that he’s a popular figure in the gay community all over the world even though he’s openly heterosexual. He also takes homophobia very seriously, so seriously in fact that he retired from his English rugby club earlier this month to spend more time concentrating on his anti-bullying foundation, StandUp. Less than a week later he jumped on a plane and embarked on an ‘Acceptance Tour’ of the US in which he has visited four cities over the last two weeks to speak at events hosted by gay and gay-friendly rugby clubs.

Cohen’s tour is a response to the overwhelming number of suicides linked to homophobic bullying in the US over the last few years including five young men in one week in October 2010. He believes that a lot of work needs to be done to stop young people taking their own lives.

Cohen expresses his opinion with eloquence on his website, “As athletes, it is not enough just to have strong bodies. We must have strong characters and use our voices to support those who need and deserve it.”

Contrast this with the damaging ramblings of Jason Akermanis on the Today Show and in the Herald Sun in May last year. The AFL and the football community rallied against Akermanis’ comments, embarrassed that the player chosen to write an article in the paper about International Day Against Homophobia could stuff it up so badly. The AFL has since managed to rid itself of Akermanis entirely but since the incident has done very little to promote an anti-homophobia message throughout the league.

The AFL's CEO Andrew Demetriou is extremely proud of himself for leading the only sporting body to update its racial and religious vilification code to "prohibit vilification on the basis of...sexual orientation, preference or identity" and uses this to combat accusations that the AFL has been dragging its feet on the issue of homophobia. However the changes to the code were done in 2009 and Akermanis clearly didn’t get the memo.

Ben Cohen shows up sporting organisations all over the world for how little they are doing to address the issue. If one rugby player can launch a foundation with international notoriety and conduct a successful speaking tour of the US, then imagine what a wealthy and powerful organisation like the AFL could do in Australia.

As is often the case, the union (in this case the AFL Players' Association) is currently taking the lead on this issue within the AFL. Unions have a strong history of fighting homophobia - even the Builders Labourers Federation have taken industrial action against homophobia.

The ALFPA have organised for three AFL players - Nick Duigan (Carlton), Daniel Jackson (Richmond) and Bob Murphy (Western Bulldogs) to link up with Headspace to promote the issue. Amongst their various media appearances, the players participated in a panel discussion on Joy FM, Melbourne’s gay and lesbian radio station. Jackson also spoke to the Sydney Morning Herald about his desire to see a diversity round in the AFL. Let’s hope he continues to ignore AFL CEO Andrew Demetriou who told 3AW his views on having such a round, “We don't have a round for cancer, we don't have a round for homelessness but we do things. We know very well what our views are about discrimination…Next we'll be sorting out the pygmies in Tanzania." It seems Demetriou studied at the Akermanis school of public relations.

Demetriou’s “pygmies” comment insinuates that homophobia has little to do with AFL. However, despite Demetriou’s belief, homophobia is a major issue in sport. In Australia a 2010 study found that 40% of gays and lesbians surveyed had experienced homophobia in the sporting environment and the experiences of the respondents showed that AFL is the most homophobic football code.

In the US homophobia in sport has jumped into the spotlight this month. In addition to Ben Cohen’s tour, the US chef de mission for the 2012 Olympics, Peter Vidmar was forced to resign after it was revealed he had supported the anti-gay marriage campaign. One week later NHL ice hockey player Sean Avery publicly announced his support for the gay marriage campaign in New York.

In Australia today the political battleground over homophobia also manifests in a fight to change the Marriage Act. Although it’s hard to see Demetriou stepping off his pedestal to lead an Equal Love march down Swanston Street, let’s hope we see some of the AFL players from the AFLPA follow Cohen and Avery’s lead in extending their reach and showing their support for the same sex marriage campaign in the coming months.

ANZAC Day's Sporting Connections

“Sport is to war as pornography is to sex.” This (rather crass) statement belongs to Jonathan Haidt and although Haidt is a political psychologist in the US, you’d think for sure that he’d been in Australia for the lead up to ANZAC Day this year.

New TV ads featuring Australian netballers and footballers telling us to text our support to the troops is just the latest way that sports are being used to promote ANZAC Day. We already have the “traditional” ANZAC Day football clashes between Collingwood and Essendon in AFL and the St George Illawarra Dragons and the Sydney Roosters in NRL. Not to be out ANZACed, this year netball is promoting the Queensland Firebirds and West Coast Fever match as its contribution. Growing up I never understood how these were “traditional” ANZAC Day matches since none of the teams were from New Zealand or Turkey and it’s certainly not like those games have been played since 1915. (As it turns out all of these “traditions” are less than 20 years old). Very strange indeed.

Even though I studied the sociology of sport at university, no one ever explained that sport and war go together, well, like porn and sex. In many societies over the course of history sport has been used as preparation for war. The Aztecs, the Kingdom of Castile in Spain and the Native Americans are just a few of the recorded cases.

Set your time travelling machine back to today and it’s not difficult to see the connections between modern sport and war. Picture rugby league teams running at one another on a field and compare it with the image of opposing armies on a battlefield. We’re told that qualities like mateship, courage, teamwork, leadership, loyalty and physical prowess are required in our athletes and our soldiers. How many times have you heard Ray Warren speak of Darren Lockyer “marshalling his troops” or the State of Origin teams “going into battle” or Jonathan Thurston "putting up a bomb"? In addition, the skills and fitness acquired through playing sports is an asset to all armies during war. Sheffield Shield cricketer Frank Lugton was killed in the First World War but his Commanding Officer said that his cricketing skills made him a fine grenade thrower.

During World War I sportsmen were a particular target for recruiters. The army set up Sportsmen’s Battalions – special units manned entirely by sportsmen. One recruitment poster appealed for sportsmen to “Join together, train together, embark together, fight together. Enlist in the sportsmen’s thousand, show the enemy what Australian sporting men can do.” Other posters called on sportsmen to enlist in the “Greater Game”.

Don’t think that this means that between world wars ANZAC Day is a time for everyone to get out and compete in your local fixture though. In many states including Victoria there are Acts which prohibit any organised sport until after midday to encourage everyone to go to ANZAC marches. The Acts also force sporting bodies to hand over profits made by any sports events on this day to the various ANZAC Trusts. These trusts fund support for returned service men and women – a job that the government should already be doing.

ANZAC Day was first celebrated in 1916 at a time when the First World War was becoming an increasingly unpopular blood bath. Since its inception the day has played a large role as a recruitment and PR exercise for the military.

Today, the ANZAC Day message promoted by politicians, the media, culture and sport is not overtly about recruitment. You will hear speeches repeating the familiar mantra, “They died for us”. Never will you hear, “They killed for us”. Killing provokes distasteful images whereas dying is much more savoury. Who is this “us” they’re dying for anyway? The troops in Afghanistan certainly aren’t there for me or the 61% of Australians who are against the war.

And when Bec Bulley from the Australian Diamonds tells us to support our troops and “let them know you’re proud of what they’re doing”, despite the fact that most Australians are against the war, no one is going to send a message saying, “I think you’re carrying out an imperialist intervention in the Middle East which will only lead to death and destruction for Afghan people. Instead, I think you should be at home with your family and friends.” For some reason, supporting our troops always means sending them off to the perils of war and never means keeping them safe at home.

In some ancient societies sport was used to decide disagreements as a substitute for war. Of course, capitalism would never allow for that today. While we live in a system where a small minority at the top of society get to send others off to kill and be killed with no consequence to themselves wars will continue. However, if the majority of the population including the workers who are most likely to become front line soldiers got to vote about how to settle disagreements, it may be a different story. Let’s hope such a world exists one day.

Violent injury: just ‘part of the game’?

‘This is a barbaric game, this game is not for the weak. You play football, you understand that.’ Former gridiron player Marshall Faulk is blunt in his assessment of the violence involved in American football.

This year, for the first time, AFL players are banned from returning to the field if they are diagnosed with a concussion. The rule was rushed in three days before the season opener and it didn’t impress players like Carlton captain Chris Judd who rebuffed, ‘You'll just never get anyone concussed anymore.’ He’s probably right – players may get concussed, but the new rule will be a disincentive for doctors to diagnose it. The rule isn’t accompanied by any guidelines for diagnosis or independent doctors’ rules to keep team physicians accountable. But nonetheless, it’s clear the AFL felt it had to do something.

News coming out of the US on the long-term effects of football head injuries is horrific. Former Chicago Bears player Dave Duerson shot himself in the chest last month after he suspected he was suffering long-term brain damage. He left behind clear instructions for his brain to be donated to the NFL’s brain bank for research purposes. Duerson’s death sent shockwaves through the NFL and was a wake-up call to football codes all over the world to take brain injuries more seriously.

Unfortunately Duerson was only the latest in a long line of NFL players who have suffered from the effects of a brain disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). The disease is caused by repetitive head trauma and displays symptoms such as depression, erratic behaviour and premature memory impairment. In 2008, Tom McHale was found dead at forty-five from a drug overdose after battling years of addiction. Before him Andre Waters and John Grimsley both died of suspected suicides. The symptoms of CTE eventually progress into full-blown dementia. It can only be diagnosed posthumously and so far, almost all NFL players examined in the NFL brain bank study at Boston University had the disease.

A separate study of retired NFL players found that 6.1% of retired players over fifty had been diagnosed with dementia, Alzheimer’s disease or other memory-related disease – five times more than the general population of men over fifty.

Such controversy has meant that the NFL leads the world in rules changes to prevent head injuries. Not only do players in the NFL have to sit out the game if they are concussed but also if they have less serious head injuries and can’t pass the NFL’s health test. The NFL also provides independent neurological consultants to examine players with suspected head injuries to prevent the issues of under-diagnosis that concern Chris Judd. Some states in the US even have laws which force coaches to refer young players to a doctor if they have suspected head injuries. Recently the NFL has introduced harsher penalties for helmet-to-helmet hits.

In Australia, the AFL, ARU and NRL have made a number of rules changes to minimize head and neck injuries. Before the concussion rule, they tried the ‘head down over the ball’ rule in AFL, the spear tackle and head-butting rules in NRL, banning gang tackles and shoulder charges in rugby and tougher penalties in all codes. The AFL is the first to try the concussion rule and reduce the number of interchanges to slow the game down. Rugby codes are already discussing the concussion rule and expected to follow suit.

Adrian Anderson, the AFL’s General Manager of Football Operations, says that rules changes are working and that head and neck injuries are at the lowest on record. But after watching the five concussions or serious head blows which occurred in Round 1 and considering that at time of writing, 116 AFL players are on the injury list, I find this very hard to believe.

The truth is that football is still as violent as ever. While the rules changes are attempting to slow down the play, players are encouraged to get bigger and hit harder. It’s these big hits that get replayed and used to advertise the game, especially in rugby league.

Players do what they’re told by coaches and are under pressure to win by brute force when necessary. As a result, football continues to be extremely dangerous despite the rules changes.

According to Manly hooker Matt Ballin who suffered a concussion in his first NRL game this year, it’s all in a day’s work. ‘It’s a tough game, you’ve got to expect a few hits and injuries. It’s a contact game and you don’t want to go out and injure players but we always know it’s going to happen from time to time.’ So is it just all part of the game? Or is it possible to have a game that is both entertaining and enjoyable to play without using young people’s bodies as consumer products, to be tossed away when they are broken at the end of the season?

Sean Gregory from Time magazine thinks that ‘the boxing analogy is fitting’. Gregory’s argument is that (American) football can’t be steered off its violent course. He believes that eventually it will be up to fans and parents to decide for themselves whether football is too violent for the mainstream. They’ll have to consider whether the average 950 blows to the head that a college footballer takes in a season is a good investment in their child’s future and fun Friday night entertainment.

Players and parents who register their children with a football club generally do understand the risks, though more could be done to make the effects of brain injury explicit. In addition to this, football administrative bodies and team owners have a responsibility to look after their players.

At the moment, players’ bodies are thrown around for all their worth and then delisted when they’re not useful to win football games. Daniel Bell, who is only 25-years-old, is already seeing the effects of multiple head injuries during his years playing Australian Rules football. He is entitled to claim half of his last AFL contract salary in compensation and is doing so at the moment with the help of the Players’ Association. The amount he is claiming will be under $100 000, according to the Age.

The process for claiming compensation is strict and claims must be lodged within six months from the player’s final contract. But it’s worth noting that symptoms of CTE develop over time and can be degenerative, so players may not realize the seriousness of their injuries until it is too late.

Bell suffers memory loss, poor concentration and blurred vision. The amount he has lost by not being able to perform at his peak on the football field and in other workplaces will almost certainly be more than $100 000. In any other workplace, an injury such as this would attract higher compensation, especially if Bell suffers an ongoing problem with his work capacity. But as is so often the case in sport, players walk a fine line between being professionals and being expected to accept poor treatment because they are apparently lucky enough to be doing what they love.

According to a recent Age newspaper poll, 88% of respondents thought that AFL players who suffer severe concussion should be banned from playing the following week. Fans care about the players they watch and it looks like Gregory’s boxing analogy may be coming true. But football administration bodies can be doing much more to look after their players. A national insurance scheme that properly compensates injured players at any time their symptoms present would be a good start.

This article was first published at Overland

Nixon proves AFL's got the "issues"

The release of a nude photo of St Kilda Captain, Nick Reiwoldt and two team mates helped bring in 2011 with all the class we’ve come to expect from Australian footballers. And all the sexism we’ve come to expect from those commenting on them. The 17 year old woman who released the photos accessed them while having a sexual relationship with another St Kilda player, Sam Gilbert. She was then subjected to a barrage of abuse and told by the AFL that she “has issues” (unlike Reiwoldt in whom they stated they had great faith in as an individual). Now Reiwoldt’s 47 year old manager has admitted to having inappropriate dealings with the young woman while she was holed up in a hotel room paid for by the St Kilda football club. It’s a series of events that make Sam Newman’s crass blowup doll scandal look like Disney On Ice.

Player manager, Ricky Nixon, admitted to seeing the young woman on Valentine’s Day this week and the Herald Sun claims they saw him leave the woman’s hotel at around 7.15am the following morning. The young woman alleges he also provided her with alcohol during their relationship which lasted several weeks. Nixon is player manager to three players involved in the original naked photo scandal – Reiwoldt, Nick Dal Santo and Sam Gilbert. Dal Santo was naked in a separate photo released and Sam Gilbert was the player who took the photos and had the relationship with the then 16 year old woman.

Nixon denies having sex with the teen and providing her with alcohol but admits he made a series of bad decisions by visiting the woman to try to help her. This isn’t the first spectacularly bad judgment call by Nixon. He is notorious for his rash actions which have included drink driving his Alfa Romeo into a tram on his way home from work in 2009, getting arrested for public drunkenness at the Caulfield Cup in 2002 and escorting his client Ben Cousins to Riva nightclub while Cousins was at the Tigers trying to recover from his drug addiction. He also represented Wayne Carey from the time Carey was 18 through to 2002 when news broke of Carey’s affair with his best friend’s wife.

Nixon proclaimed repeatedly on radio this morning that the teenager “needs help”. It’s Nixon who needs help and so does the game. Just at the time when the AFL should be encouraging more women to be involved in the sport to try to curb its sexism issues, the double standard applied to the young woman compared with the St Kilda players and Nixon proves that sexism is alive and well in the sport. Channel Ten has also fumbled their opportunity to contribute to a culture change by recently demoting the game’s only female commentator, Kelli Underwood, after a two year trial at the commentary desk.

The question must be asked, where are the players and members of the football community who oppose these grubby goings on? We know that not all players are misogynist, nor do all have tiny enough brains to treat a 16 year old so badly and take photos of their team mates naked. Harry O’Brien has rightly spoken out against the focus on women’s fashion at the Brownlow Medal awards night. More players need to join him in speaking out about sexism and condemning personalities like Nixon who have obviously been a toxic influence on the game’s culture and useless in mentoring young footballers to become decent and respectful human beings.