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.