The devil is in the detail
IN THE billion-dollar AFL industry of 2022, it seems almost incongruous that only a handful of the game’s elite superstars earned $1 million or more this season.
While much of the game’s money trail goes almost unnoticed and unreported, the public fascination over the salaries of the 800-plus AFL footballers has skyrocketed in recent years.
Much of it is guesswork, with figures estimated every time a high-profile player signs a new deal.
Some contracts are front or backended; most deals have an in-built set of bonuses and match-payment figures that can push the figures significantly up or down, depending on performance.
Some contracts are structured in a way to ward off potential poaching raids from cashed-up opposition clubs.
This makes any assessment of AFL pay packets largely an inexact science.
The Herald Sun’s annual Rich List - a comprehensive examination of the best-paid 100 players, as well as those who narrowly missed out - does its best to dispel some of those myths.
That’s why compiling the AFL salaries list required hundreds of calls to industry figures and those in the ‘know’, as well as weeks of crosschecking, assessment and reassessment.
The Rich List figures are presented in $100,000 bands to reflect the fact many salaries are dependent on in-season performances, with bonuses that may or may not be met in any given season.
Players remain acutely sensitive about their pay rates, but as the 2022 list shows, many of the game’s best players take far less money than a lot of us would believe in order to keep premiership lists together or to accept long-term security within their club.
Critics who contest the nature of this exercise would concede almost every single contract brokered by clubs comes with wild and immediate speculation about its value.
And AFL House releases regular updates about the yearly pay breakdown of players and the updated freeagency lists to its own non-independent media arm.
The Herald Sun Rich List attempts to put those salaries into perspective and provide context and accuracy around the most talked about and speculated deals.