Long-serving Port Adelaide assistant Chad Cornes took the call to discuss his profession on Good Friday, a scheduled day off for his club’s AFL program.
“It’s the day off today but the [Port Adelaide] Magpies play [SANFL] later today, so I will head down there,” Cornes said.
Welcome to an assistant coach’s definition of a “day off” in footy season.
Cornes, Gold Coast’s Tate Kaesler and the Western Bulldogs’ Daniel Pratt have all been coaching for more than a decade.
Coaches Chris Fagan (left) and Craig McRae (right) with assistants Daniel Giansiracusa, Daniel Pratt and Chad Cornes.Credit: AFL Photos, Getty Images. Artwork: Nathan Perri
They love their jobs and are devoted to their profession, hence their willingness to paint a picture of the role and describe the increasing challenges within it on behalf of many coaches who feel similarly.
They all respect their clubs and senior coaches, who they know understand the demands and treat the assistants as well as possible, given the realities of the role and the budgetary constraints imposed.
But they can see the growing expectations are unsustainable, and change is needed to ensure the role continues to attract and retain the best people for it.
The question for many in the profession is whether the AFL can see it, and if those at league headquarters can, what are they willing to do to address the compounding issues that many believe will ultimately have a negative impact on the game?
Alistair Nicholson, the CEO of the AFL Coaches Association, says the coaching cohort has been promised change for too long now.
“The extent of the work has increased, the remuneration over a 15-year period – not just since COVID – for assistant and development coaches has been flat, remaining under CPI, and career prospects have flattened,” Nicholson said.
One assistant coach, who spoke to this masthead on the condition of anonymity, said he was overpaid when he started as an assistant straight after retiring as a player 14 years ago. He had no experience and says he is “1000 times better” as a coach now. His income, however, is the same as it was when he started.
The percentage each club spends on coaches varies, but a senior source at an AFL club, who was granted anonymity to indicate how the cap was allocated, said they spend between 25- to 30 per cent of the soft cap on the wages of the senior, assistant and development coaches. That amounts to between $1.9 to $2.3 million per club.
They can sit 20 per cent of the senior coach’s salary outside the cap, which helps reduce the percentage of the coaching wage bill allocated to them. No one begrudges the senior coaches’ wages, which averaged about $750,000 per year in 2024, but the gap between them and their key staff is wide.
Kaesler didn’t play in the AFL but hard work and smarts won him the trust of players at Adelaide and now the Gold Coast, where he is head of development and VFL coach.
He is what you’d describe as an enthusiast, one who lives and breathes football and has made his way through being prepared to do whatever is required.
But his words echo those of most assistant coaches, particularly post-COVID.
“Even though the cap has not increased, they still want to see the same type of footy – if not better. The general consensus is people will just dig in and do more,” Kaesler said.
That’s exactly what coaches have done. With the job growing beyond 60 hours per week, much of that is spent on weekends or through the night when the laborious, yet essential, coding of game vision needs to be done before plans can be made for development and match preparation, and time can be given to the players during the day.
Cornes gets home from a night game close to midnight, codes half that game until 3am, and then spends the day off with family before six hours are spent finishing coding and reports. The next day he is out of the blocks to prepare for team meetings and line reviews, and then a ball transition meeting is followed up with individual catch-ups with players.
Port Adelaide assistant coach Chad Cornes was a premiership player with the club in 2004 before moving on to GWS.Credit: AFL Photos
Themes for the week are established, and then the focus turns to the next opponent, and liaising with his assistant and an outstanding analyst essential to making that work in the time permitted.
“Those first few days can be pretty brutal,” Cornes said.
That time isn’t just rolling ground balls, but extends to areas beyond the comprehension of most, if not all, other roles in football.
Pratt had already received half a dozen text messages from players as he caught up with extended family for an Easter breakfast.
Kaesler is not alone in opening up his house to players for dinner, or just time out from share houses for relocated players building the foundations of their lives and careers at the same time. Most assistant coaches – many of those with young families – know they can’t shut the door of their homes, let alone their offices, as relationships are so critical to coaching.
“It’s easier to talk to development coaches because there might not be as much pressure on selection. We have them around sometimes when needed, but also to stay connected and build relationships, especially when I first got up to the Gold Coast,” Kaesler said.
That pastoral component is often forgotten when assessing how the role works in an environment in which big money is being directed to address the increasingly complex mental health challenges players face, and the declining numbers of players from specific backgrounds.
Good assistant coaches often stop issues from becoming major problems.
It’s often instability in the coaching ranks and poor decision-making from clubs that affects performance, more than the competitive balance levers affecting players nowadays, with free agency and compromised drafts distorting their impact.
Brisbane Lions premiership coach Chris Fagan made a submission on coaching to the AFL Commission.Credit: Getty Images
That’s why a presentation to the AFL Commission from Lions coach Chris Fagan after last year’s flag – describing how crucial his coaching group had been to dragging the club from nowhere to premiers, and how the profession needed more support for standards to remain high – was worth three years of submissions from the coaches’ association.
One of the problems is that it’s easy to dismiss complaints, as people from all walks of life have a story, and senior AFL figures sometimes wonder whether a coach’s willingness to air complaints, which the senior coaching cohort did recently, runs down the profession.
Coaches know that risk, which is why their reaction should be an indication of what is happening. They will fight for what they see as fair; they can see when they are being dudded relative to the rest of the industry.
One senior figure within the industry, who preferred to remain anonymous, said, from a political point of view, it would be much smarter for the AFL executive and commission to have the coaches on-side because their public profile – and forums in which they can air their views – made them dangerous.
Western Bulldogs assistant Daniel Pratt.Credit: AFL Photos
One long-serving assistant coach, who wished to remain anonymous to speak freely, said his wage had gone down since COVID.
A manager of another assistant coach, who also wanted to remain anonymous, said his client’s wage had dropped from $150,000 per year to $110,000 per year in the past five years, despite their seniority and experience growing.
That wage is not a bad return in anyone’s language, but in relative terms it’s a paltry amount, given the growth in wages post-COVID in other areas of the game that aren’t subject to a soft cap the AFL argues – without obvious evidence – as being essential to competitive balance.
The rest of the industry’s wages have recovered, and the game’s financial health has continued to flourish, with AFL revenue now around $1 billion per year.
The AFL’s 10 senior executives were paid a combined $10.4 million in 2024, and the average CEO wage is now higher than that of senior coaches, as football department wages have stagnated under a tight football department cap that, at $7.75 million per club per annum, remains below the level it was before COVID. The AFL has introduced exemptions, which puts the actual expenditure above that figure, but few have flowed to the coaches.
They have observed the growth in player wages as they get a share of AFL revenue using the bargaining muscle to get a collective bargaining agreement – a power the coaches’ association just does not have right now.
Even umpires, who work part-time but have a CBA, can earn more per season than assistant and development coaches. Sure, umpires get scrutinised, but few feel that exposure as constantly in roles as insecure as those in football departments.
The sense of value wasn’t helped when football operations boss Laura Kane appeared surprised at the level of coach satisfaction when she spoke during Gather Round. “If it’s a reality, it’s one I don’t want anyone to feel,” Kane said.
Assistant coaches are on two-year deals, with 70 per cent holding three month termination clauses in their contracts. The average wage of assistants is a very respectable $190,000 per annum, although many are paid much less and the opportunity for growth is virtually non-existent.
Pratt, who has ambitions to be a senior coach, said experience as an assistant has made him not only a better coach, but more efficient.
“Guys that have been in [the game] for eight, nine, 10, 12 years are really frustrated by how they are regarded within the AFL, and their overall reward for the time and stress,” Nicholson said.
Senior coaches are also concerned that the pool of people available for football departments to select from will diminish if the need for change is ignored – a point Fagan and others have made.
“We need a vision for the elite coaching profession, and a framework where we tackle the issues from all quarters [the AFL, coaches, clubs, players, administrators, pathways and educators] to be able to make the profession better – a three or five-year plan to measure the improvements in place,” Nicholson said.
“It’s also about the AFL prioritising the need for a strategy for the profession, which everyone can be accountable for executing.”
Talks between the coaches’ association and the AFL are ongoing, but such a plan is yet to emerge.
Meanwhile, the assistants will keep putting in the hours, developing the athletes, improving the game, copping the feedback about their team, and hoping the next generation (which includes the game’s best players, who increasingly turn their backs on coaching) can walk into a profession properly recognised for its impact.
“Coaches are optimistic things are going to happen, but that is what we thought two years ago,” Pratt said.
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