The penny seems to have finally dropped with the game’s governors in the months that have followed Chris Fagan’s post premiership session with the AFL Commission.
Fagan’s outlining of the Brisbane Lions recovery after the club looked destitute and clinging for survival in 2015, and the football staff who led it, prompted a shift in the thinking of at least three influential commissioners and reinforced the concerns from a further two who didn’t need convincing that the game was undervaluing its coaches.
Premiership coach Chris Fagan and his assistants soak up the joy.Credit: Joe Armao
Even so, the bottom line-driven AFL bosses remain frustrated by the campaign being led by senior coaches that has punctuated the 2025 season.
Chief executive Andrew Dillon and football boss Laura Kane have concluded they must act to address the deep levels of job dissatisfaction endured by coaches and their assistants. And the dearth of star players willing to move into coaching. And the falling numbers of Indigenous players coming through the system. And the struggles of non-Victorian clubs trying to lure good coaches interstate with so little job security – particularly in Sydney.
Dillon and Kane are expected to outline a set of proposals to the commission at its June session that will rewrite last year’s modest three-year plan for the football department soft cap.
Although Dillon has repeatedly stated that money alone cannot solve the reality of coaches feeling undervalued, new financial measures and triggers will be put in place which he believes will make coaching a more attractive career path. Dillon and Kane are also reevaluating the demands on assistant coaches and their contractual lack of job security.
Dillon said the details of the proposal would be completed after sessions over the coming weeks at every AFL club. He does not believe that coaches are undervalued by the game but agrees that the game must act if coaches truly feel that way. He would not yet outline the proposed measures but said senior coaches were better paid now than they were in 2019 before the AFL slashed football department spending at the start of COVID.
Frankly, it seems extraordinary that it has come to this. That such a divide exists between head office and its coaching fraternity when the red flags have been flying for so long. Red flags like the alarming lack of interest last year in the West Coast coaching job. This was amid ongoing pleas from John Longmire and Chris Scott – with Scott at the top of his game taking a second job as an ambassador for Morris Finance – and with three GWS assistant coaches living apart from their families.
The AFL’s view is that media scrutiny has contributed to the increasingly unhappy lot of coaches, and it was alarming to hear one senior coach this week suggest that he and some other coaches have contemplated banning media interviews with broadcasters as one industrial mechanism to make their grievances heard.
As my colleague Peter Ryan pointed out in his recent investigation into the AFL’s coaching crisis, coaches were dismayed when Kane said during Gather Round that she was surprised to learn that coaches felt undervalued. Dillon and Kane appear to have rejected the strong push to simply remove the entire wage of the senior coach from the soft cap saying the coaches’ problems are more complex, and yet the time the game has taken to address those problems are baffling.
AFL football executive Laura Kane.Credit: AFL Photos via Getty Images
The role of the AFL Coaches’ Association in what has become an industrial campaign remains intriguing. AFLCA boss Alistair Nicholson lost significant support late last year when he failed to strongly support Ken Hinkley after the Port coach was slapped with a $20,000 fine for his post-game antics in the Hawthorn semi-final. And for lagging on forming a strategy to fight for coaches’ conditions. The fact that the coaches’ association relies on funding from the AFL places Nicholson in a difficult position.
But Nicholson has been more vocal lately and bolstered the association coffers by striking financial deals not only with host broadcaster Fox Footy but also Nine and the podcast Dyl and Friends. Even though some coaches remain frustrated at being told of these deals – and their subsequent media commitments – after the event.
Former player manager and Richmond and Essendon football boss Daniel Richardson has been charged with taking on the coaches within the AFL which means he is almost working in a parallel universe alongside Nicholson. Just how effectively this model is working remains the subject of debate among the coaches, many of whom are frustrated at their association to which they contribute $5000 annually – a sum that goes towards funding their professional development.
Certainly, the AFL – which funds the coaches’ association to the tune of almost $1 million annually – believes that money could be better spent but has always baulked at cutting the association adrift.
And AFL bosses, despite conceding they need put forward a new deal for coaches and football departments by the budget month of June, still insist they have worked each year to lift the soft cap. This year it rose by $400,000 to $7.65 million with football department spending scheduled to increase to just over $8 million by 2027.
Additional extras include 20 per cent of the senior coach’s wage sitting outside the soft cap, allowances for female and Indigenous coaches, spending on mental health experts and programs and travel for non-Victorian clubs who reach the grand final.
And yet even the proposed 2027 figure – not counting the additional extras – sits $1.5 million below the soft cap limit in 2019 before it was stripped for the pandemic. Most senior coaches and football bosses remain disgusted that Dillon and his team do not trust the clubs to use their own discretion and expertise to allocate football funding but need to be told how to spend it.
Surely, the AFL has better means to ensure there is no repeat of scenarios such as the Essendon off-site drugs program or the Adelaide camp.
For all its perceived ineffectiveness, Fagan believes the coaches’ association, launched at the start of this century by Neale Daniher, remains the preferred model for AFL coaches. He believes it would be a dangerous move to take the organisation inside the AFL – given the sensitive and confidential nature of some the health services sought by coaches particularly concerning their mental welfare.
Fagan’s view underlines a lack of trust among the coaches with head office and just how dramatically the relationship between the game and its key frontmen has eroded over recent years. And just how much work Andrew Dillon and Laura Kane must do to repair it despite their view that the coaching crisis is being exaggerated.
