doggies4eva wrote:Salary caps don't work. Full stop.
The thing that makes the AFL fairly even is the draft. Some sort of draft or limitation on recruiting is probably overdue in the SANFL. The emphasis should be in my opinion the development of youth with a little recruitment to cover any shortcomings.
Yes they do. At AFL level, allowing infinite player payments would slowly but surely erode the draft as a means of ensuring a fairly even spread of elite players (it would make little or no difference in relation to fringe or 'honest trier' players).
At least in theory (and for the Clones, Essendon, Woods and Weagles it soon wouldn't just be theory), with enough cash you can completely rort the draft system. One way is through trades with a substantial cash component. For example, you trade away one-- or several-- 'regular' players for a struggling club's star. You make it worth their while financially by continuing to pay the salaries of the outgoing players; and in any even they're loathe to refuse b/c they know their star is likely to walk for more cash elsewhere at the end of his current contract, in which case they get nothing.
Or, as the rich club, you simply let the drafted star serve out their 2 year post-drafting contract with the cellar-dweller before offering them more money than they could ever dream of getting in years at their current club. The star then nominates that amount of money as their 'terms of trade' (which no other club, except the other fabulously wealthy ones, can afford), walk away from their dying club, go into the PSD, and they're yours.
Caps just don't make much sense in (ahem) second tier competitions. Especially where the difference between financial success and failure is whether you have pokies up and running, and if so, how many. The difference is so stark that you might as well have a cap that is indexed to the number of pokies the club owns. Or, just ditch it. Clubs will go under only b/c:
· they can't get pokies up and running, and
· the SANFL won't support them.
If the first happens, the 2nd certainly shouldn't, b/c the SANFL ain't short of cash and wants to see a healthy local comp for good reason.
A significant plus for the SANFL is that juniors go through the ranks and are 'attached' to a team. You wouldn't want to throw that away; for starters, it would kill any interest by the clubs in developing players through their U17 and U19 comps (unless they were superstars likely to get AFL drafted), and therefore be bad for the game as a whole. I don't see a SANFL draft as a way to go, and any rule 'you can only buy/trade in so many players per year' would be likely to be an illegal restraint of trade.
Posted: Wed Dec 21, 2005 7:16 am
