Are AFL players underpaid?

SHOULD AFL players be paid more than they currently make?

Collingwood veteran Scott Pendlebury is one current player that believes his cohort is heavily underpaid.

Speaking on the Ball Magnets Podcast with teammate Tom Mitchell and NBA star Josh Giddey, Pendlebury suggested AFL players were underpaid given league executives are paid more than the competition’s top players.

While AFL players earn far more than the average worker, Pendlebury believes the higher-profile players need to be paid more as they can’t live a normal life in cities like Melbourne.

With players in the NBA earning 51 per cent of revenue and AFL players earning just 28 per cent of their competition’s revenue, Pendlebury believes it’s time for players to earn a bigger piece of the pie.

“I still think the players in our game and the coaching staff and that are heavily underpaid,” he said.

“Everyone will go, ‘Oh, you get paid so much as players’.

“I think the executive team in the AFL are the highest paid people in the game, which is fine, but there’s no other league in the world where the exec team are paid more than the players.

“I think of a guy like Nick Daicos or Dustin Martin, they cannot live a normal life in Melbourne.”

In response to Pendlebury, Kane Cornes credited the Magpie for also suggesting that football department staff should be paid more before asking David King how much he thinks players should earn.

“He said this, he’s not going to get much sympathy from the footy fans out there,” Cornes said on SEN Breakfast.

“I’m glad he mentioned [the coaches] on first listen, I didn’t hear him reference the coaches because I’m big on this.

“The soft cap spend has been decimated and hasn’t recovered like the players’ [salary cap] and every other aspect of the game has [since COVID].

“The role that the coaches, and even the medical staff, we’ve lost some great doctors in the game as a result of this and they’re really important as well.

“So that’s got to increase, they’ve been smashed and haven’t recovered, and the players probably have with their wage.

“What’s the right percentage? It’s different to the NBA because it’s privately owned and there are all sorts of different aspects of that.”

While King said he wasn’t sure exactly how much revenue players should earn, he does feel that list sizes are too big and the top earners should be making more than $2 million a season.

“I don’t know that the number, I don’t know the answer to that,” he said.

“But what I do know is that the lists are too big, and the top end of talent are not getting paid or remunerated as they should be.

“Dustin Martin over the last five years should be on $2 million a year.”

In 2022, just three players earned more than $1.2 million a season while no players reportedly earn more than $1.5 million.

– BY LACHLAN GELEIT/ SEN