VOLUNTEERS are the lifeblood of local football and netball clubs all across the country.
This is why I completely understand the sentiment of Irymple’s disappointment last week with the ruling handed down by AFL Victoria from the audit of the club’s financials as one of the two grand finalists last season.
While the fine was minimal, it would have been incredibly disheartening to all those involved behind the scenes to have received one at all for the one breach that was found.
In simple terms, the club passed the audit with flying colours.
They provided absolutely everything that was asked of them, co-operating fully with the investigators.
Essentially, the one minor infraction they had was not having a contract for a 16-year-old who played a few games in the season.
Mind you, the money paid to this player was clearly shown in their player payments.
The main discussion in the past few days in clubland across the region though has been about how much of a slap in the face it was to be fined over such a small bit of oversight and how hard it was to find volunteers for clubs, even without punishing those very volunteers for something so insignificant.
And I do agree with this.
However, deep down agree also with what AFL Victoria has actually done here.
Hear me out …
Let’s step back for a second and actually assess the reason the audits are now in place and why it is important for all infractions to be penalised.
The reason AFL Victoria is doing these audits is to find and sanction clubs that are CLEARLY breaching the salary caps allocated to them.
And if you don’t think this is happening in country footy, you have your head buried in the sand.
It is happening and it is rife.
So what is the point of penalising Irymple for such as a small breach?
Well, what the penalty does is send a ‘shot over of the bow’ to get the attention of every other club in the league to get its own house in order.
Fining a successful club that is constantly in the spotlight makes a bigger statement than it would if the fine had been issued to an underperforming club that wouldn’t get the publicity like that of Irymple.
That’s why I think auditing each grand finalist is such a smart move.
For clubs that are found to clearly breach the salary cap, it is premiership points being stripped in the current season that will make the biggest impact and start to stamp out ridiculous sums being paid to players.
And I can assure you, this type of penalty is very much on the agenda for those clubs AFL Victoria deems to have breached the rules seriously enough.
This could still actually happen this year, should AFL Victoria see fit to impose it.
And, yes, I know these clubs openly breaching the salary caps are paying cash under the table or providing other incentives and not running them through the books, and, yes, if clubs want to do it they will find a way to do it.
But I also know of players being offered up to $5k per game in country footy and I know of clubs that breach the salary cap by not only tens of thousands of dollars but by more than $100,000 in a single season.
This is just plain unfair to the rest of their competition.
Footy must at least try to stamp this out or minimise it for country clubs to survive.
So the reality is now this for clubs openly flaunting the cap: you are being watched – and you are being watched closely.
Now imagine for a second that a club has been audited and has been found in serious breach or breaches of that audit and then has been penalised by losing premiership points for this season.
What if they were to lose enough points in this current season to make it impossible for them to play finals, or if no matter the number of wins they had this season the penalty was that they were simply banned from participating in finals altogether?
How would this make all the unsuspecting players, members, supporters and volunteers feel – those who just trusted everything was above board at their club behind the scenes?
Pretty gutted, I would think.
Just imagine also the effect on the players who were on massive money if they were told it was no use paying them the big money to play anymore as the money they were being paid was just to win a flag that they now couldn’t win.
These players would then need to choose to stay or find a new club on much less money, halfway through a season too, which would be quite inconvenient.
I imagine these particular players with no real loyalty to the club and who now had their large paycheques taken away from them would be very, very unhappy.
I wouldn’t want to upset these types of players too much either, because these players might just open up a closet with a lot of skeletons inside should they feel upset enough to do it.
Wow, that could be bad – very bad – for a club.
I just hope that never happens around here.
