AFL trades day two as it happened: Tigers’ Graham compensation revealed; Worsfold back at Eagles

Other clubs should not be punished… to compensate a club that is losing a player. It goes both ways – if you look at American sports, the NBA has no compensation, the NFL has a different type of compensation. But it’s certainly not as rich and beneficial as it is in the AFL.

Battle has got a six-year deal, which is worth somewhere above 850 thousand, not quite 900 –that’s my understanding. Now that’s big money, no doubt. But I wasn’t expecting this to be band one [compensation] because I think we all thought to get band one part of the deal, the money would have to be north of 950, and it certainly isn’t that.

PETER RYAN: I think St Kilda are entitled to think ‘well every club has had their bonus, and this is our chance’. But that doesn’t explain the system.

Also, I’m not sure it answers Evan’s question, but I think four of his first five words are most pertinent. He said “surely the compo system is broken”. I think we can remove “surely” and just say “the compo system is broken”. It does need to have someone address it.

HEAR MORE EXPERT ANALYSIS IN THE LATEST PODCAST:

Who decides what the compensation is?

The AFL’s football department uses a formula that generates a point rating for players. The league deliberately keeps that relatively secret to try to avoid abuse or manipulation of the rules by clubs.

What do we know about the formula?

The league considers the size of a player’s contract at his new club – which is the average annual earnings for the player over the life of the contract, not just the size of the contract in any one year – and the age of the player. The AFL changed the rules this year – the formula no longer considers the life of contracts beyond five years, nor short-term ones of less than two years. So effectively, giving a player a longer-term contract beyond five years will not affect compensation. Nor will trying to offer a very high one- or two-year deal to draw a favourable compensation pick. Restricted free agents – where the original club has the right to match a player’s contract offer and therefore force their rivals to trade for the player instead of getting them as a free agent – are most vulnerable to exploitation by clubs. That is, a club can try to ensure the contract they offer a restricted free agent is big enough that it draws a good draft pick as compensation – and dissuades the original club from matching the contract.

The AFL then has five bands in which it allocates draft picks as compensation:

• First round
• End of first round
• Second round
• End of second round
• Third round

With the rise in the salary cap under the latest collective bargaining agreement, the amount needed to pay a player to generate a first-round compensation pick also rose. It is now clear that Battle and Perryman were given contracts that averaged close to or above $900,000 a year, because they drew band one compensation and a pick in the first round.

“Traditionally, the two determinants for free agency compensation have been guaranteed average earnings and age. They’ll continue. What we’re introducing is the term of the contract moving forward,” AFL head of football performance Ned Guy told the AFL website in August after the AFL Commission passed changes to the contract term in free agency compensation.

Is it fair that other clubs fall back in the draft because another club loses a player?

No. But that is the system. If you abandon compensation altogether for losing a free agent then you might as well abandon restricted free agents altogether as every club would match a free agency bid and force a trade. Besides, clubs wouldn’t agree to losing players for no compensation, even if they hate it when their draft pick gets pushed back because someone else is compensated.