As lobbying for AFL ladies’s groups hits fever pitch, anxious golf equipment have been moved to query the league about aggressive manoeuvres to strategically safe prime gamers pre-emptively on employment contracts.
Brisbane’s trumpeting this week that they’ve signed their first marquee participant within the prodigious Tayla Harris – who Melbourne have been making a critical pitch for – has notably bristled given listing guidelines for the brand new competitors haven’t been set by the AFL.
Comparable manoeuvres have been executed deftly by Collingwood who employed Meg Hutchins in a full-time soccer operations position and concurrently appeared to wrench the main key defender from the grasp of the Western Bulldogs. That transfer is understood to have miffed members of the Canine’ hierarchy that noticed Hutchins as a key plank of the aspect they need to area.
Daisy Pearce and Melbourne are the opposite notable instance of a membership having successfully wedded a participant to its aspect by means of a non-enjoying contract properly earlier than 2017 staff licences are awarded.
The most effective established feminine participant within the land, Pearce this yr left a profession in midwifery to undertake a full-time cross-division internship on the Demons. She is the now the face of that pioneering membership’s nearly assured 2017 nationwide ladies’s league licence.
There’s, nevertheless, a big distinction between this week’s Brisbane-Harris improvement and the offers Melbourne and Collingwood struck with Pearce and Hutchins, respectively, earlier this yr.
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The Demons and Pies, whereas clearly very shrewd, weren’t so brazen to announce their new staff as assured gamers of their membership colors within the new league.
In distinction, in celebrating that 19-yr-previous Queenslander Harris, who had been on the AFL’s payroll with a job at AFL Queensland, is now a full-time worker at Brisbane, the Lions spruiked how that they had signed “their first ladies’s participant… in an historic milestone…”.
Brisbane CEO Greg Swann declared “Tayla is among the most gifted, younger feminine prospects within the nation” and her signing with the Lions is “important to the event of girls’s AFL in Queensland”.
Whereas each statements are definitely true, the Lions’ framing of the transfer as a coup for a nonetheless unconfirmed group and enjoying listing resulted in additional than an odd raised eyebrow at rival golf equipment and the AFL.
Brisbane revealed on their web site that “in addition to being the membership’s marquee participant, Harris will even tackle a full-time position on the Lions, driving feminine participation in her position because the communications and group coordinator”.
Harris, set to play within the Melbourne/Brisbane feminine/male double-header on the MCG on Sunday, personifies the more and more aggressive struggle for signatures.
With these Harris/Pearce/Hutchins type employment signings turning into a sample, rival golf equipment have moved to make clear the state of play with the AFL.
Within the thoughts of the AFL, technically the present job description of any certainly one of Harris, Pearce and Hutchins wouldn’t preclude them from becoming a member of one other membership to play.
That is still the case till the league proclaims not solely the profitable golf equipment however the three-tier participant drafting and cost system to be launched from yr one.
With the Lions locked in as a basis ladies’s membership in Queensland – Gold Coast didn’t bid and the AFL is intent on a nationwide competitors – Brisbane have been determined to lock in native prodigy Harris.
The deal introduced this week all however confirms she is going to play for the Lions subsequent yr and never relocate to Melbourne as she is understood to have been open to doing. It was additionally struck earlier than Sunday’s double-header between the golf equipment.
Harris created the defining picture of the primary free-to-air telecast of a ladies’s recreation final August – sporting a Melbourne guernsey – together with her breathtaking scissor-kick.
The picture that captures the distinctive attract of girls’s footy and expertise of feminine footballers in a single body immediately turned scorching property.
Melbourne might perpetually personal the magic second in a way, given Harris was sporting pink and blue, however to the Lions’ delight it seems her time as a Demon is formally over.
Separate to the employment contract Harris has now signed with Brisbane, she is going to command prime market greenback as a marquee participant when she ultimately indicators a enjoying contract.
To greatest guarantee a fair competitors the proposed ladies’s league construction is that every membership has two marquee gamers that may earn round $25,000 yearly for enjoying, on prime of any separate employment contracts.
Considerably the AFL says it is going to finally approve who the marquee gamers are for every membership.
The primary season of the nationwide ladies’s league is deliberate to span two months in February/March 2017.