Windfall for clubs without stadium deals
Jake Niall
The Age
August 2, 2006
THE AFL is set to provide more financial assistance to Victorian clubs, equalising the competition further by "topping up" the returns of clubs that do not have favourable stadium deals.
While the Kangaroos, Western Bulldogs and Melbourne already receive millions in special assistance — known as the annual special distribution (ASD) — the AFL is believed to have accepted the argument that other clubs, too, might be entitled to help if they have poor stadium deals that make it harder for them to make money.
The clubs likely to benefit from a topping-up strategy are MCG tenants Hawthorn, Richmond, Melbourne, Telstra Dome tenant St Kilda and possibly even Port Adelaide, the most financially precarious of the non-Victorian clubs.
Whether a particular club would benefit would hinge on the kind of returns it was receiving in a given year and would take into account returns from home games played interstate, such as in Tasmania.
In essence, the AFL has accepted the case put by Richmond that stadium deals can be more closely tied to the annual special distribution, and that the league should provide assistance to clubs that fall below certain financial levels — the Tigers proposed that any club that did not reach the Victorian average of about $6.5 million for "match day income" should receive a top-up.
In practice, this would mean that the Tigers, for instance, might receive $200,000-$400,000 following a poor season in which their match day returns were below par, but they might not receive any additional funds if their match-day returns — a combination of membership, gate receipts, reserve seating, signage and corporate hospitality — were above a certain level.The same would apply to Hawthorn and St Kilda, and it might change the formula for payments to the Western Bulldogs, Melbourne and Kangaroos. Geelong, with its own ground, would be ineligible, while Carlton, despite its struggles, has excellent stadium deals with Telstra Dome and the MCG.
While the AFL, including the commission, is believed to favour a broader assistance system that would help what one might call the competition's lower middle-class — and not simply the poor — details have not been finalised.
The funds are part of the distribution of the $780 million television rights deal, with the new collective bargaining agreement with the players now settled and to be announced today.
AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou, when asked whether the league would assist more clubs by equalising stadium deals to some degree, said: "It is true that a few months ago that we did some analysis on clubs that have had poor stadium deals — particularly Melbourne clubs — and that work was done prior to the work we started to do on … the bonus distribution to clubs, you know, the distribution we planned to give to clubs.
"What we've done is we've continued to do work on one pie, or one pool, to distribute to the clubs, which takes into account all those factors — ASDs, poor stadium deals, the bonus pool."
But Demetriou made clear that any distribution — including what he called imminent "bonus distribution" to all clubs — would come from the same pool, in effect the TV rights windfall.
http://www.realfooty.theage.com.au/realfooty/articles/2006/08/01/1154198139886.html
