Collingwood star Scott Pendlebury has revealed that he believes one of the key issues with the league is that players are significantly underpaid.
Pendlebury spoke about the issue to teammate Tom Mitchell and Australian NBA player Josh Giddey on the sports podcast Ball Magnets, expressing his belief that players are 'heavily underpaid'.
Throughout the 2022 AFL season, 7 News reporter Tom Browne released a tweet which stated that the league executives' salaries had increased since before the Covid-19 pandemic, totalling a jaw-dropping $11.8 million, split between the nine members, equating to roughly $1.31 million each.
The AFL executive received $11.8m, compared to $10.4 pre COVID in 2022.
Based on a 9 member executive, that’s $1.31m per executive (on average).
Chairman Richard Goyder still doesn’t disclose individual amounts, ie. Gil’s salary.
— Tom Browne (@TomBrowne7) February 15, 2023
"Everyone will go 'oh you're paid so much as players', but 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 executive team is paid more than the players," Pendlebury said.
"I still think the players in our game and the coaching staff and that they are heavily underpaid."
According to ESPN, the average player salary throughout the 2022 season was between $200,000-$400,000, with only ten players earning less $100,000. It was estimated that 12 players earned seven figure salaries last year, inclusive of Lance Franklin, Jeremy Cameron, Dustin Martin and Christian Petracca.
The Collingwood midfielder was close to point out the difference in the NBA and AFL points of revenue.
"I'll get shot down (with people saying) 'players are greedy' ... (but) in NBA you guys get 51 per cent of revenue of what you bring in, we're 28 per cent of revenue," he said.
According to ESPN, the highest and lowest paid NBA players includes Golden State Warrior, Stephen Curry, who earned $48,070,014 million and Ishmail Wainright from the Phoenix Suns was the lowest paid, at $633,891 for the 2022-2023 season. Even though Wainright's salary was considered to be the lowest in the association, he is still earning far above the AFL average salary.
Pendlebury argued that other sports such as cricket, basketball and rugby have a strong system in place for salaries, which could deter the amount of young AFL prospects in the future.
"I feel like if you've been a good player in the AFL for a long period of time, you've got to reward these guys," Pendlebury said
"You don't want like cricket, rugby, all these sports to overtake how much they are paying their players because then we'll start to lose all of our kids to that sport."
The Collingwood veteran noted that such significant and influential players cannot conduct everyday activities without being recognised, and therefore their pay should compensate for their lack of privacy.
"I think of a guy like (Magpies youngster) Nick Daicos, (Tigers superstar) Dustin Martin, they cannot live normal lives in Melbourne, they can't, (it's) not even possible to go out," Pendlebury said.
Young gun player Daicos, is categorically, the lowest-paid Collingwood player which sparked 7 News journalist, Mitch Cleary to comment about how Daicos' salary is not reflective of his influence in each game during an episode of his Tradies podcast, earlier this month.
"And he (Daicos), theoretically, is earning $240-$250,000 this year to play footy, and he, right now ... (is worth) $850-$900,000 on value," Cleary said.
