Former St Kilda captain Danny Frawley has revealed a massive issue with the VFL Women’s competition that is causing friction between clubs.
According to Frawley, the newly reworked state league doesn’t have any kind of salary cap and this means players are getting more money in VFLW than they are in AFLW.
“I’m led to believe there’s a lot of money being paid in the VFLW competition,” he told the AFL Nation pregame show.
“A lot of AFLW players are getting coaxed by VFLW teams and offered maybe more than they’d get in the AFLW.
“There’s girls at Hawthorn on 20,000 to 30,000 for example.
“The money these girls are getting, I’ve got no issue with it, but there’s no salary cap, that’s all I’m saying.”
Frawley said this free-for-all system is killing some of the older clubs of the competition as AFL and VFL teams use their resources to horde AFLW standard players.
“Clubs are just grabbing cash from a sponsor and trying to have an AFLW standard team in," he said.
“Darebin is really struggling, Melbourne University was a great club and now they’re being phased out by the AFL clubs and VFL clubs.
“The AFLW has a salary cap, yet the VFLW hasn’t and there’s a lot of poaching going on.”
Several VFLW teams lost their licenses this year including Seaford, Diamond Creek, the Eastern Devils and the St Kilda Sharks.
They’ve been replaced by a number of AFL owned teams including Carlton, Essendon, Richmond and others, as well as VFL side Williamstown.
The change caused a number of players to leave teams they’d been representing for a long time, while others chose to skip the competition all together to recover from back-to-back VFLW/AFLW seasons across 2016, 2017 and early 2018.
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