Richmond made a fresh bid over summer to have its $100,000 COVID fine removed from this year’s soft cap.
The Tigers made an informal approach to the AFL in December to ask if the six-figure sanction could be paid in another way to ease the pressure on a slashed football department budget.
But they were told no.
The request came three months after furious Richmond chiefs unsuccessfully tried to force Callum Coleman-Jones and Sydney Stack to pay $75,000 of the fine for their part in a drunken late-night kebab fight.
Hawthorn, Collingwood, Sydney, Port Adelaide, Carlton, North Melbourne, Adelaide, Essendon and Melbourne were hit with a variety of sanctions for different COVID protocol breaches throughout the 2020 season.
But the Tigers were the hardest hit in the wake of the Coleman-Jones and Stack embarrassment and Brooke Cotchin’s day spa visit.
In total, the club was hit with a $100,000 bill - $75,000 for the player breach and a further $25,000 suspended from the Cotchin slip-up.
The AFL had come under some criticism for how the COVID fines would be absorbed, with critics arguing club staff members should not risk losing their jobs because of player transgressions. The AFL has slashed each club’s soft cap expenditure by more than $3 million for 2021.
But football operations boss Steve Hocking last year defended where the COVID fines sat.
“What we did right at the start of this is to have the whole industry collaborate on this and work on this together,” Hocking told SEN’s Crunch Time.
“Everyone agreed that fines should go into the soft cap, it should be a whole-of-club sanction. It’s team accountability and a team response and a leadership requirement from everybody.
“There’s been some questions around why it has to come out of the soft cap, really everyone has ownership of this and it’s a club-wide leadership piece.”
The AFL Players’ Association had blocked Richmond’s attempt to get Stack and Coleman-Jones to pick up the $75,000 sanction, citing the code of conduct.
“When the AFL sanctions a player for a breach of AFL rules, a club cannot also impose a sanction on the player," AFLPA legal and player affairs manager James Gallagher said.
Stack and Coleman Jones had already been banned by the AFL for 10 matches each and immediately banished from the Queensland hub.