Stop reading in six paragraphs if you want to feel good about being paid to play. Everything up to that point is true and flattering. Everything after it is also true — and considerably less fun.
In 2000 the average listed footballer earned $126,996. By 2025 he earned $505,961 — call it just under four times more, for doing the same job the sport has always paid him to do. Try asking your own employer for that.
Consumer prices over the same stretch didn't quite double. Wages in general — actual Australian pay packets — a little over doubled. On the two measures that matter to any household, footballers didn't just keep pace. They lapped the field. A pot of beer that cost $2.23 in 2000 was worth 56,949 salaries' worth by the average wage; by 2011 that was up to 60,558 pots. A counter-meal parma ran about $12 in 2000 and takes some finding under $25 today — roughly doubled, and the salary comfortably ran past it.
Beat the cost of living. Beat wages. Beat the beer. If the story stopped here, the AFL would be right to put it on a billboard — and most winters, it does.
In 2000 the AFL sold its broadcast rights — the right to point a camera at the game and sell the footage — for about $40 million a season. In 2025 it sold the same rights for $643 million. Sixteen times. Over the eleven years the beer moved by one pot in sixteen, the television money paid to broadcast a footballer drinking none of them went from $40 million to $156 million a season. The beer kept a straighter line than the wage did.
The NBA gives its players roughly half of everything the league earns — not the broadcast deal alone, everything — fixed, published, not up for debate each cycle. The NFL runs the same idea at just under half, ticking closer automatically if the broadcast money grows fast enough. AFL wages actually grew by a bigger fraction since 2000 than either American league's did. But four times a small number is still a small number, and the small number the Americans started from was already bigger than the big number the AFL has now. The fraction isn't the story. The plumbing is.
Broadcast isn't the league's only income, so widen it to the whole business — gate, memberships, sponsorship, the lot. Broadcast money has sat at roughly the same slice of total AFL revenue for as long as the figure's been disclosed, so widening the lens doesn't let the AFL off. It tightens the case. Player payments as a share of total AFL revenue fall every single year the figure exists.
The Players' Association's own figure is just under a third of "assessable football revenue" — a real number, but a slice of a pie one side gets to define the size of. That is the difference from the NBA and NFL, both published, both audited, neither up for renegotiation mid-cycle.
Every negotiation has a year that tells you what it actually thinks of you. For AFL players it was 2020. Base payments halved, bonuses cancelled, the cut left in place after football resumed.
We know precisely what the players gave up. Nobody outside the building knows precisely what the league gave up. Draw your own conclusion about why one of those numbers is public.
Grow the 2000 salary at the AFL's own verified rate of broadcast growth and the 2025 average lands somewhere between $0.9m and $1.3m. The actual figure is $505,961. Averages flatter the top of the ladder, so the fairer question is the player in the middle of the list.
The median figure rests on one assumption: that the shape of the pay ladder holds as the pool grows, rather than the extra money pooling entirely at the top. The best test available — the fifth or so the playing list grew by between 2018 and 2024 — suggests it mostly would hold: the top tenth's share dipped slightly, and the bottom half held its ground. That's real evidence from a modest test case, not proof the bigger claim scales cleanly.
An earlier version of this piece over-reached. The players'-share chart falls in a sawtooth — a sharp drop at each new deal, a slow climb back, never quite recovering. Read as fully deliberate, that's wrong: broadcast deals land in five-year lumps, wages rise in yearly steps, and dividing a lumpy number by a smooth one makes those teeth on arithmetic alone. Roughly half the shape is arithmetic — a correction that cost this piece a headline it liked. What's underneath the teeth is not arithmetic: keeping pace would have finished the players near ninety-eight in every hundred. It finished at barely half that.
The gap is enormous, and a meaningful part of it went somewhere entirely defensible. Greater Western Sydney has been called a money pit so often the phrase has stopped meaning anything — which is a shame, because it's roughly accurate, and the accuracy is the point. A club placed in a market that didn't want it, told to build an audience from nothing, takes money for a long time before it takes anything else. That's not waste. It's a bet the AFL still believes in — and bets take capital that would otherwise sit in the pool.
The women's competition deserves better than the two arguments usually made about it. That AFLW is a drain on the men's game is wrong — every code invests ahead of revenue, and an eight-season-old competition was never going to be self-funding. That it simply deserves men's-competition pay is also wrong, and not because of the football or the effort.
Here's the trap, and it's genuine. Quality rises fastest if players go fully professional — but that costs a great deal, and the revenue to justify it doesn't exist yet, because the audience that generates revenue mostly arrives after the quality improves. Pay first and you're funding a bet; wait for the revenue and you're waiting for something that needs the investment to arrive first. Somebody has to go first, and going first costs money that has a queue of other claimants on it. It's the one place in this ledger where the AFL's spending is genuinely difficult rather than merely unexplained.
Nobody is paid what they deserve in professional sport. They're paid what the audience is worth. An Olympic athlete in a smaller sport trains as hard, over a longer cycle, for a fraction of the money — and there's no moral defect in it. There's simply no broadcast deal, because there's no sustained audience, because there's no year-round story to follow. Fairness has close to nothing to do with it.
What generates the money isn't the sport. It's the attention — and attention doesn't come from the games. People don't watch sport; they watch stories that happen to be settled by sport. The rivalry, the comeback, the kid from nowhere, the thing you argue about at work on Monday. Codes that invest in that layer generate audiences; audiences generate broadcast deals; broadcast deals generate wages.
None of which weakens the men's players' case — it's the whole reason the case stands. The audience is already there, sixteen times over, in the only currency that counts. The eyeballs were delivered. The broadcasters paid for them. What's in dispute isn't whether AFL footballers deserve more; it's why the people generating an audience that grew sixteenfold are paid out of a share that shrank by half. And it's why the AFLW question is the harder one: those players aren't underpaid because anyone undervalues them — they're underpaid because the audience isn't built yet, and the thing most likely to build it is the story layer, not a louder argument.
That's the honest shape of the thing. The men have the eyeballs and a shrinking share. The women have a rising share of a number that barely exists yet. Both problems are about media — and only one of them is difficult. The sixteen is real. Most of the gap is not defensible; a real, smaller part of it is. Where this piece could still be wrong, that's been said plainly rather than buried.