Premier of South Australia Peter Malinauskas with AFL CEO Gillon McLachlan at the launch of Gather Round at Adelaide Oval.Credit:AFL Photos
They said the players would be paid on a pro-rata basis,meaning that every player would get paid in proportion to his 2023 salary.
The clubs would spend the remaining $250,000 on football staff,with the AFL boosting the soft cap on football department spending by that amount. The soft cap had been slashed from nearly $10 million before the pandemic to between $7 million and $8 million in 2023.
The large,one-off increase in clubs’ salary caps is the result of the millions that the AFL has reaped by creating the Gather Round –based on a similar initiative of the NRL – in South Australia and of the huge ticket sales for the nine matches,six of which will largely fill the Adelaide Oval.
The salary cap for every AFL club is $13.54 million and so the increase will boost the player payments for each club to more than $14 million.
All tickets to the Melbourne v Essendon game on Saturday afternoon and the subsequent Port Adelaide v Western Bulldogs at night – the first of two double-headers at Adelaide Oval – have been sold. Richmond and Sydney are playing in another high-stakes clash at Adelaide Oval on Friday night.
There are only about 300 tickets left for the later Sunday double-header,which starts with Geelong v West Coast (1.10pm Melbourne time) and then concludes with Collingwood’s huge clash with the unbeaten St Kilda (4.50pm Melbourne time).