The 2012 AFL off-season signifies the beginning of a practice made common in the 4 major leagues in the United States, being imported into Australia’s game. The NBA, MLB, NFL and NHL all have the movement of significant players for money during the summer months as part-and-parcel of the back-page headlines.

But the question remains, will it belong in the AFL system, one used to trading players for players/ draft picks and from that going straight to the draft?

Names have been thrown around the media like paper planes in a classroom all throughout the regular season including Travis Cloke, Kurt Tippett and Travis Boak, all with the sentences their name is in usually ending with a word rhyming with “ousand” or “illion”. The ability for the management group of one team to catch a plane and speak to a player of another, is something never before seen in AFL circles, and therefore is flushed through the media at a rate of knots, ensuring everybody in the football world know abouts it. Will the players like how their names get bantered around the industry, as we’ve seen with all three of the players’ teams above forbidding any further talks of contract?

It seems as though the AFL has forgone any notion of taking “baby-steps” on their way to a system of free agency. They have gone straight from having only a trade week in which players can switch teams, to a period in the off-season where the team with the most salary cap room will catch the biggest fish. So will the system the players themselves bargained for fail or flourish?

Loyalty is a threatened object when free agency swoops in to make less-and-less players one-clubmen. A player at the age of 27 for example, one contract away from ensuring their status as a one-club player remains, may choose to leave their beloved club in favour of cash, and lots more of it. So which path will the players go down once confronted with the option of choosing between moral and money?

All these questions and more are dangling above all football fan’s heads, just waiting to be answered, and all that can answer them is time, a sport’s most valuable asset.

What are your thoughts?

Travis D