A Community Club Sustainability Program working party endorsed caps remaining the same for the 2022 campaign as what was initially set for the 2021 season.
The cap for the Goulburn Valley League will be set at $125,000.
"It is appreciated that community leagues have co-operated in maintaining caps into the 2022 season in an uncertain time, despite some leagues and clubs having capacity to increase," AFL GM commercial and operations manager Zara O'Keeffe said.
"This is a display of unity amongst community leagues, which puts the interests of the game and returning to play in 2022 as the highest priority and is much appreciated."
The AFL GM Commission is confident these caps will continue to remove much of the pressure and burden of fundraising from the shoulders of already hard-working volunteers and will allow clubs to prepare for future seasons with greater financial viability and sustainability.
The commission also noted these figures were the upper limit of the total allowable player payments, with clubs able to make their own decisions within their budget constraints about their player payments being less than these caps.
"Aligning with the objectives of the AFL Victoria APP policy, these limits will assist in clubs attracting and maintaining the interest of players, supporters, volunteers and sponsors and ensure that teams are as strong and as well matched financially and on field as possible," AFL GM Commission chair Peter Foott said.
"It is important that ‘stronger’ clubs do not obtain an unfair proportion of top players at the expense of other clubs, particularly following another season that has seen leagues and clubs hit with reduced home-and-away games and the cancellation of finals in many of our region's leagues.
"We are pleased that all leagues were prepared to maintain the same caps in 2022 following the reduction to caps in the region that was made following the COVID-19 impact."
In the last completed season in the region — 2019 — the GVL ($175,000) had a higher cap, before a collective reduction was agreed on once the 2020 campaign was cancelled.
The 2021 limits eventually finished much lower than the initial caps — with changes made for the recently scuppered campaigns to reflect the interrupted seasons.
This has significantly reduced the number of games each league was able to stage — and the allowable player payment limits of each have been adjusted to reflect that.
An amendment to an allowable player payment clause was adopted to read as follows:
“Should a round or multiple rounds of fixtured matches be cancelled in a football league, the allowable player payments for a club in the relevant football league shall immediately be recalculated on a pro-rata basis of the revised fixtured matches for that season relative to a normal season of fixtured matches.”
What this means is that each round in every league has been assigned a numeric value and the limit for 2021 has been reduced by the sum of that number multiplied by the amount of abandoned rounds.
The GVL completed 11 rounds this season. A typical full campaign is 18 rounds, giving a pro-rata round value of $6944.44 — $125,000 divided by 18 — which can then be multiplied by seven to find the cap reduction for this year.
It puts the allowable player payment total for GVL clubs in 2021 at $76,388.92.
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