Weekly Times |THE merit of one of the categories under AFL Victoria's proposed points system has been questioned by one of the members of the working party charged with developing it.
The points system is one aspect of AFL Victoria's club sustainability program to address player payment concerns and is being trialled around the state.
The system allocates points values to players based on the standard they have played at, and other factors may lead to points being added or subtracted.
One of the categories covers "premium community players", classified as players who in the past three years have finished in the top five in their club's best-and-fairest — or top 10 in the case of their league — or been their club's leading goalkicker with a minimum of 40 goals.
Recruits who fall into this category start off worth four points.
AFL North East Border region general manager John O'Donohue, one of the members of the working party, said the category was not used when the points system was applied to the senior players in the competitions he oversees.
Points values for players in the Ovens and Murray, Ovens and King, Upper Murray, and Tallangatta and District leagues are being processed.
O'Donohue said his hub would "question the value of" the category, and it was hard to apply it without all the relevant information.
"We don't see a lot of those types of players jumping around so we'd just question whether it's worth actually having in there," O'Donohue said. "For the amount of work we've got to do to go through players and find where they've been and tracking their best-and-fairest wins, we didn't include it."
The other two region general managers on the working party, AFL Barwon's Lee Hartman and AFL Central Victoria's Paul Hamilton, said the category was being used in trials by clubs in their regions.
Hamilton said no major problems had been reported in the case of the category, but all three men stressed it was still within the trial phase.
"If you're taking one of the best players out of any club then he should be worth more points than one of your standard players you are taking from a club," Hamilton said.
It's proposed that recruits will gain a point if they have transferred to more than two clubs in the previous three years. The working party has not decided whether that penalty point will apply to players who stay at their current club into the 2016 season, regardless of their transfer history.