Tara Murray
Riddell District Football League clubs will have a salary cap of $85,000 next season.
The new cap is a decrease of $25,000 down from $110,000 for this year’s cancelled season.
Leagues across the state have had their salary caps slashed, with the impact and uncertainty due to COVID-19.
RDFL operations manager Jordan Doyle said the new cap falls in line with AFL Victoria’s recommendation for the league.
With the changed landscape of no football, the league was able to bring forward the usual announcement date from November to now, which will give clubs more planning time.
“We let them [the clubs] know a few weeks ago and we didn’t hear any feedback, which is usually a good thing,” he said.
Doyle said with changes to salary caps in neighbouring leagues, the system was much fairer for the RDFL clubs.
Under old salary caps, top divisions of metro leagues had more than double the amount of money to spend while lower division clubs also had a bigger salary cap than RDFL clubs.
Top divisions in metro leagues will now have a cap of $100,000 next year, in some cases half of the salary cap from 2020.
In the Essendon District Football League, division 1 has a cap of $85,000 and division 2 has a cap of $70,000.
In the Northern Football League, division 2 has a cap of $80,000 and division 3 has a cap of $60,000.
The Ballarat Football League also announced on Monday that its salary cap would be $100,000.
“Other leagues have been consistently higher and it makes it much fairer for our clubs,” Doyle said.
“We were comparing to EDFL division 2 clubs in the same area which were higher”
Doyle said they were expecting the salary decrease would close the gap between the bigger and smaller clubs in the league.
“Some clubs were struggling to get to $110,000.”
The league is yet to announce its player points for next season.
Doyle said they were still waiting for AFL Victoria to make a decision on whether listed players this year would drop a point for 2021.
