Geelong’s Secret Waiver Shows Head Office Still Ducking the Big One

Back in my day a bloke got his bell rung, the runner splashed a bit of water on him and he played out the quarter because that’s what you did, and I’ll admit now that was bloody stupid, but at least nobody was signing paperwork about it in a lawyer’s office. This week we found out a Geelong player put pen to paper two years ago on a waiver that would keep the club out of the gun in any future concussion lawsuit, and the AFL’s response has been about as forceful as a wet lettuce leaf.

A document nobody wanted us to see

Let’s call it what it looks like from the outside, because that’s all any of us punters have got. A Cats player, presumably under some pressure whether he’d admit it or not, signed away his right to come after the club down the track if his footy career leaves him with the sort of brain trouble we’re now seeing wreck blokes in their forties and fifties. The AFL says it’s a club matter. The AFLPA has made some noises. And Geelong, fair play to them for at least not pretending it didn’t happen, have gone quiet as a church mouse on the specifics.

I don’t reckon this is a Geelong problem specifically, mind you — I’d put good money on this sort of arrangement being more common round the competition than any club wants to front up and admit. But it was the Cats who got caught with it in the daylight, and it’s the Cats who are wearing it this week, fair or not.

Head office and the art of saying nothing

The AFL’s statement on this, if you can call it that, amounted to a shrug and a reminder that concussion protocols have improved. Mate, nobody’s arguing the protocols haven’t improved. The illegible interchange runners of old are gone, the doctors have more power to pull blokes off, the twelve-day rule exists. All good things. But none of that answers the actual question sitting in front of everyone’s face, which is: if a club can get a player to sign away his future legal rights before he’s even fully grown into his career, what exactly is the competition doing to make sure that never needs to happen in the first place?

This is the same head office that will fine a club fifty grand for a jumper clash and can find three separate tribunal members to argue about whether a bump was careless or negligent, but when it comes to the single biggest threat to the long-term welfare of the men who make them their billions, it’s all care and no responsibility. I’ve watched this competition — the old League, the VFL as I’ll always half call it out of habit — tinker with a hundred rules nobody asked for, from stand-the-mark to the six-six-six, and yet on the one issue that could genuinely end a bloke’s quality of life it goes quiet as a Sunday arvo in Barwon Heads.

What a waiver actually says about the game

You don’t ask a man to sign a waiver like that unless somewhere in the building someone’s already lawyered up for a fight they know is coming. That’s the uncomfortable bit. This isn’t a club looking after a player, this is a club looking after itself, and the AFL knowing full well these arrangements exist and doing nothing meaningful about it is head office looking after itself too. Everyone’s covering their own backside while the blokes out there taking the head knocks are left to find out in twenty years what it’s actually cost them.

I’m not saying the player was forced into anything, and I want to be fair here because we don’t know the full ins and outs of how that conversation went — maybe he had good advice, maybe he understood every clause. But you’d want to ask yourself how much real bargaining power a young fella on a rookie contract has when the club he loves and needs puts a document in front of him. That’s not exactly two equal parties sitting down at the table.

Plenty of old boys from my era reckon this whole concussion business is overblown, that footy’s always been a hard game and you cop what comes. I used to half agree. Then you watch some of these blokes struggling in their fifties and it stops being an abstract argument pretty quick.

The cost the game doesn’t want to pay

Here’s my grumble, and it’s been building a while. The AFL makes a motza off broadcast deals, off memberships, off merchandise with some kid’s face plastered on a hoodie, and yet when it comes to genuinely funding long-term studies, proper compensation schemes, real support for blokes who retire early with symptoms, the cupboard always seems bare. There’s always money for a new logo or a Gather Round junket to Adelaide, but ask for a serious concussion fund with teeth and suddenly it’s all working groups and reviews.

The true cost of concussion isn’t just the retirement payout or the insurance premium, it’s the bloke who can’t remember his kid’s birthday party at forty-five, or the one who’s had three seperate specialists tell him three different things about what’s wrong with his head. That’s the cost nobody wants on the balance sheet, and that’s exactly why a quiet waiver in a filing cabinet at Kardinia Park is so much more comfortable for everyone at head office than an honest conversation about liability.

What should actually happen now

If I were running the joint, and I know plenty of you will say thank god I’m not, I’d ban these sorts of individual waivers outright and set up one competition-wide standard covering every player at every club, funded properly out of League — sorry, AFL — coffers, not left to each club to sort out on the sly. You’d want an independent body, not stacked with league appointees, actually assessing long-term claims. And you’d want the AFLPA with real muscle in the room, not just issuing statements after the fact once the story’s already broken.

None of that’s radical. It’s just honest. But honest costs money and admits the game has a genuine problem it created over a hundred and thirty years of blokes belting into each other at high speed for our entertainment, and this competition has never been overly keen on admitting things cost it money.

The Carlton angle, for what it’s worth

I’ll declare my colours here same as always — I bleed navy blue and always will — and I’ve watched our own boys cop knocks over the years that still worry me now they’re retired. This isn’t a dig at Geelong specifically, much as it pains this old Blueboy to say a kind word about the Cats. It’s a dig at a competition that would rather manage the headline for a week than manage the actual problem for the next thirty years. Get it right, AFL, because the players deserve better than a waiver and a shrug.