On Tuesday, the Australian Football League (AFL) announced a new six-year collective bargaining agreement with its players, for the first time linking their wages to the league's revenue after the fashion of Australian cricket's existing MOU, signed in 2012. Paul Marsh, the former Australian Cricketers' Association chief executive who was central to that MOU, left to join the AFL in 2014, and is uniquely placed to comment on the ongoing pay dispute between CA and Australia's cricketers.
Having just completed the AFL deal, what's your perspective on where the cricket negotiation is at?
They don't even appear to be at first base from my understanding of it. With CA not supplying financial information to the ACA it is very hard for them to negotiate a deal. That's how I see it at the moment.
The AFL deal has been reported as being imminent for a long time yet it still took time to finalise. What are your thoughts on CA's lead negotiator Kevin Roberts going on a roadshow to state squads less than two weeks from the expiry of current MOU?
Wouldn't you think his time would be better spent getting in a room with the ACA, giving them the information, and actually start moving on this? Our agreement has taken a long time to get to where it has got to, and it's taken us five weeks just to draft the agreement - how these guys get this thing done in the next nine days and mitigate all the risks that come with it not being done, it's hard to comprehend how it could happen.
You mentioned financial information as an issue - how is that a problem for the ACA in trying to reach a deal?
No players' association can responsibly represent its members if you don't understand what the financial forecasts look like. Historically CA - and the last MOU in 2012 was the best - gave us incredibly detailed and rigorous financial forecasts for their business, for the state associations and for the BBL teams. The reality of it is that your forecasts will end up being different to your actual results, almost by definition it is impossible to look five or six years into the future and get that absolutely right.
But in CA's case they have to be accountable to something, and that's why the percentage model is so important. If the actual revenues of the industry end up being different to what the forecasts are, then you've got something you can tie the players' payments to. A share of revenue could be more or less than what it has been, that's all part of the discussion, as is what goes in and what goes out, but it's about tying what the players get to the actual revenues of the game rather than what the forecasts are.
There's no accountability for CA if they don't. They can give you whatever set of numbers they want to give you, and if they end up being significantly inaccurate - as they have been for every MOU negotiation since 1998 - then the players are getting shortchanged. Right now CA aren't even giving the ACA a set of forecasts. That to me is fundamental, and all CA have done is lost the trust of the entire playing group because it looks like they're trying to hide something.
What was the AFL's attitude to information sharing?
I think there's an acknowledgement from the AFL that they want to do a long-term deal with us for industry stability, but they understand it is impossible for us if we're being responsible to tie what the players get just to a set of forecasts. They understand that point, and the second that players keep talking about in both sports is partnership. Incentivise us with a model that helps us to both grow the game together. Our model isn't where the cricket model is currently at because we've got 28% of forecast revenue, 28% of the AFL upside and only 11.2% of the clubs' upside. The ACA at the moment have roughly a 26% share of everything.
The club piece is a bigger challenge in the AFL but that's all up for discussion. The principle of tying player payments to the industry is common to both models now. We think we'll end up getting a better result for the players and the game, and that's the galling part of what's going on at the moment in cricket. Surely the players are going to get a lot more money in this MOU through the percentage model, or the review mechanism as we're calling it in the AFL, but let's not lose sight of the fact that for every dollar the players get, the game gets three. Why are they [CA] trying to strip that off? It smacks of pure greed.
"I'm incredibly frustrated, as someone who did the last deal and helped convince the players to put $20 million of their own money [from the 2015 World Cup] back into growing the game. Yet the very next MOU the players are told 'we don't want to give you this revenue percentage anymore'."
When you left the ACA in 2014 the game's landscape had already changed enormously due to Twenty20 tournaments and that process is only getting faster. Are you surprised to see this sort of dispute arise when players have more choice than before? Certainly more than AFL players have.
I think it's crazy. For the services of players, cricket is now a seller's market. The players can choose where to go, and that's a reality the AFL doesn't have, players can't pick up their trade and go somewhere else. But the cricketers can, and for the majority of countries now they can make a lot more money doing that than playing international cricket. I think international cricket is at risk of falling over if the big countries have a period for whatever reason where they don't play international cricket.
Nearly all successful professional sports are club-based, cricket is now half-and-half and could very quickly become a club-based sport. There are some parts of the cricket model at the moment that don't work for players - say the best player in the world is a West Indian or a New Zealander, what they get for playing for their country may well be less than what an Australian state cricketer gets. So to think they are not going to chase the T20 dollars and get paid what they're worth is just complete naivety. It seems to me that CA are at risk of pushing the players down that path.
The other thing I find incredible is that CA relies on its commercial partners to generate income, and they as of next week no longer have the players locked away from the perspective of protecting their commercial partners. It's a slippery slope to companies saying 'we don't want to invest in cricket because of the risk here, because players can go off and do things with our competitors', then the whole business model of cricket falls over. Stability and certainty means everyone knows where they stand, CA can go away and do commercial and broadcast deals and organise tours. If they haven't got that, from a business standpoint it's chaos. That's the thing where you look at it and think 'how could it get to that point?'.
One of CA's major arguments against revenue sharing is that they say it becomes very difficult to invest in new projects when a percentage of all investment must go to players. How can that issue be addressed?
The ACA has historically been responsible. If CA have put arguments around needing flexibility around the revenue-sharing model in order to invest in the game, all I'm hearing from the ACA is 'we're happy to talk about that'. And it can be negotiated, you can exclude certain revenue streams, and we've done that with the AFL deal like in the case of Etihad Stadium. We've given the AFL a six-year exclusion to take any money they generate from Etihad that won't go into our pot.
If the clubs make money from it that will be included, but that's giving them [the AFL] a chance to pay off that investment, and hopefully beyond six years everyone will benefit from that. I think any players' association will look at good arguments and work those things into the model. But the argument is 'we don't want to give you a share of the upside because we might want to spend it, and we're not going to give you the forecasts because we don't want to'.
I think it is impossible for a responsible players' association to do a deal on that basis. Certainly if I was in the ACA's shoes I couldn't possibly consider anything more than a one-year deal, and even that would have to be under the principle of revenue share - it is just too open to be gamed. CA have all the information, they know what the future looks like as their best guess, and they won't even share that. It is incumbent on CA to put the details to the ACA to try to work through what sorts of investments they want to make.
Another issue is the adjustment ledger. CA have said it is reasonable to take adjustment-ledger money from the current MOU into the next one because that is what happened in 2012. Why was it done then?
We did a one-year rollover deal for 2011-12, and it was a season with an India tour. We could have paid the players 26% of the money from that year, but what would have happened was a massive increase for that one year, and then a decrease for the next year and so on. It was only done that way so the player payments were evened out rather than what would have been irresponsible and unfair to most of the players, spiking one year then going down the next.
I'm incredibly frustrated, as someone who did the last deal and helped convince the players to put $20 million of their own money [from the 2015 World Cup] back into growing the game. The players took a very responsible decision to invest back into the game. There wouldn't be another professional sport in the world where the players took that decision, yet the very next MOU the players are told 'we don't want to give you this revenue percentage anymore'. I find that incredibly disrespectful and unprofessional in my view.
We negotiated that share of revenue fair and square, and the players could have put all of that money in their pocket, and they didn't. That shows how serious the players were about this partnership, so to then have that thrown back in their face... For CA to use money from this MOU that the players have earned - despite the fact they've given $20 million back - and then try to say 'we're going to take more money out of what we have to pay you and put it into the next deal', it's just contemptible from where I sit.
When you left cricket in 2014, did you have much of an idea that CA was moving in this direction in terms of what it wanted out of the next MOU?
I was certainly conscious of [CA chairman] David Peever's business history. I knew David's philosophies were anti-union, or not seeing the need for a union, which perhaps is a lack of understanding for the difference between a players' association and a normal employee-type union. There's differences in 100% membership, players being through these fights before and being incredibly united. I had an inkling there may have been a change coming from CA, but there certainly won't be one from the players. The irony of what's going on right now is it will only make the playing group stronger and more united.
In terms of the changes CA are seeking, the AFLPA was coming from a similar perspective in terms of wanting to change a system that had existed fairly consistently for a number of years. How did you go about that?
CA wanted to change the model, as we [the AFLPA] did, and we had to take the AFL on that journey together. I don't think CA have done that at all with the players. You'd think they'd be saying 'guys this is what it all looks like, these are our concerns with the model, we want to meet with you and discuss it'. Instead it looks like 'here's our deal, we're not going to discuss the financials, take it or leave it'. It's laughable, and if they think they're going to change the players' minds now, it just shows how far removed they are from the players' psyche. By trying to work around the ACA, all they've done is make the ACA stronger - the players appoint them and pay them to look after their interests so they don't have to get involved in all this. By going to the players direct they've almost done the ACA's job for them. It defies belief.
So what do you think happens next?
There's no doubt the players have got very strong resolve here. I can't see a deal done before June 30, so from that point the players become uncontracted, the commercial rights fall away, and potentially we'll see players going off and doing their own commercial deals, looking for opportunities in tournaments overseas. I think the big tipping point here will be the India tour. If the players haven't got contracts then, from where I sit that would be one they shouldn't go on. They'll effectively be locked out, it won't be a strike.
CA's approach here is purely and simply trying to bully the players into an outcome that CA want. 'We won't give you the financial information, we won't give you this model, here's our deal, take it or leave it' - that's been the approach to this point. How can it possibly be seen as a 'win/win' here? I can't see how, and from a human-behaviour perspective you just ask who's going to agree to that then, how will the players say 'we're happy with that deal' and the same for CA. It's now a win/lose scenario and in my experience, if you're going to have a relationship with someone, win/lose just doesn't work.
Do you have a different perspective on where cricket is at having been removed from it for a few years and involved in a rival sport?
Cricket's not going that well that it can afford to throw itself open to this. As much as CA will claim it is Australia's favourite sport and all that, now I've been removed a bit, it doesn't get the column inches that other sports get, it isn't necessarily in the consciousness of the Australian public like it used to be, and I just think it is a very dangerous game to play.