Jobs for the boys: The loophole at the centre of amateur football’s recruiting arms race

The Victorian Amateur Football Association may be a non-professional league, but its chief executive is well aware of the corporate heavyweights who skirt the sidelines.

Ask Jason Reddick about the ties between the University Blues and one big business in particular, and he doesn’t even need to hear the whole question.

“Powercor,” he interjects, “yeah.”

The Blues’ president and secretary, Tim Rourke and Scott Russell, are respectively chief executive and general manager of corporate affairs at CitiPower and Powercor – Victoria’s largest electricity distributor – where the team’s treasurer, under 19s coach and social representative have also worked.

But it is the fact this corporate link is reflected on-field that has raised eyebrows among opposition clubs and players, with some questioning whether the Blues might be leveraging job opportunities at the company to help recruit top players, in lieu of being able to pay them.

At least seven of the Blues’ 66 players who have taken the field for the seniors since 2024 are current or former employees of CitiPower and Powercor. Another – the team’s captain, former Essendon backman Martin Gleeson – is employed at CitiPower and Powercor subsidiary Beon Energy. At least two more are employed at one of CitiPower and Powercor’s major contractors, Locale Civil.

The Age has counted at least another 10 senior players, including ex-AFL talent like Ayce Cordy and Josh Green, and two senior coaches who have worked for either CitiPower and Powercor or its subsidiaries since 2018.

Many started working there around the time they joined the Blues, according to their LinkedIn profiles, in roles such part-time analyst, head of vegetation management, and health improvement coach.

Clubs in the amateur league are not allowed to give players any form of payment or reward that could induce them to join. But they are broadly allowed to assist, or even facilitate, employment opportunities for their players, provided the job is not linked to the club’s operations and the wage is not above the “market rate”.

In that gap between impermissible player rewards and permissible job assistance, a potential loophole is born, which could also raise questions for hiring practices at companies associated with VAFA clubs.

Rourke, for his part, categorically denies the Blues have ever directly incentivised a player to join by offering them a job at the energy distribution company or its affiliates, saying if anything it was the other way around. With over 2000 people employed at CitiPower and Powercor, he said getting quality people to fill those roles was a constant challenge.

“We try to get people to the footy club that are valuable to people at work,” Rourke said.

“We’ve had people at work say we need more people like [four-time best-and-fairest] Ross Young, like Marty Gleeson.”

Rourke said every footballer or coach they had ever employed at CitiPower and Powercor had possessed a relevant degree and skill set, and gone through rigorous interviews and tests before being taken on.

He also said several players had only worked for short periods, which he described as essentially “work experience”, doing odd jobs like fitting out trucks.

CitiPower and Powercor declined to comment.

While the Blues are adamant that they do not use jobs to recruit players, the situation highlights the grey area in an amateur league filled with high-flying members and sponsors.

Reddick said it was more than fine for clubs to help their players secure jobs, and even to promote their networks as a selling point for prospective recruits.

But whether it is permissible for a club to directly incentivise someone who is not a current player to sign on by offering them a job at an affiliated company is less clear.

The league has previously stipulated that a player’s employment could not be “dependent on playing for the club”, but that line is absent in the latest version of the amateur status rules.

Declining to be “pinned down on hypotheticals”, Reddick said if a quid pro quo arrangement was explicit in a contract, it would likely be flagged when the player came before the permit committee – which all “high-end” ex-AFL/VFL footballers must do – and potentially merit further investigation.

“A long-held part of the appeal of the VAFA is networks, and that it’s a ‘who knows who’,” he explained.

“But they’ve got to be at arm’s length. So if there is a direct connection between the two, yeah absolutely VAFA would look at it.”

The Age is not suggesting the Blues have breached the rules, rather highlighting that the rules themselves are opaque and difficult to oversee the enforcement of. At the end of the day, the length of an arm is subjective.

And while it is unlikely to be explicitly written into any contracts for the exact reason that it might set off the watchdog’s alarm bells, the VAFA clubs and current and former footballers The Age has spoken to have almost unanimously confirmed that such quid pro quo arrangements do occur on a handshake basis.

The Age reached out to all 10 premier A-grade senior men’s teams in the VAFA. Of the seven teams that responded, four said they had used specific job opportunities – not just the broad promise of access to professional networks – to incentivise players to sign on. Six of the seven believed other clubs were doing the same thing. The Age is not suggesting wrongdoing by these clubs.

Several pointed out it was usually not the only factor in a player’s decision, and often not even the biggest factor, but the consensus was that job opportunities were among the few tools available to VAFA clubs to attract players. A few said they had dedicated team members and even whole committees focused on building jobs networks to connect current and prospective players with opportunities, as well as providing career support.

On their website, Old Trinity Grammarians actively invite “members and supporters with potential job opportunities for current players or future recruits” to get in touch, while Old Xaverians have a dedicated jobs’ portal for players and the club community. This year, more than one-third of senior men who have played for them have worked for one or more of the club’s sponsor companies.

Old Xaverians president Michael Logan said he was not aware of specific examples of jobs-for-recruits arrangements as he was relatively new to the role, having only been elected late last year.

But he said he did not think it was “outside the spirit or the letter of the rules”.

“If they were seeking employment, we’d help. It is something ex-AFL players are often looking for,” Logan explained, given the need for them to quickly build up a professional CV.

University Blacks president Patrick Barry said his team did lean on professional networks to an extent to aid recruitment, but it was not a quid pro quo arrangement, and culture, location and mentorship opportunities were also important drawcards.

“Private schools have a fountain of youth. So for us attracting players is hard. We don’t have the old boy network … and when you don’t pay players, you do have to talk about networks,” he said.

“We haven’t had much success recruiting ex-AFL players, though, so maybe we’re doing things wrong.”

One A-grade club president, who did not wish to be named for fear of backlash from other clubs, said while every club leveraged job opportunities where they could, including his own, some had more extensive, wealthier networks than others – and some, he believed, took it further than they should, including offering top-tier players jobs at inflated rates.

“That’s always been the suspicion – and whether [the players] are even doing the jobs or not,” he said.

“It’s pretty clear that questions need to be asked.”

It is a suspicion validated by a former AFL player who spoke to The Age on the condition of anonymity for fear of alienating VAFA connections. He said he had been amazed at the resources amateur clubs were willing to throw at him and former teammates, including job opportunities at the companies of wealthy club-affiliated businessmen, often paying what he believed to be inflated rates.

He said non-VAFA country and suburban clubs offering “silly money” to players – often well above their salary caps – put an even higher premium on top-tier talent and forced amateur teams to up the ante.

Reddick said if anyone had evidence of rules being breached, they could submit an anonymous tip-off to the league’s independent integrity division. He said he was not aware if any had been submitted pertaining to this issue as they would only be made known to him if escalated.

The most recent figures The Age could find on the VAFA website show 32 complaints were made to the integrity unit in 2017, 60 per cent of which related to amateur status.

Ultimately, Reddick said it was almost impossible for the VAFA to have complete oversight of dozens of clubs and thousands of players – a fact apparent in the range of gripes which emerge in conversations with clubs. Like the fact the points system – which puts some limits on team line-ups based on player experience – favours the “old boys” high schools, and full-time scholarships worth tens of thousands of dollars seem not to count as rewards that would undermine amateur status. Some clubs have state-of-the-art facilities, some do not even have change rooms for their women’s teams.

But the sacrosanct nature of amateur status – and whether it is being defiled – stands out as one of the concerns longest grappled with, as former footballer Peter Karvelis can attest.

In 1981, the University Blues were relegated following reports he was being paid to play.

Karvelis, who made a splash by quickly booting 100 goals in a season, said people struggled to believe someone who had been paid to play would opt to return to amateur ranks, and players sometimes resented coming up against him. He said while he was sometimes given petrol money to drive to games as he lived a distance away, that was the extent of it, and he had genuinely wanted to play for the love of the game.

Karvelis told The Age this week VAFA had never even interviewed him about it. In fact, this was the first time anyone had asked him about it since.

And perhaps therein lies the problem with the league – there are lots of rumours, some of which may be just that, but without these questions being asked they will never be put to bed.

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