STRUGGLING clubs spending money on high-altitude overseas training camps has come under fire from Collingwood as the equalisation discussion heats up.
Magpies president Eddie McGuire said watching money being spent on such trips by clubs also receiving AFL handouts was a concern for profitable clubs who were expected to share their revenue.
Although the camps can be funded using various means, including corporate dollars, McGuire used them as an example to voice his concern about decisions some clubs were making.
He feared that some clubs might lose their incentive to remain independent if equalisation policies were not considered carefully.
"It seems to be a welfare-state mentality, as opposed to how do we all band together for the good of the competition and for all clubs by growing the competition," McGuire told radio station SEN on Tuesday.
"I'm for equalisation, but what I don't want it to become the end of people having aspiration."
Speaking on SEN on Wednesday, Western Bulldogs president Peter Gordon rebuffed the notion that money spent on overseas altitude trips should be used to question the level of revenue sharing.
He said the Bulldogs' players paid for much of the club's trip to Colorado and, in any event, the cost would represent about 0.02 percent of the club's total revenue.
"When clubs are losing millions of dollars it's not because of trips to Colorado, it's because they don't make enough money," Gordon said.
"They don't make enough money because they don't get the sponsorship opportunities because of their size, they don't get the membership and the gate and, particularly for the ones at Etihad Stadium, they start the year at least a million dollars behind [other clubs] because of the stadium deals."
McGuire had said the ambition should be to find new revenue sources, or ways to maximise existing opportunities, rather than just redistributing existing money.
"How do you make more money from the available sources there? Let's not jam it on to the supporters. [Let's think] how do we get better results out of TV? How do we get better results out of sponsors? Those are the things we should be doing for equalisation," McGuire said.
The AFL has restructured a beverage deal with its drinks partners and proposed a gate levy to raise extra revenue that will be shared among clubs under equalisation.
Collingwood CEO Gary Pert told radio station 3AW he supported equalisation but there needed to be transparency in spending from clubs who were dependent on financial assistance from the AFL.
"The AFL needs to put all spending under scrutiny because that is the condition of receiving this extra financial assistance and that is certainly an area that should be explored by the AFL," Pert said.
However Gordon said the AFL was behind other major US professional competitions in relation to the way revenue was shared. The discussion needed to move away from the notion that all clubs were going to be equal, to a point where the reason behind each club's financial position was recognised, he said.
"Every major competition has recognised that there is a balance to be struck between letting the clubs be big clubs … and sharing the revenue in a way which permits the smaller franchises economically to continue to compete," Gordon said.
Powerful clubs remain concerned that ideas to limit football department spending will rein in innovation, while the AFL wants to slow what it considers to be an inflationary trend in football department spending.
Many are also concerned clubs have wasted money paying out contracts to coaches sacked before the end of their tenure.
Gordon argued that every club, regardless of its size, will have management issues from time to time, and stuck to the orthodoxy that it was historically smaller support bases that led to revenue differences rather than management.
"This is about the recurrent inability of smaller franchises to make the amount of money they need by themselves in order to be competitive," Gordon said.
Some ideas being floated are taxes on football department spending or caps on the number of personnel employed in football departments however the conversation remains open-ended.
Work is continuing to measure the minimum expenditure clubs need to make in their football department to remain competitive.
AFL CEO Andrew Demetriou said last week that although ways to contain football department spending were being discussed, nothing had been decided.
"We can't just continue to see costs spiral out of control," Demetriou said.
Most consider paying 100 per cent of the salary cap to be an essential first step.
AFL CEOs discussed equalisation on the Gold Coast last week, with a working party once again reporting on progress.
AFL.com.au understands about 80 percent of the discussion was to be on ideas to grow revenue to spread among the competition while about 20 percent of the focus was to be on ways to curb the inflationary trend.
