ONCE a week, Brisbane's Brownlow medallist Lachie Neale will be out on the training field helping young Lion Deven Robertson up-skill his game.

How to gather ground balls, how to position his body at stoppages, how to handball more efficiently on both sides of his body.

It doesn't stop there. Neale will watch vision with the second-year midfielder, taking him through the good and bad of the previous week's game and analysing upcoming opposition.

Neale is one of 10 Lions taking part in a coach education program established by Chris Fagan and head of development Scott Borlace.

Brisbane introduced the program – where players have essentially become development coaches – to mitigate against the financial losses felt by all football departments this year.

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The 'soft cap' for clubs to spend on their football programs – which includes everything from coaches to doctors, welfare, physiotherapists, recruiters, dieticians and analysts – was slashed from $9.5 million to a touch over $6 million.

Senior coaches in particular have been vocal in the past two months as life with a reduced workforce hits home halfway through the season.

The Lions have lost two development coaches (despite every coach agreeing to a pay cut), a physio, sports scientists, an analyst and dietician – none of whom have been replaced.

Fagan told AFL.com.au the decrease in staff numbers and budget had not led to a decrease in workload.

"It's very hard to undo what's been done in terms of what our football departments have developed into," Fagan said.

"You don't forget it. You know what you've been offering.

"We're still trying to not only offer the same program, but improve it, with less people in coaching, with less people in fitness, with less people in medical; we're still trying to do a better job.

"It's very naive to think just because we've got $3.5 million less to spend in our football department, we'll put in $3.5 million less effort to do our jobs.

"We haven't backed off a skerrick, we're still trying to find ways to get better."

Some little things, like pre-season training camps, have been lost. Some other things are bigger.

No sports scientist to track GPS data on players at training – something many clubs see as crucial to injury prevention – means others from Brisbane's high-performance team now pick that skill up.

The coaching fraternity has been out in force in recent weeks to highlight its concerns.

Sydney's John Longmire said the reductions were more like a cut with a chainsaw than a trim with a knife.

Geelong's Chris Scott said the environment was "unsustainable", while Luke Beveridge suggested the senior coach's salary should sit outside the cap to allow more jobs inside it.

While the final figure for the 2022 season is yet to be settled on by the AFL, Fagan said he hoped it landed closer to $7.5 million for each team.

The AFL has been in discussions with a mix of CEOs, CFOs, coaches and football managers from each club as it tries to settle on a figure.

"I think we all understand it needed to happen in light of COVID and all the uncertainty around finances in the game, but it seems like it was out of whack to the hits the other parts of the game have taken," Fagan said.

"We are responsible for producing the product.

"Cut it by 20 per cent, to $7.5 million, we could probably manage. Even if that was over two years.

"What can we cut it back to so that the product is not threatened?"

Fagan's concerns lie both with the product and the toll it takes on individuals.

He says with development coaches copping the brunt of the cutbacks, the pathway to assistant and senior coaching has now been interrupted.

The chances of the next Brendon Bolton – going from development, to assistant coach, to the top job – are reduced.

Fagan estimates Brisbane's coaching staff put an average of 60 to 70 hours a week into their job, at a minimum.

As he prepares for an 'opposition meeting' – to discuss that weekend's opponent – Fagan will now edit his own vision and regularly source statistics ahead of addressing the team.

This used to be the job of an analyst.

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"I'm lucky. It's just my wife and I. I can spend as much time in footy as I like," he said.

"The other blokes here are married, got kids, got mortgages, got school fees, other things in their life. We're asking them to do more for less.

"I don't know the individual toll of that.

"I feel like in the next two or three years there's going to be a bit of an exodus of really good people lost to the game.

"Those in power might say 'so be it', but these people have invested a lot of time and effort to become experts at what they do, so if they are lost to the game, that's a tragedy, I think."

AFL football operations boss Steve Hocking recently told Melbourne radio station SEN that all sectors of the game had taken a hit.

He said it was incumbent on everyone to understand they need to potentially do things differently now.

"That soft cap, we're only six months into it – we need a whole season to understand it," he said.

"They (clubs) are being heard and being well represented."

Hocking said in any business there was a risk of losing staff.

"There will naturally be people that make decisions based on what is best for their own circumstances," he said.

"What we're mindful of is making sure we're delivering a game that's inclusive of all, it's available and able to be accessed by a range of different players and coaches.

"It's not just coaches, we want to maintain elite competition."

Fagan agrees the issues don't just lie with the day-to-day operations of clubs at the elite level. He says his concerns extend to recruiting.

Adam Simpson has raised similar worries, saying it would be difficult to keep a player like Willie Rioli on the "straight and narrow" with less resources to do so.

"Are we going to stop making decisions around those blokes that are on the edge, character-wise?" Fagan said.

"Will there be potentially terrific AFL players lost to the game because clubs won't make ballsy decisions based on character, they'll go based on certainty?

"We all know the world's not fair, and this is not meant to be a sook-up, but it can't be lost on the people who make decisions, that the people who work in football departments, that produce the product that everyone is so happy with every weekend are paying a fair price at the moment for COVID – a bit more than what everyone else has paid.

"When things go wrong at footy clubs, who gets the boot? People in football departments. We have high-stress jobs and that shouldn't be lost on people.

"What happens in commentary around footy clubs when things aren't going well? It's not that the CEO isn't doing his job, or the marketing guy isn't doing his job, it's the coach or the coaching group or the fitness bloke or the medical bloke is no good.

"Just like the players, we're in the hotspot."