“$20 MILLION CONTRACT”: DAVIS’ BIG REID AND DARCY PREDICTION AFTER ANDREW CONTRACT NEWS
Gerard Whateley and Phil Davis have reacted to the eyewatering contract signed by Gold Coast’s Mac Andrew and predicted what it could do to the AFL player movement space.
The Suns officially revealed that Andrew is now tied to the club until at least 2030, but Nine’s Tom Morris is reporting that if he plays 60 games over the next five years, he’ll automatically trigger four more years on the deal – amounting to nine years overall.
Morris says that if he remains on that contract from 2026 to 2034 – given he was already signed for 2025 – he’ll earn more than $12 million.
Whateley laid out what he thinks Andrew will have to achieve over that stretch to live up to the biggest deal we’ve seen in footy.
“By the end of it, he’ll have to have won multiple best and fairests and he has to at least half the time been in the top three of the best and fairest,” Whateley said on SEN Mornings.
“I reckon he has to of been a four-time All-Australian, routinely been in the top 10 players in the competition and a key figure in a top-four team over a period of time.
“Is that too high a bar? Or a fair bar for the biggest contract we’ve seen.”
Davis thinks Whateley could be spot on, particularly if Andrew’s deal continues to rise in line with new Collective Bargaining Agreements.
He also thinks that it’s set a new bar for what clubs are willing to offer players and predicted that young guns Sam Darcy and Harley Reid will be the first to one day be offered deals worth $20 million+ over a long-term deal.
“If it’s a fixed percentage of the salary cap forever, you’re not far too wrong,” Davis told SEN Whateley.
“He’ll have to be the best player for Gold Coast I would have thought.
“I’ve always had a sneaky suspicion that they (Reid and Darcy) will be the first two players offered $20 million in some capacity.
“It might be 12 years for $20 million, but that doesn’t mean they’ll sign that one, that will be the offer to leave.”
With new bars constantly being set,
Davis thinks that other players who are considered future talents will try and get deals similar to that of Andrew’s.
“The scary thing is that we keep on getting a new bar set all the time, but for different types of players, so Sam Taylor comes out and sets the bar as the highest ever key back. Now we’ve got a bar for that,” Davis said.
“If you think you’re the best key back or you want to peg yourself to that, we’ve now got a new price.
“For example, Finn Callaghan comes out of contract at the end of next year, I would
Former St Kilda midfielder Seb Ross is hoping a club throws him an AFL lifeline in 2025.
The multi-time best and fairest winner was delisted at the conclusion of the 2024 season, something that he says caught him off guard. He played 13 games across the year, falling out of favour in the back-half.
“I wasn’t shocked by the decision. Being out of contract at this time of the year and being in the system for so long, I knew that that’s the way it could go, but the shock probably lied in how abruptly it ended,” Ross told SEN Breakfast.
When asked if the Saints could have handled his delisting better, given his service to the club, Ross said: “There’s probably somewhere in between”.
“I’ve always had empathy for the way guys have gone about dealing with this time of year. To be honest at footy clubs at this time of year when a lot of guys are out of contract it’s a pretty crap time of year.
“To experience that first-hand this year, it’s think if I was his manager, I’ve got a good thing to peg that against now (Andrew’s contract) – we’re getting new things to peg where everything goes.
“If you’re Harley Reid and Sam Darcy, you’ve got some big decisions to make in the long term.”
If Andrew is still at Gold Coast by the end of his deal, he’ll be 31 years old.
Multi-time best and fairest winner open to AFL lifeline after abrupt 2024 delisting
such an unknown time and I wasn’t sure which way it was going to go, I was certainly preparing for it to not go my way.
“It probably ended pretty quickly – I was just like wow.”
The 31-year-old says he would be keen on an opportunity elsewhere in 2025 if one presented itself.
“I don’t know the chances of it happening, but that was a discussion I was having with the Saints later in the year – that I still felt like I could go on and I wanted to play on and checking with the high performance staff and their metrics and I was still an above average midfielder in all the high-speed meters per minute numbers,” Ross said.
“The body is able and the mind is able, so
I’ve got to wait until after the trade period if there’s any list spots available, but I’d certainly be open to continuing on my career.”
Ross added that he is yet to speak to a rival club about potential 2025 opportunities. He played 211 career games for the Saints, winning the Trevor Barker Award in 2017 and 2019.