Profit Over Person: When AFL Clubs Treat Duty of Care as a Contractual Inconvenience
Australian football likes to describe itself as a family. Families do not ask a person with a history of concussion to accept legal responsibility for future brain trauma so everyone else can keep the show moving.
That is the allegation now consuming Geelong Football Club. According to ABC reporting, defender Jake Kolodjashnij entered a secret agreement with the club in 2024 under which he effectively assumed legal responsibility for future brain trauma, in an apparent attempt to protect the club and its medical staff from later court action.
The agreement was not lodged with the AFL or the AFL Players’ Association, and it emerged publicly only on 06 Aug 26.
Geelong’s board has now held a crisis meeting. Club captain Patrick Dangerfield says the club “buggered up”, former Geelong president and current AFL Commission chair
Craig Drummond has apologised and recused himself from the AFL’s assessment, while chief executive Steve Hocking has said there is not much the club would do differently. That last part should concern every director, executive and health and safety professional.
A club can concede that it created a secret arrangement affecting a player’s legal rights, fail to submit it to the bodies responsible for oversight, remove the waiver after public exposure, and still have its chief executive describe the failure as the troublesome one or two per cent surrounding an otherwise excellent organisation.
That is not mature safety governance, it is institutional self-regard wearing a club polo.
This is what profit over person looks like
“Profit over person” does not require minutes recording that a board deliberately chose money over a human brain. It appears whenever an organisation preserves performance, availability, competitive advantage, reputation or protection from liability by allowing the worker to carry the health consequence.
The AFL is a commercial sporting system, and players are the labour that produces its product. The fact that they are talented, highly paid, fiercely competitive and desperate to remain selected does not reduce the obligations owed to them. It increases the need for independent controls because their career, identity, income and loyalty can all push them towards accepting risks that the employer must still manage.
Calling that acceptance “agency” does not solve the problem. A worker can understand a risk and still be exposed to it unlawfully, just as a truck driver cannot sign away defective brakes and a factory worker cannot consent to an unguarded machine because production is behind.
A waiver is not a risk control. It does not reduce the frequency or severity of head impacts, improve diagnosis, strengthen medical independence, limit contact exposure or improve rehabilitation. It merely tries to change who carries the legal and financial consequences after the harm has occurred.
That is liability management, not health and safety management. The document does not control the hazard, it controls the organisation’s anxiety about being held responsible for it.
The law does not stop at the boundary line
Section 21 of Victoria’s Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004 requires an employer, so far as is reasonably practicable, to provide and maintain a working environment that is safe and without risks to health. It expressly includes safe systems of work, while section 22 requires employers, so far as is reasonably practicable, to monitor employee health and workplace conditions.
The Act’s principles are equally inconvenient for anyone hoping consent will do the heavy lifting. People who manage or control matters that create health and safety risks are responsible for eliminating or reducing those risks so far as is reasonably practicable, and employers are expected to act proactively.
No court or regulator has found that Geelong breached the OHS Act in relation to this agreement, and the AFL process remains underway as at 10 Aug 26. That qualification matters, but so does the legal reality that a private document cannot simply erase statutory health and safety obligations. The reported waiver is therefore not merely poor public relations or an administrative “misstep”; it raises a legitimate question about whether the club’s governance was directed towards controlling brain-injury risk or controlling future accountability.
Essendon already removed the excuse of ignorance
The AFL cannot claim this is unfamiliar territory. Essendon Football Club’s 2012 supplements program produced one of the clearest demonstrations that professional football clubs are workplaces and players are employees owed statutory protection.
On 28 Jan 16, Essendon pleaded guilty to two charges brought by WorkSafe Victoria and was convicted and fined $200,000 for failing to provide a safe working environment. The court found the program operated under a shroud of secrecy, disregarded player safety and exploited the youth and vulnerability of players who would have found it difficult to challenge senior figures. The magistrate described the conduct as an employer proactively doing something to its employees, through an injection program lacking proper medical controls, prescriptions and reliable records.
The club had already been fined $2 million by the AFL, removed from the 2013 finals and stripped of draft selections. Those sporting sanctions did not replace the OHS prosecution because internal competition rules and workplace safety law serve different purposes.
Essendon should have permanently killed the idea that elite sport exists in a special legal atmosphere where loyalty, ambition and medical consent forms can substitute for employer control. Apparently, the lesson had a shorter half-life than some of the substances.
The warning signs did not end with Essendon
On 01 Oct 22, WorkSafe Victoria confirmed it had commenced an investigation into historical allegations concerning the treatment of First Nations players at Hawthorn Football Club. The individuals named in public reporting denied wrongdoing, and the fact of an investigation must not be presented as a finding or prosecution. It nevertheless demonstrated that psychological health, discrimination and organisational conduct inside a football club can attract the same regulator attention as physical hazards.
Not every controversial club matter has resulted in enforcement. SafeWork SA investigated Adelaide Football Club’s 2018 pre-season camp and announced on 28 Sep 21 that it found no evidence of a breach of the Work Health and Safety Act 2012 (SA), then closed the investigation. That outcome is important because criticism should follow evidence, not team colours, and a regulator investigation is not a conviction.
On 14 Mar 23, the ABC reported that the AFL had told clubs WorkSafe Victoria closed an earlier concussion-management investigation on the basis that the league and Victorian clubs met or exceeded relevant workplace safety obligations. That was not a lifetime exemption. Safety duties are continuing, evidence changes, medical knowledge develops and systems must respond.
On 05 May 26, the AFL fined Carlton $75,000 after finding that Elijah Hollands should have been removed from play earlier during an acute mental health episode. The league said there were sufficient visual cues, performance data and knowledge of his individual circumstances, yet he remained on the ground until late in the final quarter.
The AFL then mandated full-time psychology capability and began developing psychological fitness-to-play guidance, which rather neatly confirms that the previous system was not adequate for the event that occurred.
WorkSafe Victoria is now conducting another investigation into the AFL over player safety and concussion management during contact training. ABC reporting states that a recent Four Corners investigation identified 33 Australian Rules players diagnosed post-mortem with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, while more than 100 former players are involved in concussion litigation alleging brain damage.
This is no longer an emerging risk. It is a known, grave and repeated occupational health issue sitting in full view of league executives, club boards, medical teams, insurers, players and regulators.
“We care deeply” is not evidence
Every club statement issued after a welfare failure seems to contain the same polished assurance that player wellbeing is the highest priority. Those words have no probative value unless budgets, authority, decisions and controls support them before the incident becomes public.
If player health is genuinely the priority, medical decision-making must be structurally independent of selection pressure and football department influence. Repeated head-impact exposure must be measured and reduced, health trends must be monitored, return-to-play decisions must be conservative, and any proposal affecting a player’s rights must receive competent legal, medical, OHS and worker-representative scrutiny before it is signed.
Boards should also be asking whether executives are reporting leading indicators or merely injury events. They need information on cumulative head-impact exposure, repeat concussions, symptom recurrence, time to recovery, medical overrides, disputed clearances, contact-training loads, player concerns and the adequacy of long-term support. A board that receives only a green dashboard and an assurance that protocols were followed is not exercising oversight; it is receiving comfort.
The AFL’s first instinct remains self-regulation
The AFL initially chose not to sanction Geelong, describing the matter as a “complex and unique case”. Only after public pressure did the league issue a belated “please explain”, while the club removed the waiver and the AFL chair apologised for his part in the arrangement when he was Geelong president.
Complexity is real in medicine, employment and professional sport. It is not an excuse for secrecy, unmanaged conflicts or documents designed to shift future consequences onto the person exposed to the hazard. Those are governance choices, and governance choices can be examined without pretending every difficult matter is medically simple.
The reported sequence creates dreadful optics: the club approved the arrangement, the arrangement remained undisclosed to external football oversight, the person who led the club at the time later became chair of the competition’s governing body, and that governing body’s first response was no sanction. Recusal after exposure is necessary, but it does not repair the control failure that allowed the conflict to exist.
Football does not need another lesson, it needs accountability
The AFL and its clubs have had the Essendon conviction, repeated concussion retirements, CTE diagnoses, coronial recommendations, litigation, insurance contraction, player testimony and multiple regulator investigations. They do not lack awareness. They lack a consistently demonstrated willingness to let player health override football imperatives when the decision is difficult and expensive.
The test is not whether a club can produce a signed form, a respected doctor, a compassionate media statement or a player saying they wanted to continue. The test is whether the organisation eliminated or reduced the risk so far as was reasonably practicable, preserved genuine medical independence, monitored health properly, consulted properly and made a decision it could defend without relying on the exposed person to absolve it.
If the AFL wants to call clubs families, it can start behaving like a responsible employer. Until then, “player welfare is our highest priority” belongs in the same cupboard as the mission statement, the crisis communications plan and the good intentions that apparently become operational only after someone leaks the paperwork. Real safety does not ask the worker to indemnify the system, it changes the system.
Source note
This article reflects publicly available information and legal status checked on 10 Aug 26. The Geelong and current WorkSafe matters remain unresolved, and no breach of the OHS Act by Geelong is asserted.
Primary and direct reporting sources include:
Of the club matters reviewed, Essendon is the confirmed WorkSafe prosecution, Hawthorn and Adelaide involved regulator investigations, Adelaide’s matter closed with no evidence of a breach, and the current WorkSafe inquiry concerns the AFL’s concussion management.
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