A reigning best-and-fairest at the centre bounce. An All-Australian defence. A key forward with 177 goals. One player prised from all 18 rival clubs — and the entire 40-man list still slides under the salary cap with change to spare, and a $5 million signing bonus sitting outside the cap, untouched. Every fan should look at this and think: hang on — a whole footy team, for that?
Here's the trick the whole build is stealing. The top of the market is a tiny, hyper-taxed shelf — only three players in the entire competition are valued at $2m or more. Step off that shelf and there's a deep pool of genuine AFL-standard footballers going for a third of the price. A $2m name returns maybe 1.3 times a $0.7m established player's output — for nearly three times the money. You're not buying football. You're buying the surname.
Tasmania just refuses to pay it. Eighteen established players — one from every rival — for $13.0m, about $0.72m a head. Spread the whole 40-man list out and it comes to roughly nine superstars' salary — stretched across forty bodies.
They bought the whole team and skipped the surname surcharge.
We didn't just add up the money. We ran the list through Actual Sport Intelligence — the same research we bring to winning teams across codes: structure, matchups, culture, the long game, the physical arc. Strip the salaries and there's a real team here, and the reasons it holds together aren't the ones on the price tag.
In the AFL you don't pay for footballers, you pay for famous. Only three players in the whole competition are valued at $2m or more; below that shelf sits a deep, cheap pool of genuine AFL-standard output. Tasmania's entire competitive spine — one established player from all 18 rivals — is bought there, at about $0.72m a head.
Seven key defenders reads like a bloated tall stockpile. As geometry it's the opposite — a deliberate over-supply that manufactures the free man in the one zone that decides modern footy: the defensive-half rebound. An intercept surplus guarantees turnover ball; two elite kicks in Wanganeen-Milera and Martin turn it into clean exits.
Key-position players take the longest to develop and break the most often, and they're the one line with no mid-season replacement market. Carrying seven is cheap fire insurance — about $0.6m a body — not waste. On a list this young, still adapting to senior loads, that redundancy is doubly correct.
Gold Coast and GWS flew marquees into markets they had no roots in, and watched them leave the moment a contract let them. Tasmania anchors its spine with three home-born players — Pearce, Mansell, McKercher. Belonging isn't a garnish here; it's the retention mechanism, and it never shows up in the salary column.
Honesty is the point. The same research found the flaws, and they're not small. This is a team with a glass jaw in the middle, and every rival coach will find it inside a quarter.
The redundancy is inverted — maximum cover at the position that self-covers, none at the one you can't fake. Seven key defenders (four can't crack the 22) sit behind three on the field; at ruck there is exactly one senior body with teenagers behind him. Every rival's plan writes itself: make it a ruck war and starve the midfield of first-use ball.
Strip the salaries and watch the real game. This is a genuine defensive fortress — but footy is won at the source, and behind Tom Green there is almost nobody to win contested ball. One prime bull, propped by two 32-year-olds. A back six that can't get the footy is just well-dressed spectators.
Young and cheap reads as pure energy. But energy is a bank account, not a renewable resource. Half the list is 18–22, so the rotation is kids; the lead-holding bodies are the oldest group on the list — exactly the legs a hard-running side burns first. Gold Coast, the older build, still conceded 100-plus in 14 of its first 22 games.
The average age climbs toward the top-four benchmark by 2031, which looks like a group maturing. It isn't — it's two halves that are never good at once. The veterans carry the early wins and retire exactly as the kids need them; the young core doesn't truly peak until 2033–34.
Better, for the same money? Almost every read said yes, and pointed the same way: sell one of the four spare key defenders, and buy the two things this list actually lacks — a second ruck and a genuine ball-winner for the coalface. Then fire the untouched $5m at one more bargain star. Same $18.4m, a real engine room.
Or cheaper? Strip the four glamour names — Wanganeen-Milera, Pearce, Morris, the McKercher trade — and you save $3.6m. You'd still field a reigning best-and-fairest, a 177-goal forward, four key backs and a ruck. But be careful what you cut: shave the home-born core or the spare talls and you rebuild the exact problem that cost Gold Coast and GWS 60–70% of their kids. Cheaper is easy. Coherent is the moat.
Same board, same $18.4m, every player's real contract and salary. Drag the magnets, run the cap, fix the ruck — or blow it all on one superstar and see what's left. Build a better Tasmania. Or a cheaper one. Then share your team sheet and make your mates argue.
Open the List Manager → Drag real player cards · live salary cap · share your 18The Devils will field a respectable side in 2028 almost regardless. Whether they field the right one — and whether you'd have done it better — comes down to how you'd spend the same eighteen-and-a-bit million. Go on. Prove it.