How AFL Clubs Actually Make Money: Club Finances Explained
How AFL club finances work — the league distribution, membership, match day, sponsorship and the gaming revenue argument, with verified 2024 and 2025 figures.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Money18 min read
- Combined AFL and club revenue 2024
- About 1.944 billion dollars
- AFL distribution to clubs 2025
- About 461.5 million dollars
- AFL distribution to clubs 2024
- About 420.8 million dollars
- Average club revenue 2024
- About 75 million dollars
- Record club membership 2025
- 1,363,437 across the eighteen clubs
- Victorian club revenue 2025
- About 812 million dollars combined
- Clubs still holding gaming venues
- Four, across eight venues
- Player losses at club gaming venues 2024-25
- About 40.4 million dollars
AFL club finances rest on four streams: the league distribution funded mainly by broadcast money, membership and match day returns, sponsorship, and whatever non-football businesses the club happens to own. Across the eighteen clubs in 2024 those streams produced about 1.355 billion dollars in club revenue, which together with the AFL's own income took the industry past 1.944 billion. The average club turned over about 75 million dollars.
The important thing about AFL club finances is that the four streams are not weighted the same way at any two clubs. A club with a large membership and a favourable stadium deal might draw a quarter of its revenue from the AFL. A club without those things draws a great deal more, because the distribution model is deliberately unequal and pushes central money towards clubs carrying structural disadvantages. That is the whole point of it.
This page works through where the money actually comes from, why the league distribution is not split evenly, what a membership is really worth, why the stadium agreement matters more than the crowd figure, and the argument the competition has still not settled about the four clubs that continue to hold poker machine licences. For what clubs are allowed to spend on players, see the separate guide to the AFL salary cap; for the money that funds most of it, see AFL broadcast rights.
One framing is worth setting up first. An AFL club is not a business in the ordinary sense, because it cannot be sold, cannot relocate at will, cannot spend its way to a better team and does not exist to return capital to anyone. It is a licensed participant in a competition that deliberately caps its two largest costs and redistributes its largest revenue source. Read the accounts with that in mind and figures that look strange in a commercial context start to make sense.
The four pillars of a club balance sheet
Almost every dollar an AFL club earns arrives through one of four doors.
The AFL distribution is the club's share of central revenue, which in practice means mostly broadcast money plus league sponsorship and finals income. Membership and match day covers season memberships, general admission and reserved ticketing revenue that flows back to the club, and the club's share of catering and corporate hospitality under its stadium agreement. Sponsorship and marketing covers jumper sponsorship, category partners, signage, corporate functions and licensed merchandise. Non-football business covers everything else, which for some clubs is a leisure centre or a licensed venue and for four Victorian clubs still includes gaming rooms.
Across the nine Victorian clubs in 2025 those pillars produced roughly 812 million dollars of combined revenue, with about 207 million from AFL distributions, about 242 million from membership and match day, about 162 million from sponsorship and marketing, and the balance from non-football operations and investment income.
- Membership and match day29.8%
- AFL distribution25.5%
- Sponsorship and marketing20.0%
- Everything else24.8%
Combined revenue of the nine Victorian clubs, about 812 million dollars, split by reported category. The remainder line is non-football business, merchandise, investment income and one-off items rather than a single stream. Non-Victorian clubs have a different mix.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Membership and match day | 242 |
| AFL distribution | 207 |
| Sponsorship and marketing | 162 |
| Everything else | 201 |
What the AFL distribution actually is
The distribution is not a grant in the charitable sense. It is the clubs' collective share of revenue the AFL earns on their behalf and cannot practically split at the gate: the broadcast agreement, league-level sponsorship, finals gate revenue and the AFL's own commercial operations.
In 2025 the AFL distributed about 461.5 million dollars across the eighteen clubs, up from about 420.8 million the year before. That rise of roughly forty million dollars in a single year came from the first season of the current broadcast agreement, which is the mechanism by which television money reaches a football department. It does not arrive as a cheque from a broadcaster to a club. It arrives through the league.
Why the distribution is not split eighteen ways
If the AFL simply divided the pool evenly, the competition would still be lopsided, because the clubs do not start from the same place. Collingwood has a supporter base built over more than a century in the most football-saturated city in the country. Gold Coast is building one from scratch in a market that already has a rugby league club, an A-League club and a beach.
So the model has two parts. Every club receives an equal base amount, reported at roughly 12.2 million dollars per club in 2024. On top of that, a needs-based allocation goes to clubs carrying structural disadvantage. The average distribution across all eighteen clubs in 2024 was about 19.2 million dollars, comfortably above the base, which tells you how much of the pool is allocated unequally.
The names of these mechanisms have changed repeatedly. A Competitive Balance Fund was folded into what the AFL called an Annual Special Distribution, aimed at clubs with long-term structural revenue or cost disadvantages. Separate funds have supported facility development and debt reduction. The labels move; the principle does not.
| Victorian club | Reported 2025 AFL distribution |
|---|---|
| North Melbourne | About 28 million dollars |
| St Kilda | About 26 million dollars |
| Western Bulldogs | About 23 million dollars |
| Melbourne | About 22 million dollars |
| Victorian clubs combined | About 207.19 million dollars |
The pattern is readable at a glance. The clubs at the top of that table are the clubs with the smallest independent revenue bases, not the most successful clubs. In 2025 the Victorian clubs' distributions rose about 10.75 per cent on the previous year and made up roughly a quarter of their combined revenue.
Membership: the biggest single line for most clubs
Club membership set a record in 2025 at 1,363,437 across the eighteen clubs, up 3.26 per cent on the previous record of 1,319,687 set in 2024. Fourteen clubs posted their own all-time high in the same season.
That matters commercially well beyond the subscription fee. Membership and match day returns were about 395.5 million dollars across the competition in 2024, rising about 10.7 per cent year on year, and about 242 million across the Victorian clubs in 2025, roughly thirty per cent of their revenue. Collingwood draws close to forty-five per cent of its revenue from that category, which is the highest dependence in the competition and the reason its finances move so sharply with on-field performance.
A membership is also the club's most valuable commercial asset in a different sense. When a club sells a category sponsorship it is selling access to a verified, addressable, geographically concentrated audience that has already paid money to identify itself as a supporter. A club with 100,000 members is selling something a club with 40,000 members cannot.
What a membership actually buys
The tiers are broadly consistent across the competition. A full home game reserved seat package is the most expensive and guarantees a specific seat for every home match. A general admission home game package guarantees entry but not a seat. Interstate and country packages price access down for supporters who will attend rarely. Non-attending or "supporter" memberships carry no ticketing entitlement at all and exist purely for people who want the club to have their money and their number.
The non-attending tier is the one supporters underestimate. It is close to pure margin, it counts towards the membership figure that drives sponsorship value, and it moves a supporter up the priority queue when finals tickets are allocated. Clubs price it deliberately low for exactly those reasons.
Match day revenue and the stadium agreement
The single biggest misconception about AFL club finances is that a big crowd means a big payday. It does not, on its own. What a club earns from a home match is set by its stadium agreement.
Under a typical arrangement the venue retains a share of ticketing, and catering, corporate suites, signage and car parking are split according to terms negotiated years in advance. Two clubs can draw identical crowds at different venues and book materially different returns. That is why stadium deals have been at the centre of every equalisation argument the competition has had, and why the AFL has periodically stepped in to renegotiate terms on behalf of tenant clubs.
Total attendance across the 2025 home and away season and finals reached 8,253,649, the second highest in the competition's history, with a single round record of 431,505 in round one. Those are healthy numbers. They translate into club revenue at wildly different rates depending on where the turnstiles are.
Marvel Stadium, the MCG and who owns the ground
Two Melbourne venues host the bulk of Victorian football, and the clubs' relationships with them differ completely. The AFL itself took ownership of the Docklands venue now known as Marvel Stadium in 2016 and has since spent heavily on upgrading it, with the 2025 accounts still carrying about 8.2 million dollars of depreciation from that work. Owning the venue lets the league set tenancy terms directly rather than negotiating with a third-party operator. See the Marvel Stadium guide for how the ground itself works.
The MCG is governed differently again, through a long-standing relationship between the Melbourne Cricket Club, the AFL and the Victorian Government, and it operates under its own trust arrangements. The MCG guide covers the ground; what matters financially is that a club playing home matches there does so on terms it did not set alone.
Interstate clubs sit in a third category. A club in a purpose-built modern stadium with a favourable tenancy can generate match day revenue per attendee that a Melbourne tenant club cannot approach, which is one reason West Coast and Brisbane have appeared near the top of the revenue table in recent years.
Sponsorship and the commercial department
Sponsorship and marketing produced about 306.7 million dollars across the competition in 2024, up about 2.6 per cent, and about 162 million across the Victorian clubs in 2025. Collingwood led the Victorian clubs in that category, with Carlton and Hawthorn next.
The structure is layered. A front-of-jumper sponsorship is the headline deal and the most expensive. Below it sit back-of-jumper, shorts, training kit and sleeve positions, then category partnerships that give exclusivity in a commercial vertical, then signage, digital inventory, function room naming and community program partnerships. A modern AFL club commercial department sells dozens of separate products, not one.
Two constraints shape the market. Gambling advertising restrictions have tightened, removing a category that was once lucrative, and the AFL controls certain league-level categories centrally, so a club cannot sell a partnership that conflicts with a competition-wide agreement.
Gaming revenue and the argument that will not go away
Four AFL clubs still hold poker machine licences. Across eight venues in the 2024-25 financial year, those clubs' machines recorded about 40.4 million dollars in player losses.
| Club | Venues | Reported player losses 2024-25 |
|---|---|---|
| Carlton | 4 | About 19.6 million dollars |
| Essendon | 2 | About 14.4 million dollars |
| Richmond (Wantirna Club) | 1 | About 4.7 million dollars |
| St Kilda (social club venue) | 1 | About 1.7 million dollars |
| Total | 8 | About 40.4 million dollars |
"Player losses" is the regulator's term for the money kept by the machines after payouts. It is the venue's gaming revenue and the customer's net loss, expressed as the same number.
The clubs that have already walked away
North Melbourne was the first Victorian club to divest, in 2008, at a point when the decision cost it real money it did not have. Collingwood announced its exit in 2018 and made it complete and immediate, selling the licences for two venues, The Coach and Horses at Ringwood and The Club at Caroline Springs, with a combined 156 machines, to the Melbourne Racing Club. Hawthorn sold its venues in 2022. Melbourne, Geelong and the Western Bulldogs have also left the sector.
That leaves a shrinking group, and the direction of travel is one way. No AFL club has entered the gaming business in recent years; several have left it.
The case each side makes
Gambling researchers argue the position is untenable. Clubs that run junior programs, mental health partnerships and community outreach are simultaneously operating the most harmful gambling product in the country, drawing disproportionately from lower-income postcodes. Deakin University researchers have called for a buyback scheme to support every remaining club out of the sector, on the grounds that the barrier is now financial rather than philosophical.
The clubs that remain make a narrower argument. The venues fund football departments and community programs that would otherwise need to be cut or replaced by AFL money. Licences sold do not disappear; they transfer to a commercial operator with no community obligations and no reason to run harm minimisation beyond the legal minimum. And a club that divests without a replacement revenue stream is simply a poorer club.
Both positions have force. What is not in dispute is that gaming has gone from a mainstream club revenue stream to a minority one within about fifteen years.
Non-football businesses beyond gaming
Gaming is not the only non-football business. Richmond operates a substantial leisure and recreation management arm. Several clubs run function centres, licensed venues without gaming, health clubs and childcare facilities. Others hold property.
These businesses look attractive on a revenue line and less attractive on a profit line. They carry staff, leases, compliance and capital costs, and they book large turnover against thin margins. A club reporting very high revenue is often a club running a large non-football business, not a club with a great deal of spare cash.
What the money is spent on
The two largest expenses are capped. Total player payments limit what the club may pay its listed players, and the football department soft cap limits coaching, high performance, medical, recruiting and football administration spending. Both are covered in detail in the AFL salary cap guide.
Because both caps are ceilings rather than budgets, extra revenue cannot be converted into a better list. It goes into facilities, into staff who sit outside the football department cap, into the AFLW program, into debt reduction and into reserves. This is the central design feature of the competition: money buys a club security and infrastructure, not players.
Profit, debt and why a small surplus is normal
The eighteen clubs reported combined comprehensive profits of about 99 million dollars for 2024, up about 31.6 per cent on the previous year, on revenue of about 1.355 billion. That is a margin of roughly seven per cent across the industry.
Individual results vary far more. Collingwood posted a statutory profit of about 4.55 million dollars for its financial year to 31 October 2025, on revenue of about 96 million, up from about 85 million. The Victorian clubs collectively held about 825 million dollars in assets and about 596 million in equity at the end of 2025, with about 119 million in cash and equivalents.
A large surplus at an AFL club is not necessarily good news. It can mean the club underspent its football allowances, deferred maintenance, or booked a one-off asset sale. The number to read is the operating result with one-off items stripped out, alongside confirmation that the club spent to the salary floor and used its football department allowance.
Victorian clubs and the rest
The competition's geography splits the money in ways that are not obvious. In 2024 the ten non-Victorian clubs generated about 592.5 million dollars between them and the eight Victorian clubs about 763.2 million. Per club, the non-Victorian average was ahead.
Growth is running faster outside Victoria too. New South Wales clubs lifted revenue about 22 per cent year on year in 2024 and Queensland clubs about 16 per cent, from smaller bases and in markets where the competition has invested heavily in game development. The old assumption that the Victorian clubs are the wealthy ones and the expansion clubs are the charity cases has not been accurate for some time. Guides to the clubs themselves are at Victorian clubs and non-Victorian clubs.
The clubs at the top of the funding table
There is no shame in receiving a large distribution, but it does describe a position. A club drawing 28 million dollars from the league is a club the competition has decided cannot presently stand on its own revenue. That triggers scrutiny of the fixture it receives, the venue it plays at, the size of its membership base and, periodically, its right to exist as a separate entity.
Every serious relocation or merger conversation in the modern competition has started with a distribution figure. It is worth understanding what those numbers mean before reading the next round of speculation about a club's future.
What happens in a bad season
Poor on-field performance hits club finances with a lag of about twelve months. Memberships are largely sold before the season starts, so a bad year shows up in the following year's renewals. Match day revenue falls immediately as crowds thin, particularly in the corporate and hospitality categories where the buyer is discretionary. Sponsorship holds up until renewal, then gets repriced.
Meanwhile costs do not fall. The salary floor requires the club to spend at least 95 per cent of the cap regardless of the ladder. Coaching payouts after a mid-season change are an unbudgeted cost. This asymmetry is why the AFL's needs-based distributions exist at all: without them, a club having a poor decade would spiral rather than recover.
The AFLW cost line
Every club fields an AFLW team, and the women's competition currently costs clubs more than it returns directly. There is a separate AFLW player payment cap and a separate football department allowance, and the AFL funds a substantial share centrally, but the net position at club level is a cost.
That is a normal position for a competition still building its broadcast and commercial value, and it is factored into the distribution model rather than left to sit on individual clubs. The relevant number to watch over the current broadcast cycle is whether AFLW commercial revenue grows fast enough to change the arithmetic.
Tasmania and a nineteenth set of books
The current broadcast agreement was negotiated on the basis that the competition might reach nineteen teams during its term. A new licence changes club finances in two directions at once: the central pool is divided by nineteen rather than eighteen, and the new club requires substantial establishment funding from that same pool.
The offsetting argument is that a new market adds broadcast audience, memberships, sponsorship and game development reach, and that historically the competition has grown the pool faster than it has diluted it. Whether that holds is the financial question of the next decade.
How to read a club annual report
Every club publishes an annual report, generally over the summer. The useful sections are consistent.
Start with total revenue, then the category breakdown showing the AFL distribution, membership and match day, sponsorship, and any non-football business. Move to the operating result, and find the note that reconciles it to the statutory result, because that is where one-off items live. Then look at net assets and any interest-bearing debt. Finally, check the football department and player payment disclosures to confirm the club spent its allowances.
Comparing two clubs directly is harder than it looks, because their financial years do not always align. Several clubs report to 31 October, others to 31 December. A "2025 result" from one club may cover different months to a "2025 result" from another.
- 462Distributed to clubs
- 98Game development spend
- 68Underlying operating surplus
- 20Infrastructure investment
Reported figures from the AFL's 2025 financial result, rounded to the nearest million dollars. These are league-level numbers, not the position of any individual club.
Merchandise, licensing and the guernsey
Merchandise is the revenue line supporters assume is enormous and clubs know is not. A retail jumper carries manufacturing, licensing, wholesale margin and retail margin before a club sees anything, and the club's share of a jumper sold through a national sporting goods chain is a fraction of the ticket price. Direct sales through a club's own online store and match day retail are worth considerably more per unit, which is why clubs push so hard at those channels.
Licensing is the quieter half of the same category. Clubs license their marks for everything from playing cards to homewares, and the aggregate is a steady, low-effort income stream that does not move much with the ladder. Neither line is going to reshape a club's finances. Both are worth having, and both rise on the back of a premiership rather than causing one.
What a finals campaign is worth
The AFL pays participating clubs for finals appearances, and hosting a home final at a venue where the club has favourable terms adds a further amount. But a September campaign brings its own costs, including travel, accommodation, additional staffing, extra player payments under the finals arrangements and, for a Grand Final club, a substantial commitment to member ticketing logistics.
The lasting benefit is not the cash from the four or five weeks. It is what a finals run does to the following season's membership renewal rate, to sponsorship renewals and to merchandise. Clubs that make preliminary finals two years running tend to post their best financial results the year after, not the year of. That lag is the single most useful thing to know when reading a club's result against its ladder position. For how the five-week series now works, see the finals system guide.
How AFL club finances compare with the NRL
The two codes solve the same problem differently. The NRL has no draft, so its salary cap carries the entire equalisation load, and its clubs have historically had a deeper relationship with licensed and gaming venues through the leagues club model. The AFL runs a cap, a draft, a football department soft cap and a needs-based distribution simultaneously. See the NRL salary cap explainer for that comparison, and the rugby league and rugby union guide for how the codes sit against each other.
Cricket has taken a third path again, with a revenue-share model negotiated between Cricket Australia and the players rather than a club-by-club distribution. The Australian cricket pay deal explains that system, and the Big Bash salary cap shows how a franchise competition handles the same question.
What to check each year
Five numbers tell you most of what you need to know about the health of an AFL club. The AFL distribution, because a rising distribution against flat own-revenue is a warning. The membership figure, because it is the base everything commercial is priced against. Membership and match day revenue, because it shows whether the members are actually attending. The operating result with one-off items removed. And net debt.
Everything else is detail. If those five move in the right direction across three consecutive years, the club is in reasonable shape regardless of where it finished on the ladder.
Where to go next
For what clubs may pay players, read the AFL salary cap guide. For the money that funds most of the distribution, read the AFL broadcast rights guide. For where the season ends and how the biggest single revenue day of the year is run, read the AFL Grand Final guide.
For the competition structure the money supports, see the AFL fixture and the draft. For the wider Australian sporting context, start at Australia or the sports index.