Most people think there are 18 clubs in the AFL right now. This isn’t a trivia session, so no need to count them.

But there are more clubs than those designated by team colours. Informal groupings exist in and around the league between players with shared characteristics.

There are bigger groupings, like the countless players with mullets on their heads.

There are also more exclusive clubs kicking around.

The former number-one draft pick club counts just 11 current players amongst its ranks. There are eight Brownlow medallists plying their trade at the top level and five Coleman medallists on AFL lists.

Even smaller is the Norm Smith Medal club, with just four active members.

The concept of the “millionaires club” would have been inconceivable for most of footy’s history. In recent years, however, the club of players earning more than a million dollars — on the official books at least — has steadily grown.

The 2007 season saw the first million-dollar player, rumoured to be Carlton great Anthony Koutoufides. The next year saw the club double in size, before swiftly dropping back to zero by 2009.

Despite occasional lulls, the number of members of the millionaires club keeps expanding alongside the growth of the league’s coffers.

There were 19 players on a million dollars a year in 2023, about one a club on average.

This number is set to explode, thanks to the upcoming broadcast rights deal and the collective bargaining agreement negotiated by the AFL and the AFL Players’ Association.

Next season may see over 50 players join the once-exclusive club, with the 100-player mark possible by the end of the decade.

The era of seven-figure salaries is truly on the horizon, which is a world away from the first year of the AFL era in 1990 when just eight players earned more than $100,000.

The ABC has run the numbers to help make sense of the impending player-salary boom.

Player payments grow

The AFL has a range of governing documents, which differ in length, complexity and the level of boredom they induce while reading.

The seductively titled AFL and AFLW Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) — at a svelte 195 pages long — might be one of the most important.

The document outlines broad rules about employee and employer conduct behaviour, or what the players and clubs will do over the coming years.

It covers everything from leave periods to licensing guidelines, including a section called the Memorabilia Signing Guidelines.

More importantly, it sets out how players are to be paid. The current CBA covers the period between 2023 and 2027. The document sets out minimum pay for players based on a variety of factors.

In 2024, the minimum pay for a rookie-listed player is $90,000 and the minimum for a player outside of a rookie or draftee contract is $130,000.

The CBA sets out a salary cap for each side as well, called the Total Player Payment Limit. That limit is $15,788,222 per club in 2024.

That will grow to $18,440,415 in 2027.

The AFL also publishes the distribution of pay for all senior players each year in its annual report, which indicates how many fall into each $100,000 band.

The pay distribution of an average club looked like this in 2023:

That’s in player terms. When you look at how much money a club — on average — gives each category of players, it looks more like this:

The ABC has combined these documents to project what the future might look like. We should expect the millionaire club to have between 30 and 54 players in 2025.

That’s roughly two to three on every team.

The big deals, such as the next bombshell move of one of the game’s elite, should start to nudge $2 million per year fairly soon.

It’s clear that the average pay of a footy player has gone well above that of the average Australian.

But that wasn’t always the way.

Before we look at the mega deals of the near future, it’s useful to look back to where we’ve come from.

Money always a dilemma in Aussie rules

The idea of a country footy club luring the game’s best forward in their prime seems preposterous.