“Blatant manipulation”: Chris Scott fumes at North Melbourne’s assistance package

Geelong coach Chris Scott has slammed the AFL’s decision to grant North Melbourne an assistance package.

The AFL announced the package on Monday afternoon which will give the Roos access to three first-round picks across the next two seasons among other benefits.

Scott believes the AFL should simply stop meddling with the draft as teams that perform poorly are already rewarded with early picks.

He believes North Melbourne are struggling because they chose to go down a path where they targeted early picks and called the assistance package ‘blatant manipulation’.

“There is a mechanism of equalisation within the AFL already,” Scott told Fox Footy’s AFL 360.

“If you finish second last you get the second pick in the draft and they’ve had that for a number of years now because they chose to go down that path.

“The AFL has got to pretty quickly get to the point, in my view, where they just get out of the way and let the system operate without this blatant manipulation.”

Scott also believes that there’s always lag in any business and that North Melbourne would have been fine in the coming years without extra assistance.

Referencing how Hawthorn took both Luke Hodge and Jarryd Roughead with priority picks in the early 2000s, Scott believes the Kangaroos would have eventually come good and now may be at a huge advantage because of the number of early selections they would have made.

“The problem here is in any business there is always a lag,” Scott said.

“You can’t look at this season and go, ‘Okay you’ve finished second last so we’ve got to support you again’. The support has already been there over previous years.

“They’ve got so many top-five picks now look at the midfielders that they’ve got.

“What they can’t do now is go, ‘Now all of the sudden you’ve got a dominant midfield because you’ve had all of these picks’, and take something away.

“But they never take something away.

“Clarko (Alastair Clarkson), he’s a genius because that Hawthorn team if you go back was made of Hodge pick 1, Franklin pick 4 and Roughead pick 2 and he (and Hodge) were a priority pick.

“So you get that lag then all of the sudden you go bang.

“The risk is the AFL actually turn around and say, ‘We made an error’, but you can’t fix it.”

While North Melbourne have finished bottom two in all of the last four seasons, they have still played in eight finals since 2012 and featured in two prelims across the last decade.

Given that they’ve been relatively successful compared to other clubs across the last decade, Scott couldn’t understand why North Melbourne was being so well looked after.

“The compensation for being bad, you already get that in terms of the salary cap and the way the competition’s set up,” Scott said.

“I’m saying too much … there are clubs who have performed at a lower level than North Melbourne over the last decade and haven’t got one single thing.

“I don’t understand how you can play in eight (finals), play in prelim finals and get compensation and priority picks year after year.

“The worst place to be clearly in today’s competition is the middle of the road because you get nothing.

“The AFL shouldn’t be in the position where they’re manipulating the competition the way they are.”

The first-round picks that North Melbourne collected as part of the assistance package come at the end of the first round. They receive one selection in 2023 and two in 2024. Next year’s picks are subject to review in 2024.