Carlton coach Mick Malthouse has called on the AFL to scrap its cost-of-living allowance (COLA) now, rather than wait until 2017.
A Fairfax Media report on Tuesday suggested the league would remove COLA by the start of the 2017 season, replacing it with rent subsidies for the two clubs based in Sydney.
The story added that Greater Western Sydney would retain salary cap concessions in 2017 under the new system of equalisation measures to be announced in June.
Malthouse, a long-term critic of COLA and the "two-tiered" system he feels it has created, wanted action now.
"2017? What's wrong with 2016 or 2015," he pondered, before spending the better part of four minutes offering his take on the issue.
"The quicker we straighten it out ... so there's no spikes in someone else's salary cap for particular reasons or because you live here or whatever you do, the better.
"I can spend another hour on this."
Malthouse, who started his playing career at St Kilda and coaching career at Footscray, proceeded to detail the great fears he held for Melbourne's smaller and poorer clubs.
"I take my Carlton hat off and put on a football person's hat ... what do they get? How do they get advantages? They don't," he said.
"If anything, they're disadvantaged all the way through.
"They pay more for their grounds and a whole host of things. And it's not even the clubs you worry about so much, it's the supporter groups."
The three-time premiership coach suggested the era of free agency put even greater strain on cash-strapped clubs occupying the bottom half of the ladder.
"It's already been compromised by free agency. Not many players are going to put their hands up to play for the bottom sides," he said.
"But sides in the bottom will lose players who want to play for the top sides. So straight away they get stronger, and the sides down the bottom get weaker."
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