AFL greats help struggling football netball clubs with one-off 'draft'

Eight AFL legends will come out of retirement for one game as they get 'drafted' to a handful of local football teams across Victoria. 

The inaugural Carlton Draft was established by a large well-known brewery and TLA sports marketing agency to help struggling local clubs get back on their feet.

Jarryd Roughead, Eddie Betts, Shaun Burgoyne, Dale Thomas, Nathan Jones, Brendan Goddard, Alex Rance and Cam Mooney make up the playing pool with more than 2,300 games of AFL experience under their belt.

The brewery's marketing director Hayden Turner had the difficult job of filtering through more than 500 applications that were received from local sporting clubs and narrowing them down to just eight.

«We were really overwhelmed with the response,» he said.

«We were looking for clubs that had been suffering financial hardship, social hardship, or on-field hardship that are literally struggling to win games and perform.

»It's hard at the best of times to run a local footy club financially and keeping players around and keeping the volunteers around — a lot of them are really struggling.

«We wanted to come up with an idea that brought some of the romance back to local footy but also gave some of the more struggling local clubs a leg up.»

North Wangaratta Football Netball Club was one of the successful clubs.

The club spent three years without a home ground after high levels of lead was detected on the oval and surrounding land.

«If you have no ground, you have no home, and if you've got no home you lose players,» seniors coach Josh Warren said.

«Everyone wants that sense of belonging, and without a ground you don't have that.»

Mr Warren took over as coach in 2019 and said the team was in a state of despair.

«Our average losing margin was close