IF Cam develops psychological issues after your club has refused to release him despite his feeling strongly enough about leaving that he's risked losing face with your playing group by letting this all play out publicly, after he's stated publicly that he wants to go home for family reasons, whatever they may be, if there would be grounds to take GWS to the cleaners for damages.
Allikat woild explain it in legalese better.
Ok, so as a disclaimer, my background is in business law but I haven't used it for a few years.
So the clubs do have a duty of care to look after their players mental health. Mental illness should be treated the same as any injury and clubs are legally required to support their players to ensure their health going forward. Just like a normal business mental health is included in sick/personal leave. If this is truly the issue, which it honestly seems like it could be, McCarthy needs to be seeing a mental health professional to get it documented. I know you're suggesting the worst possible outcome for Cam's mental health here, but it doesn't need to go that far for it to be seen as an illness. I haven't checked the EBA specifically for these kind of issues (I will later but it's a massive document), but if GWS are ignoring or not doing their due diligence in regards to Cam's health, they can be seen to be breaching their duty of care which can be used to cancel a contract.
There are a few things in the EBA that need to be looked at first, and to go down this route it's going to take a lot longer than the 2 days left of trade period. If I was Cam's manager I'd be requesting the AFL to start arbitration between GWS & McCarthy, get the AFLPA in as a party as well so that anything put in place to help Cam with his homesickness will be official. They can probably petition the AFL for a rushed arbitration and allow Freo in as a party to broker a fair trade at the same time. If I recall Port did something similar last trade period over Ryder?
In the extreme case, if what people are speculating in regards to being dropped from the Freo game because of asking to leave is true, it could constitute workplace bullying. If it can be proven he was in form and being dropped was a form of punishment.
Restraint of trade is the elephant in the room with player contracts. If a player did take the AFL to court they would win and the system would fall like a pack of cards.The clubs have to much to lose to attempt a court case but a disgruntled player is another story altogether.
It's pretty commonly believed that player contracts aren't really legal but challenging it opens a whole new bag of worms. And Australian courts could decide that it's reasonably expected that a player is knowingly walking into a non-legalish contract. It gets too hard to prove, and if a player does win it could kinda ruin football for everyone with contract never being enforceable.
Would it tarnish the reputation of the league to take that case to court?
Or to put it another way, would it bring the game into disrepute?
It would be messy.
You can't actually get done for bringing the game into disrepute if you're challenging a contract based on legit legal grounds. It's a right (possibly constitutional - haven't read the constitution in a while tbh) of every Aussie that you can't be punished for exercising your legal rights.