I was thinking about this and there's a few things I wanted to point out. For one, these clubs finance their academies themselves so if you remove the drafting privileges, there's no incentives to actually run these academies because why funnel money into a player's development if another team reaps the rewards. So unless the AFL offers to fund these themselves and keep them viable, it wouldn't make sense to remove the privileges unless you want to massively hinder the growth of the sport in NSW and QLD.
A solution could be perhaps join the academies in QLD as well as NSW so Sydney and the Giants have to bid for NSW kids as a collective and Brisbane/GCS bid for theirs which might drive the paying price up.
Also, if you consider Sydney's situation, the idea that they've had to sacrifice ALL their draft picks really compromises the position of their list - instead of bringing in several youngsters to develop, they're only able to bring in one (albeit a gun) and that's just not sustainable with an ageing list unless they're going to rely on trading or FA for list regeneration. Additionally, they've stockpiled picks which 'shows their hand' so clubs know that they're only interested in Mills and could bid earlier to make them pay overs. I'll also add that Lloyd Perris and Jack Hiscox were also very highly rated talents picked up by Sydney through the academy but at the moment, are looking like busts.
So while it seems like a huge advantage, the points system has done really well to try minimise this. It could be tweaked better though.
Stop it..... Lol. I'm sorry but the AFL pay for these academy's already. The AFL virtually run and operate and fund all 4 clubs we talking about here.






