Australian Rules footballers playing in the AFL will not have their weights listed in the league’s 2024 season guide after they decided that disclosing a player’s weight was inappropriate for publication after deeming it private information.
Speaking with Fox Sport, former AFL player and media pundit Kane Cornes was opposed to the new policy.
“Can you believe it? I was alerted to this on Thursday ... if you get your book [AFL Record] and you want to look up what [Collingwood star] Jordan De Goey weighs, you will no longer be able to find it,” he said.
The AFL appears tight-lipped on the issue, but the editor of the AFL Record, Ashley Browne, said the revelations were true, telling Sports Radio station SEN that it was a “new AFL policy to not reveal player weights.”
“They’ve [the AFL] decided in this day and age it is inappropriate for weights to public matter, in a publication like the season guide. They would say that people support that it’s not appropriate to publish weights and that it’s private information now,” she said.
In an age where athletes face greater online scrutiny and abuse than ever before, officials in some sports believe publishing player weights could be weaponised by internet trolls looking to unsettle a player. The bullying could even potentially trigger body dysmorphia.
Some officials fear that such details could be used to torment the athletes on social media or by their competitors to gain an advantage.
In 2021, the Japan Association of Athletics Federations stopped collecting information on athletes’ heights and weights after concerns were raised during a women’s marathon steering committee over the sharing of personal information and how it may adversely affect an athlete.
Many AFL fans on the social media platform Reddit were gobsmacked by the AFL’s decision, with one poster saying that the move was pointless.
Meanwhile, another poster supported the move, writing, “Eating disorders are not uncommon in professional athletes. We should be able to address more than one well-being issue at a time.”
While unique to men’s sports, the new policy has been implemented since the creation of the AFL women’s competition, which has never listed player weights.
A 2016 study by the University of North Texas and published online by the U.S. National Library of Medicine found female athletes often experienced “sport-environment pressures about weight, eating, and body composition from within the sport environment.”
The policy does not yet seem to have filtered down to AFL club websites, many of which are still displaying physical statistics of their players.
Meanwhile, AFL Record has said it will not be making player weights public in its match-day programs this coming season.
