I doubt it. I think just to make it to the AFL level, let alone play regular matches, you would have to be ridiculously dedicated. I reckon even the laziest football player would have to be above average for drive and effort. But at elite levels of sport, some players are almost pathologically driven. So that raises the question: at which training levels to you set the program. Set it too high, you burn out some players, set it too low, and you don’t get the best performance out of the players. You could try and set a perfect program taking into consideration of the players drive, but that’s rather paternalistic, and then you bake in inequalities into the prgram (ie, “why do I need to do this program when he doesn’t have to”).
It seems the sensible approach is to afford players a degree of free will about their careers. I would have thought that was uncontroversial, but I guess not.
