AFL Players Association boss Paul Marsh admits he had to get his own house in order before achieving the most complicated collective bargaining agreement in the game’s history.

Having brought together Australian football’s elite men and women for the first time in a complex $2.2 billion, five-year pay deal, Marsh said he was forced to put his hand up four years ago when the players’ association’s uneasy relationship with key AFLW players threatened to reach breaking point.

Carlton, St Kilda, Geelong and Greater Western Sydney – led by Darcy Vescio, Cat Phillips, Meg McDonald and Pepa Randall – initially had rejected the AFLW’s new CBA in a move that threatened to derail the 2020 season as the fledgling competition considered splitting with the AFLPA to form its own union.

Gender workplace advocate Prue Gilbert quit the AFLPA’s women football advisory group, saying the union had failed over four years to provide a level playing field for the women’s competition.

While an agreement was eventually reached, the lingering bad blood resulted in Marsh to move to review the players’ association and its relationship with the women’s competition. The research project was overseen by consumer psychologist Anna Box and her findings transformed the players’ union.

“We realised we needed to take stock,” said Marsh of Box’s findings. “The piece of work we did spoke to a lot of our players and we learned what we weren’t delivering on and probably revealed a lack of communication.

“If you’re going to run a body that represents AFLW players and genuinely to be representing them we needed to ask ourselves: ‘How do we resolve this?’ We developed a vision to change.”

Marsh said the women players needed to be treated differently from the men for a raft of historic and potentially gender-specific reasons. “With the men, there’s an inherent trust built up over years,” he said.

“We were treating both groups equally, but the women wanted a higher level of detail. Whether that’s an inherent trait we needed to tailor our communication.”

The results of the project – Box was later recruited by the AFL to study the roles of women in football departments across the 18 clubs – led to Marsh finally appointing Julia Chiera 12 months ago as the players’ association’s head of AFLW. And three AFLW players, including Phillips, were added to his board.