When Eddie McGuire trawled through possible foods to sum up the AFL’s Greater Western Sydney experiment, he might just as easily have settled on apple pie as falafel.
The club being built at Blacktown and housed at Breakfast Point near Concord shares much in common with the American college experience, a deliberate choice on the part of their well-travelled and highly regarded football manager Graeme Allan.
While head coach Kevin Sheedy has played the salesman and his senior assistant Mark Williams the teacher and tactician, Allan has been the architect as the initial under-age squad is developed into a group capable of competing in the AFL in 2012.
They will be given a preliminary taste of life at the top on Saturday night when matched against local rivals Sydney and fellow expansionists the Gold Coast.
No-one expects the Giants to win, merely to show evidence of promise for the future.
“We’re trying to set this club up, from a football team perspective, like an elite American college,” Allan told AAP.
“We all live in apartments at Breakfast Point, we all eat together every night, we have lunch together every day, we train together every day and the boys hang together. That’s been really important for our development.
“I’ve been over to the United States a few times to have a look at the college system and the pro system and what we’ve got here is a group of young boys who are just leaving school, similar to a college, they leave school and go into the college system.
“So really we’re setting up like a college, and the colleges are run like professional clubs here anyway.
“It would’ve been just impossible to board young boys in different areas because they could be two or three hours apart, so the practical and the sensible way was to emulate an elite American college.”
Within that structure, Allan speaks of Sheedy and Williams together, likening them to Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson and his influential former team coach Carlos Queiroz, who presided over much of the club’s tactical direction.
“Sheeds does a fantastic job in the market of selling this club, but he’s also a great teacher, and Choco (Williams) is a great teacher, so their relationship’s very strong,” he said.
“Sheeds is overseeing it all like an Alex Ferguson and Choco is out on the ground and with the players (like Carlos Queiroz).
“We’ve got good relationships, I played footy with Mark at Collingwood, and my kids went to school with Sheeds’ kids in Melbourne, so we’ve always had good relationships.”
The most important relationship for the Giants to develop, of course, is with their community, one their chief executive Dale Holmes depicts as far more diverse than McGuire perceived.
“People tend to want to put a blanket over the area and not understand the intricacies of the south-west and north-west,” Holmes said.
“Eddie’s comments were tongue-in-cheek and he and Sheeds have had some great banter over a number of years now.
“But one of the things we’ve seen as a club is that an opportunity exists for us to play a role in helping the nation understand western Sydney better.
“There’s more to Sydney than the northern beaches and bridges, so it’s about understanding the map, the river systems, the hills and the mountains.”
Holmes is keenly aware of the hard financial realities, irrespective of how much money the AFL can throw at GWS in their efforts to corner an elusive market.
Faced with sniggers about the blank cheque in his keeping, he points out how much money the club will need to generate to stay afloat.
“The reality is for this club to survive, we will have to generate $20 million of revenue outside what we get from the AFL and that is a big ask for a start-up club,” he said.
“We’ll be required, in order to be competitive, to be able to turn over between $16 million and $20 million a year outside of AFL support from year one through to year five.
“Thereafter it’ll be $25 million, the same as everyone else. In essence AFL support declines from year one to year five – In the context of building a club from scratch there is a misconception about the amount of investment coming in from the AFL.
“We can’t just come in and struggle, we’ve got to come in and build a club that can compete with the best and be there, being able to compete on every level, on-field, off-field.
“Otherwise we will be on the drip forever and a day unless we can change the mindset by creating a club that can compete with the biggest clubs.”
For Allan, Leigh Matthews’ most powerful ally in four premierships at Collingwood and Brisbane and among the AFL’s craftiest recruiters, the size of the challenge does not detract from the sense that GWS are no longer an experiment, but a club.
“I really haven’t given that (the size of the task) any thought, I’m here enjoying it, the staff and the players are working hard and enjoying it,” he said.
“We see it as a challenge but we also see ourselves as a footy club now, and we’ll just get bigger and bigger.”
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