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Revelations that former Sydney chairman Richard Colless was subjected to a “torrent of abuse” from the chairman of the AFL Commission, Mike Fitzpatrick, should be alarming to AFL supporters.
The outburst was in response to the club’s decision to recruit high-profile former Hawthorn star Lance Franklin. It should be alarming for footy fans, not for the fact of Fitzpatrick’s alleged tirade, but because of what it reveals about the way the AFL does business.
Throughout 2013, it was widely believed that Franklin would leave Hawthorn and sign a lucrative deal with the GWS Giants at the end of that season. The AFL clearly took the view that a player with Franklin’s profile could generate significant interest in western Sydney, which might translate into support for the AFL’s fledgling expansion franchise.
However, the AFL, GWS and Hawthorn were subsequently blindsided by Franklin’s announcement that he was joining the Sydney Swans under the AFL’s free agency rules.
Since Colless has gone public with his account of Fitzpatrick’s phone call, the media analysis has largely focused on whether the chairman reacted inappropriately. However, the most telling comments ascribed to Fitzpatrick were those concerning Sydney’s contentious Cost of Living Allowance (COLA) and Colless’s assertion that the AFL were deliberately trying to orchestrate Franklin’s move to the GWS.
In that respect, Colless alleges that Fitzpatrick said of the Swans’ deal to acquire Franklin: “You knew what we wanted to do and you came to us with your bloody COLA, I told you I’d support you on COLA then you raced away and did this deal”.
Colless further alleges that the AFL was committed to paying Franklin an additional sum of money, either by diverting funds from one of the competition’s sponsors to GWS, or by paying him that sum directly. If true, it means that the AFL was actively seeking to facilitate an outcome where a player from one club joined a competitor of the AFL’s choosing, while authorising a breach of its own rules governing club salary caps in the process.
Predictably, the AFL has denied Colless’ version of events.
It should be noted that Sydney has previously benefited from the AFL’s attempts to grow the game in Australia’s most populous state.
Indeed, Richard Colless would be aware of the AFL’s preparedness to engineer what it regards as a desired outcome. When he crossed from Sydney to St Kilda in 1995, the AFL paid star full-forward Tony Lockett an allowance as an “ambassador”.
These payments were in addition to his contract with the Sydney Swans and outside the club’s total player payment figure. The AFL only publicly acknowledged the existence of Lockett’s ambassadorial allowance in 2013.
More recently, COLA afforded Sydney an additional 9.8 per cent room in its salary cap. While the Swans have steadfastly maintained that COLA was (and still is) necessary to offset higher living expenses, critics have long opposed the allowance on the basis it does not represent genuine cost-of-living assistance and is no more than one of several measures, along with the Sydney Swans Academy, which is intended to give the Swans a competitive advantage.
The Sydney Swans have qualified for the finals in 16 of the past 19 seasons.
The AFL’s formal position on COLA, at one time consistent with Sydney’s, changed soon after the Swans lawfully recruited Franklin under the competition’s free agency rules.
Indeed, Fitzpatrick’s alleged comment that he was withdrawing his support for COLA and the AFL’s subsequent response, which was to announce the payment would be phased out completely by 2017 (to be replaced by a rental assistance scheme for lower paid players) and ban the Swans from trading for two seasons, reveals a willingness on the part of the league to enact punitive sanctions against anyone that hinders or obstructs the AFL’s plans.
Granted, the AFL have since softened their stance on the trading prohibition, which now only prevents the Swans from acquiring any player earning more than the median AFL player wage.
However, if Colless’s recollection of his conversation with Fitzpatrick is accurate, there are several troubling aspects.
Firstly, it depicts the governing body as one that has a penchant for cutting deals behind the scenes. It paints a picture of an AFL administration that is willing to pursue its commercial objectives at the expense of fairness, transparency and indeed its own rules and standards.
Fitzpatrick’s purported abandonment of COLA also lends weight to the conclusion that the allowance had not been calculated with reference to any reasonable or legitimate cost of living equation in the first place.
Rather, it tends to support the view the AFL had given Sydney favourable treatment, which was revoked when the AFL deemed them to have stepped out of line.
Initiatives such as the salary cap, the draft and the equalisation tax each form part of an “equality framework” in the AFL.
These measures are designed to instil confidence in supporters that the wealthy clubs cannot perpetually dominate the competition, that no club has a greater financial capacity than any other to acquire talent, that teams presently struggling on-field will have access to the best underage talent in the country, and that every club will have adequate resources to afford them the opportunity to be competitive.
The system of free agency, which permits a club to retain a restricted free agent (as Lance Franklin was in 2013) when it matches the offer made by a rival club, can only operate fairly and efficiently if all clubs have the same amount of money available to them in their salary cap.
While supporters can attest to the fact the system does not always play out as intended, the broad objective of the equality framework is that each of the 18 clubs should win a premiership once every 18 years.
Of course, some transitional concessions were made in relation to salary cap and list size for the expansion clubs, but there was a consensus view among the existing clubs that these were necessary to make those clubs competitive in the short-to-medium term.
As the game’s national governing body and the custodian of the sport, the AFL Commission has an obligation to govern the game openly, transparently and in accordance with its own rules and standards. It has an obligation to enforce and adhere to every aspect of the agreed equality framework.
If the AFL is only prepared to pay lip service to that framework, or to abide by it only when it does not conflict with what it perceives to be the competition’s commercial objectives, then the game has a serious integrity problem – and as supporters, it affects us all.
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