If season 2021 is clear of COVID, what is worth restoring from the “old normal”, and what should be consigned to history?
Australian football never will be the same – the “old normal” is not coming back. It can’t. And it shouldn’t.
From the greatest modern crisis the AFL – and all levels of Australian football – have endured during the COVID pandemic, there will be much change. Some is long overdue and much has been repeatedly avoided by the game’s leaders compromising rather than being decisive.
The question is: When can the game work from a blank sheet of paper to right the wrongs?
There is no certainty on season 2021 – other than the need to clear the decks for cricket by October when Cricket Australia will seek its answers from the financial bonuses of a home Ashes series.
Will there be full capacity at AFL venues? Will there be a return to 22 home-and-away games? Should there be? Can the MCG host the AFL grand final? The list of questions and doubts is long – and only answered by finding an end to this damaging COVID pandemic.
But – for the sake of the exercise – let’s assume season 2021 is clear of COVID. What is worth restoring from the “old normal” … and what should be consigned to history?
THE GAME
If we could be Tom Wills starting Australian football all over again – 162 years after he gathered his mates to give Australia its own game – what would we do?
A crisis, such as the COVID pandemic, allows for the blank sheet of paper to emerge with the themes: what to keep, what to throw away and what to seek.
Australian football has one grand opportunity to reset and then, as so many such as Collingwood coach Nathan Buckley want and so many other sports do, leave the game alone.
Where to start? The rules?
So much is made of the “look of the game”. Hawthorn and Carlton great David Parkin always had a great reminder to South Australian football hero John Halbert about his work on the AFL Laws of the Game committee.
“John,” Parkin would say, “before you have left the lobby at AFL House after a meeting, the AFL coaches have set the challenge to their assistant coaches to find ways to beat your rule changes.”
Other sports devour the diversity of play. In world football, the Italians were always known for “catenaccio” – defensive, counter-attack play. Brazil did not care for defence, believing it would score more than its rivals. The Dutch fascinated all in the 1970s with “total football” – with 10 players capable of taking on any role on the field. The Germans are always brutally efficient. The world game’s beauty was its multiple points of difference.
AFL coaches with different philosophies, different game plans and different methods to achieve a result should be embraced rather than chastised to live to one universal theme.
Post-COVID allows for a radical throwback – teams of 18-a-side, four on the bench … and not 90 interchanges. Rather, let’s try a return to four reserves (maybe six) who replace injured players or allow for one-off tactical changes.
THE CLUBS
On his arrival at the Adelaide Football Club – a so-called franchise – in 2015, the late Phil Walsh declared his mission was to build an “authentic football club”.
It was a reflection on how the professional era had taken clubs away from their original aim – for a game and the fans – to be “businesses in an industry”.
Clubs now invest in external adventures to make money to spend in an arms race to win a premiership (on a 1-in-18 return). But do they eagerly generate money to invest in member needs? Do they lose focus while managing non-football operations?
The COVID pandemic has reminded club leaders just who will be loyal in a crisis – the members and the fans. So they should indeed come first. And a thousand tweets from the club’s official social media stream will never replace a straight answer from club leaders who have mastered spin with more revs than Shane Warne.
THE PLAYERS
No group (also known as “stakeholder”) is more likely to challenge – even resist – reform that corrects the game from its misplaced priorities. This is the group that has known the game as a “profession” – and an opportunity to “set yourself up for life”.
Almost everyone else in football lives to theme of “leave the game better than you found it”. Players have managers determined to make sure their clients leave the game better than when they discovered its opportunities.
The test of the players – and their union, the AFL Players Association – comes in revisiting the collective bargaining agreement. Do they concede money to speed the game’s recovery? Do they preserve list sizes at the expense of their salaries? Do they look beyond the elite to understand what is needed in the leagues that gave them a start before draft day?
Player salaries publicly declared or private? If they are to be guessed – and guessed badly – it would seem time to follow other professional sports in declaring payments. It will work to the advantage of those players underpaid or undervalued at one club and wanted by others. It would create faith in the salary cap. And why should club list managers be spared scrutiny of their decisions?
THE FIXTURE
“It will be interesting moving forward … there are some things we will look back on through this experience; things we previously thought were practically impossible, now maybe there is a way,” says Geelong coach Chris Scott.
“The compressed season in the middle of the year is great for the fans; eight games spread across the week, I’m a fan myself. I love sitting in front of the TV watching a whole lot of footy.”
This is tough. Eighteen teams. A 28-week window for qualifying games and finals. A “fair and equitable” fixture.
That would not be a 22-round home-and-away season built on the 1970 VFL model that was designed for 12 teams playing 11 times at home and 11 times away.
Conferences with three six-team groups – 10 games with clubs in a team’s group and 12 with the clubs in the other two groups – is fair and equitable but draws criticism of being American. This is despite Australian football inventing conference or group games in the 1890s, well before the Americans.
Dividing the 18 teams would be challenging to achieve balanced conferences. Maintaining a final eight would difficult.
Staying with the 17-round home-and-away series – adopted this season – would annoy the non-Victorian clubs on the breakdown of eight or nine home games. The Victorian clubs would feel short-changed without playing major derby rivals twice a season.
And can the game afford each club having just 17 matches – or 17 opportunities to sell tickets, sponsorship packages and television rights? What of those contracts at venues? Would it not help the game – and deliver better stadia – if there was an annual bidding process for the grand final?
Football every night of the week – as endorsed by Scott – has its place in a season when fans cannot get to matches and are in lockdown (that has increased television audiences by 14 per cent). But in normal times, there are other things to do.
Life (remarkably) is not always football.
THE FANS
“We can’t start 2021 with the feeling the fans are to be taken for granted again,” says AFL Fans Association president Gerry Eeman. “The onus is on the clubs … they cannot treat their members as consumers. Selling a membership should not be a business transaction.”
No club can take a member or fan for granted. Certainly not now.
Season 2020 proves the game once defined as “of the people, for the people” needs the fans more than ever.
It needs their money that can make up 33 per cent of a club’s revenue from membership sales. It needs their voices to give television executives the critical backdrop to their broadcasts. It needs their passion to fire up the players (Geelong coach Scott notes that his players would rather play before 30,000 hostile West Coast fans in Perth than in an empty arena).
Season 2020 has been a timely reminder of the fans’ importance after years of their interests being eroded by commercial interests that brought changes such as Sunday lunchtime football.
The AFL last week announced its administrative restructure includes a new department dedicated to “an enhanced focus on our fans and audience”. The department’s objective is “keeping the game affordable and accessible” and to achieve “growth in our northern market where fans have embraced our game over the past several months”.
Democracy might appear dangerous to the AFL that – by tight financial strings on loans – will have control of 16 of the 18 national league clubs in the debt-loaded fall-out from the COVID pandemic. But the model of club presidents and chairmen co-opting directors to the board room to maintain their power bases is not the ideal alternative either.
Post-COVID, the new normal should bring serious review of each club’s constitution to ensure the members do indeed get the leadership they deserve. And the members might want to end their apathy that has led to very poor returns on voting slips for club directors … and the massive outrage when boards appear out of touch with the membership. As Port Adelaide coach Ken Hinkley says so often, you get what you deserve.
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THE UMPIRES
It is too easy to bash umpires, men and women who are subjected to a rule book – and a set of interpretations. And which is more important, the laws of the game or the interpretations attached?
But the wish list from players, coaches and fans is clear, even before COVID is cleared away: (a) holding-the-ball; (b) throwing is not allowed; (c) nor is pushing in the back; (d) deliberate out of bounds.
One change becoming more obvious is the need to free AFL Match Review Officer Michael Christian from having to put every possible report in little boxes with gradings of “high”, “intentional”, “careless” etc. Let him judge an incident by his football knowledge rather than a lawyer’s legacy to the AFL football department.
TASMANIA
Before COVID, it was too easy to dismiss Tasmania by arguing the challenge of funding an AFL team in a small economy – particularly with private rather than public money from a volatile state government structure – was beyond the island.
But with the spend in football being cut – both in football departments and the administration side of a club – the case must then swing in favour of Tasmania. And there is a traditional cradle of Australian football to restore on the island.
Can the AFL expand in these times? Probably not.
Outside of Victoria, too many will want to work an axe on the nine Melbourne-based teams to make room for a Tasmanian-based team. The lasting lesson from the demise/relocation of Fitzroy to become part of Brisbane in 1997 is the loss of fans. They follow clubs – not the game. Kill clubs and fans disappear. They rarely develop new loyalties, particularly to clubs they have eagerly cheered against.
AFL WOMEN’S
Expansion while there are cutbacks elsewhere in Australian football is a challenging theme. But there is now a generation of young women wanting the dream – to follow Erin Phillips, Daisy Pearce and Tayla Harris to a top-level competition with all the trimmings. It is a tough train to brake now.
And post-COVID – just as there should have been pre-pandemic – it is time to recognise there is a women’s game and there is no relevance in measuring this version against that played by men. If other sports (basketball, tennis, golf, hockey) can appreciate the difference, so should Australian football.
The biggest challenge is living a commitment to develop women beyond the playing field, particularly as coaches. The temptation will be to demand more of assistant coaches in the men’s program, as noted at Adelaide, where men’s ruck coach Matthew Clarke has worked the past two AFLW seasons as the Crows senior women’s coach.
There might be necessity to save money. But there also is a need to invest in developing these women as coaches and administrators, for both games.
Some will argue that it is time for the AFLW to generate its own funds to invest back into the game with entry fees to matches.
Four AFL clubs are without AFLW teams. Essendon, Hawthorn, Port Adelaide and Sydney. The AFL’s timeline for changing this will make for fascinating debate.
CHINA
Port Adelaide’s international agenda is now about servicing multimillion-dollar sponsorship deals struck in China – without an AFL game in Shanghai (after playing in the Chinese city for premiership points in 2017, 2018 and last year).
Some will take delight in this game ending, such as West Coast and Collingwood premiership coach Michael Malthouse. He argues China was just about money – a pretty important resource to Australian football today. It is intriguing that Malthouse did not take up a similar protest with Greater Western Sydney’s wish to find cash in the old Californian gold fields of the USA.
Port Adelaide will not be playing in China in 2021.
Should it play in Shanghai ever again? Again and again, it is said that Australian football is the greatest game in the world. So why keep it to Australia?
There also is a need to strengthen the game’s reserves with international television rights, more so if the days of ever-increasing returns from Australian television are done and the AFL will face the difficult moment of taking the game from free-to-air screens to pay-per-view downloads with Amazon and Google to find more cash.
In the new normal, the game should not become insular.
BEYOND AFL
Every state except South Australia – which maintains an independent controlling body and its original name, SANFL – will be sweating on how much the grants from AFL House will be cut and how the strings from headquarters will become tighter.
The AFL intends to “drive greater alignment from community football to the elite game”. This might translate to centralised control.
History is loaded with examples of workshops and desk executives at headquarters in Melbourne coming up with concepts believing “one theme fits all” across Australia. It simply does not.
The needs for development in Queensland and New South Wales today are vastly different to those in Victoria, just as the pressing wants of community teams in Western Australia and South Australia are not the same as those in other states and territories.
They also are different from city to country districts in the same state.
A national reserves competition – or the AFL’s long-envisioned D-League with a development concept for under-23 players – is now binned, with neither the league nor a broadcaster able to afford the concept.
The AFL’s call to allow clubs from Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria to work their seconds in the highly-compromised VFL will challenge the South Australian and Western Australian-based Crows, Port Adelaide, West Coast and Fremantle on where and how to place their reserves.
It also will reignite the animosity among those fans who are passionate about their domestic-league teams and hate any AFL involvement in their semi-professional leagues.
If there is a dream solution, it would be a national AFL that enhances other competitions and the game in total rather than load compromises on second-tier leagues. If only the game could support Hawthorn president Jeff Kennett’s concept of promotion and relegation.
THE MEDIA
Hawthorn premiership coach Alastair Clarkson has picked up former St Kilda-Fremantle mentor Ross Lyon’s act of perpetuating that line from 2000 when Andrew Demetriou was AFL chief executive: “There is more media covering the AFL than federal politics”.
Clarkson has not been taking note that the seats in front of him at post-match press conferences are becoming barren, with more and more absentees. And less is not better.
Even before COVID accelerated (and drove) major cuts in “traditional” newsrooms, there was dramatic change to the way the game was presented.
Conventional media – newspapers, television and radio – was tripping up on the need to be first or to set agendas or to reinvent itself in a 24/7 news cycle. Club media was challenged to meet the very test it once demanded of others – being honest rather than spin masters.
And both – including the government-funded ABC – have become loaded with conflict of interest while game coverage involves club presidents, football directors, board members and player managers.
How does the listener/viewer/reader know if a commentator is talking up or down a player to influence a contract deal he is engineering in his day job? When are Collingwood president Eddie McGuire and Crows football director Mark Ricciuto speaking with independent voices?
Commercial arrangements between AFL clubs and media empires have become the curse of journalists, particularly those unaware of deals struck in their managing editor’s office.
One AFL club chief executive is said to proudly tell guests at dinner parties that he no longer fears the scrutiny of the local newspaper: “One phone call to my man in there and I can get any story run and any story pulled.”
Season 2020 brought game-day broadcasts from studios thousands of kilometres from the match venue, with commentators reliant on the vision from giant television screens. Executives have found an answer to their cost-cutting missions.
The dream of open locker rooms (those guarded by obsessive club media managers) was lost under COVID protocols. It should not be forgotten in the search for the “new normal”. And it should be noted the old-guard fear of a newspaper headline being pinned on lockers in the opposition room has been overwhelmed by the players’ self-publishing in social media.
THE STATISTICS
Could we have a new theme round, adding to Sir Doug Nicholls indigenous round? One that gives the statisticians a bye once a year. A round that is free of “metres gained” and “pressure acts” and “fantasy points” to just have the scoreboard reveal the numbers that mean most in football.
Just asking.
A FINAL THOUGHT
Geof Motley, the nine-time SANFL premiership winner and 1964 Magarey medallist, always says: “Australian football is such a great game, no matter how often we try to stuff it up.”
So here is the opportunity to finally fix up a game – more so than just a league – that since the 1980s has sought a national objective and argued about who commands the game (generally with a debate along Victorian v non-Victorian lines).
In crisis, there is opportunity.
And in 162 years of Australian football – not even after each of the two World Wars – has all of the game been in the same spot searching for the same answers to the greatest crisis the sport has known.
Traditionally, Australian football has held itself back, with powerplays between leagues, both within state borders and along state lines. COVID forces an auto-correct on decades of compromises. But there is no guarantee the correct decisions will be made. Certainly not when self-interest always wins.
Thankfully, the game remains indestructible.
Some kind of breakaway competition in the next decade or so is not so far-fetched. The lack of respect and foresight shown by Victorian establishment interests in the provocative and downright stupid act of locking in the GF until the 2050s may become the key symbolic and practical moment, in hindsight, when the rest of us realised for real that the Vics never actually cared for the national game, just wanted $$$ to prop up their own old fashioned traditions. Covid is showing us that we actually don’t need Victoria as much as we thought. A truly national comp with let’s say 3-4 teams from each of WA, SA and Vic, 2 each from nsw and qld, and 1 each from NT and tas. That would be good. Let the rest of the Victorian teams play amongst themselves and they can have their MCG grand final every year
Lots of good thoughts there. I look forward to the day that the non-Victorian teams can say they’re sick of playing in the pseudo-VFL and hand back their licences and form their own league where there’s no non-Victorian bias. e.g. the grand final is on a rotating basis, irrespective of who’s playing. 2 teams in Perth, Adelaide, Queensland and Sydney, 1 in NT, Tassie and ACT. It could be 20 years away, but as the interstate teams (see – we still even talk about teams as either Victorian or interstate!) become stronger, if the “A”FL doesn’t pull it’s head out of its Victorian ass… it just may come to pass.