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Swans are everyone's scapegoat
COMMENT
By JEFF WELLS
05jun03
THE hypocrisy of the death-riding of the Swans both here and in Melbourne is breathtaking.
Certainly there has been mismanagement in administration, marketing and recruitment, for which chairman Richard Colless has squarely poked out his chin.
It is there for anybody to belt ? the same as the club has been belted by the sponsorship and corporate hospitality money being siphoned off to the World Cup ? and some of the usual suspects have leaped forward.
Yesterday we had Mike Gibson ? who is still harping back to the Dr Geoffrey Edelsten days ? with Gibbo's good old-fashioned pie and a tinny philosophy about why there is no room for Aussie rules, or indeed four codes, in Sydney.
The message seems to be that Aussie rules and soccer should crawl away and leave the market to the real pros of rugby league.
It is the same old deadening parochialism. As if Sydney is not part of Australia. As if Aussie rules hasn't been played in this state for 100 years. As if everybody who lives in Sydney was born here in a rugby league jumper sucking a Rex Mossop-autographed dummy.
Try telling that to the biggest city in America ? that there is no room for gridiron, baseball, basketball and ice hockey in New York.
Those bagging the Swans in Sydney might want to consider that this is a team not a league ? and they average bigger crowds than any Sydney rugby league team. And if they get back to the playing strength of their grand final year of 1996 the 40,000 mobs will be back at the SCG or at Telstra.
Unfortunately the Swans draw their crowds from the same areas as union ? which has a World Cup to flog this year.
Meanwhile the Melbourne media and talkback drones insist that Sydney is nothing more than a vampire on the neck of what should still be the Victorian Football League.
Colless calls this "the biggest furphy in football". First, he says, there is the myth about the Swans' extra salary cap money. That, he said, is funded by the Swans, not the AFL.
When the licence was sold twice, in 1985 and 1988, $8 million went towards propping up Victorian clubs instead of staying in Sydney as a capital base.
"It was a case of football colonisation," he said.
Twenty years ago the VFL commissioned its own research which concluded that not even fanatical Melbourne could continue to support 10 clubs.
Melbourne could never come to grips with it. But South Melbourne were shunted up to Sydney in 1982 and Fitzroy to Brisbane in 1996. And the addition of the SA and WA clubs was an admission that interstate money was needed to keep the Victorians afloat.
Thus the AFL, about 40 years after it should have, created a national league. When rugby league tried to do the same it cannibalised itself in the Super League war.
As late as 1996 the AFL was trying to merge Melbourne and Hawthorn and admitting that it wanted only eight Victorian teams by 2006. AND Colless says that 10 or 11 AFL clubs are on just as shaky financial ground as the Swans. If three of them had used the same accountancy practices as the Swans last season, they would have declared the same losses.
The Kangaroos and Western Bulldogs are already on financial lifelines ? the Swans have yet to ask for a cent.
To me common sense dictates that, for a genuine national league, four Melbourne teams ? not interstate teams ? need to be cut to bring it down to 12. The obvious candidates would be Kangaroos, Bulldogs, St Kilda and Melbourne. But Colless isn't buying that. He cites Souths as an example of a code losing followers when an old team is cut.
And the reaction of the AFL club presidents is interesting. Put them in the same room and they are a reasonable bunch, says Colless. Let them loose and you get Eddie McGuire ? the AFL's Maxi-Me ? running amok trying to sink Sydney.
Some basket cases are tut-tutting but between the lines they are saying they need Sydney to survive. There would be no $500 million TV contract without the biggest market, Sydney.
And any team with a temporary financial problem ? which is being addressed ? is entitled to ask why a cashed-up league with a $500 million TV contract would not be stepping in to help. The AFL cannot divorce itself from its clubs. There are very few football clubs of any code in this country which can support themselves without grants and TV money. Attendances and sponsorships won't cut it.
The NRL starts with a $40 million black hole each year which is filled by $2.5 million handouts to each club and the profits from that great NSW boon to Australian culture ? the poker machine.
And if Gibbo wants to keep yapping about the excesses of Dr Edelsten I will have to remind him of the great conquest of America when the ARL took its product to a California high school gridiron pitch and gave away tickets at McDonald's to get a crowd in 1987
COMMENT
By JEFF WELLS
05jun03
THE hypocrisy of the death-riding of the Swans both here and in Melbourne is breathtaking.
Certainly there has been mismanagement in administration, marketing and recruitment, for which chairman Richard Colless has squarely poked out his chin.
It is there for anybody to belt ? the same as the club has been belted by the sponsorship and corporate hospitality money being siphoned off to the World Cup ? and some of the usual suspects have leaped forward.
Yesterday we had Mike Gibson ? who is still harping back to the Dr Geoffrey Edelsten days ? with Gibbo's good old-fashioned pie and a tinny philosophy about why there is no room for Aussie rules, or indeed four codes, in Sydney.
The message seems to be that Aussie rules and soccer should crawl away and leave the market to the real pros of rugby league.
It is the same old deadening parochialism. As if Sydney is not part of Australia. As if Aussie rules hasn't been played in this state for 100 years. As if everybody who lives in Sydney was born here in a rugby league jumper sucking a Rex Mossop-autographed dummy.
Try telling that to the biggest city in America ? that there is no room for gridiron, baseball, basketball and ice hockey in New York.
Those bagging the Swans in Sydney might want to consider that this is a team not a league ? and they average bigger crowds than any Sydney rugby league team. And if they get back to the playing strength of their grand final year of 1996 the 40,000 mobs will be back at the SCG or at Telstra.
Unfortunately the Swans draw their crowds from the same areas as union ? which has a World Cup to flog this year.
Meanwhile the Melbourne media and talkback drones insist that Sydney is nothing more than a vampire on the neck of what should still be the Victorian Football League.
Colless calls this "the biggest furphy in football". First, he says, there is the myth about the Swans' extra salary cap money. That, he said, is funded by the Swans, not the AFL.
When the licence was sold twice, in 1985 and 1988, $8 million went towards propping up Victorian clubs instead of staying in Sydney as a capital base.
"It was a case of football colonisation," he said.
Twenty years ago the VFL commissioned its own research which concluded that not even fanatical Melbourne could continue to support 10 clubs.
Melbourne could never come to grips with it. But South Melbourne were shunted up to Sydney in 1982 and Fitzroy to Brisbane in 1996. And the addition of the SA and WA clubs was an admission that interstate money was needed to keep the Victorians afloat.
Thus the AFL, about 40 years after it should have, created a national league. When rugby league tried to do the same it cannibalised itself in the Super League war.
As late as 1996 the AFL was trying to merge Melbourne and Hawthorn and admitting that it wanted only eight Victorian teams by 2006. AND Colless says that 10 or 11 AFL clubs are on just as shaky financial ground as the Swans. If three of them had used the same accountancy practices as the Swans last season, they would have declared the same losses.
The Kangaroos and Western Bulldogs are already on financial lifelines ? the Swans have yet to ask for a cent.
To me common sense dictates that, for a genuine national league, four Melbourne teams ? not interstate teams ? need to be cut to bring it down to 12. The obvious candidates would be Kangaroos, Bulldogs, St Kilda and Melbourne. But Colless isn't buying that. He cites Souths as an example of a code losing followers when an old team is cut.
And the reaction of the AFL club presidents is interesting. Put them in the same room and they are a reasonable bunch, says Colless. Let them loose and you get Eddie McGuire ? the AFL's Maxi-Me ? running amok trying to sink Sydney.
Some basket cases are tut-tutting but between the lines they are saying they need Sydney to survive. There would be no $500 million TV contract without the biggest market, Sydney.
And any team with a temporary financial problem ? which is being addressed ? is entitled to ask why a cashed-up league with a $500 million TV contract would not be stepping in to help. The AFL cannot divorce itself from its clubs. There are very few football clubs of any code in this country which can support themselves without grants and TV money. Attendances and sponsorships won't cut it.
The NRL starts with a $40 million black hole each year which is filled by $2.5 million handouts to each club and the profits from that great NSW boon to Australian culture ? the poker machine.
And if Gibbo wants to keep yapping about the excesses of Dr Edelsten I will have to remind him of the great conquest of America when the ARL took its product to a California high school gridiron pitch and gave away tickets at McDonald's to get a crowd in 1987
You could not get a more emotive piece of bulldust in all your life unless you asked me to write it!
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