Buddy hypothetical

[liz]

The Swans have been losing substantial sums of money the past few years.

I just think a less expensive player would have had a better outcome.

[mcs]

The Swans have been losing substantial sums of money the past few years.

I just think a less expensive player would have had a better outcome.

If by few you mean the last two then sure (and no doubt this year too). It was 8 years straight of profits prior to that.

And more broadly, a 'less expensive' player really just translates to spending more on other players under the cap (given there is a minimum % a club must pay), amd then undoubtedly a significant reduction in off field revenue given no "Buddy factor"....

[Blood Fever]

The Swans have been losing substantial sums of money the past few years.

I just think a less expensive player would have had a better outcome.

Good for you

[giant]

Saw Buddy in the 'hood yesterday - he looks pretty settled.

[Ruck'n'Roll]

Buddy changed management because he wasn't going to need Pickering to negotiate another AFL contract. He now needed someone to negotiate off field deals not connected to footy. I think he moved to Jesinta's management.

I don't think that critique affects the central assertion of my overlong post - thanks for reading it my the way. I am aware of that explanation. However, in a recent interview with Buddy's former agent that subject came up and rather than trot out that simple explanation, Pickering hesitated and then ignored the question.

The other thing I should clarify, is that I'm not making any judgement call on Buddy's value etc. for no other reason than because a proper cost-benefit analysis is a retrospective, and the Buddy deal isn't.

[barry]

If by few you mean the last two then sure (and no doubt this year too). It was 8 years straight of profits prior to that.

And more broadly, a 'less expensive' player really just translates to spending more on other players under the cap (given there is a minimum % a club must pay), amd then undoubtedly a significant reduction in off field revenue given no "Buddy factor"....

I also think the swans blinked with regards to how a successful GWS with Buddy as their marque forward would impact the swans bottom line.
An unfounded fear in my opinion. The swans have the affluent eastern suburbs and corporate Sydney tied up, and needed to just back themselves.
Anyway, a successful GWS, grows the sport in sydney for both clubs.

But, if having a glamour full-forward is the swans operating model (and history strongly suggests this), then we'd better be all in on Aaron Naughton if there is a chance we can extract him.

[bloodspirit]

This post contains no judgement whatsoever on Buddy’s past or present performance, his value to the Swans, the overall success ROI of the contract or other similar subjects. This post is all about what machinations could have brought Buddy's ground breaking contract into exitance 8 years ago and that is all – history not currant events.

I have always found the Buddy deal difficult for me to get my head around. However, a few bits of information have fallen into place recently and I think I’m getting closer to comprehending it now - and have decided to share.

To start with, I’ll look at the $$$’s – I’ll address the duration of the contract a little later. The Giants' offer was for $7 mill, the Swans offer was $10 mill.

Not even in the currently hyper-inflated Sydney real estate market does a bidder surpass the previous bid by more than 40% - to suggest the Swans did, is to suggest utter incompetence on their part.

I’m not suggesting this.
But I have always wondered how the Swans got to $10 mill?
It’s been suggested that the Swans were given that number by Buddy’s agent, in which case did Pickering pluck that number out of the air? Or was a $10 mill payday already a possibility for Buddy. I believe so.

So where did the extra $3 mill come from?
I think there can be only one possibility, the AFL itself.
Finding an extra $3 mill in your salary cap would be extremely difficult for a club, but not so for the AFL, who’ve invested $267 mill into GWS.
Does a 7 year ambassadorial role for the most bankable star in the AFL to headline their push into the leagues heartland - $3 mill sound implausible to anyone here? It sounds like a bargain to me.

At the time Andy Demetriou denied offering inducements to any player to leave their current club. He later acknowledged that the AFL “could” offer Buddy an ambassadorial role – so the money was available.
Inducement? Ambassadorship? - You say tomarto, I say tomayto.

The above suggestion is the only way I can see to reconcile the size of our Buddy’s offer with his frequently expressed and apparently sincere preference for the Swans. If the above is substantially correct then Buddy did not gouge the Swans for an extra $3 mill – Buddy effectively gave us last refusal by allowing us to match an existing offer.

I believe the Swans actually managed to outbid the Giants and the AFL offer combined – an astonishingly bold move.

The AFL under Demetriou has always had a completely self absorbed and almost biblical “Whoever is not with me, is against me” approach to conflict. Anyone who thwarts their desires, or even inadvertently damages their brand, will be punished.

In the case of Buddy, he actually spurned their offer. Mike Fitzpatrick’s immediate reaction, a threatening and expletive riddled phone call to Richard Colless – is a textbook illustration of the narcissists (or narcissistic organisations) response to not getting their own way.

It was followed by the scrapping of COLA - unfortunately this affected all the expansion teams, so the AFL added it’s ridiculous trade ban to remove all doubt as to who was in the naughty corner.

Is that it? Maybe not quite. The AFL may have had a whack at Buddy too.
With Buddy in the Sydney market you’d think the AFL marketing department would make saturation use of his unparalleled star power to promote the game wouldn’t you? Astonishingly this is not the case. It’s actually really hard to find much in the way of AFL-originated Buddy based marketing. Nor did Buddy get to enjoy the anticipated AFL ambassadorial role.

Finally let’s turn back to the duration of the contract.
Matching the Giants and AFL offer combined the Swans put considerable pressure on their salary cap. I suspect achieving the necessary $10 mill was only possible by amortizing the costs, with the use of a 9 year contract.
Many in 2013 thought the idea of a 35 year old making a significant contributions to his team was preposterous, but Buddy’s proved them wrong.

It was also reported that Buddy himself was shocked at the duration of the Swans contract. However, there's never been any suggestion that Buddy was unhappy/shocked with the $10 mill, so maybe he was less across some of the other details – in particular the duration of the contract. His decision to dismiss his manager immediately after he'd just negotiated the biggest contract in AFL history is very hard to convincingly explain otherwise.

Sorry for the length of this post, and hope it won’t preclude it form receiving due consideration.

R'n'R, I find your thinking plausible, even persuasive, but I'm not completely convinced i.e. you may be mostly right, or maybe not. I can't say.

The part in your reasoning that I find less compelling is that I don't see our bid as a straight-out 40% overbid on GWS. The worth of the total contract we offered was substantially greater - but the amount per year was actually significantly less. It seems we weren't in a position to outbid (or even match) GWS over 6 years and this was the way we could present a competitive offer. Maybe we really did believe Buddy would play out the contract (as has proven to be the case) - although we could not have been totally confident about that - and so it was a legit offer, not just a way of outbidding GWS by offering an artificially long contract duration.

Another point is that I don't think it's a given that we would have known what GWS were offering. Pickering may have told us the GWS offer as a means of getting us to match or outbid them, or then again he may not have (may not have been allowed to).

So, for me, as far as your main point goes - that the AFL topped up the GWS offer with $3m of their own - the jury is out. There may never have been $10m on the table from GWS (via the AFL or otherwise).

[Ruck'n'Roll]

You are correct, we'll never know for sure whether Buddy had a total of $10 mill offered from the Giants and the AFL.

But possibility of the extra money just being a feature of the extra duration forces us to disregard the posts by Mel_C that the $$ figure was not initiated by the Swans (see below).

Liam Pickering (Buddy's manager at the time) was speaking about the Buddy contract on SEN the other week. He said he provided the swans with a dollar amount and Ireland came back with the 9 year contract. Buddy was shocked when he realised how old he would be when his contract finishes.

The topic came up because they were discussing a player that had signed a 5 year contract and whether large multi year contracts were a risk. Buddy's 9 year contract was brought up and that's what Pickering responded with. So the discussion was more about the length rather than the dollar amount.

As you say, the jury is still out - mind you a jury failed to convict Joh Bjelke so they can be funny things at times.

[Ruck'n'Roll]

Actually I don't think the question is whether the AFL were in for $3 mill - I think it's pretty cetain - the only question in my mind is, did the Swans know that some of the money was from the AFL?

[Captain]

I was excited at the time to get Buddy but looking back I wish we had never got him.

Has taken way too much salary cap and caused us to lose too many good players.

In order to justify such a huge % of our cap over such a large amount of time he needed to deliver more on the biggest stages but has either been injured (2015 finals, 2016 GF,) or gone missing (goalless in 2017 SF, destroyed by Davis in 2018 EF). This year, we didn't need him to kick 6 in a dead rubber against the Suns, we needed him to nail that crucial set shot against the Giants to win.

Those that talk up his marketing/promotional side seem to forget that the SCG was rocking a long time before Buddy came along.

[barry]

I suspect by the end of the buddy era we will have a less talented list compared to the year before he came to us, be in a worse financial position, and have no premiership silverware to show for it.

We simply overpaid, and its cost us.

[mcs]

be in a worse financial position
We simply overpaid, and its cost us.

What we pay Buddy on the field, for all intensive purposes, has zero to do with our overall financial position. Because there is a minimum we have to pay under the cap anyway. So if we didn't have Buddy, we would have been paying others instead that salary, so the net effect of 'overpaying for him' is effectively zero in terms of salary.

And while one may postulate any sort of counterfactual about what a 'better team' may have achieved on the field (if you want to argue we would have done better paying other players more with the Buddy money), I do not think it is credible to suggest he has not had a significant impact for the club off the park. Not an easily quantifiable impact because one can not create a viable counterfactual to compare it with.

But I find it very hard too believe anyone could mount a strong case that would suggest in any shape or form we are as a club financially 'worse off' because we recruited Buddy - once you take COVID out of the equation. That is the only reason we are in a 'worse' financial position at the moment - it is simply ridiculous to omit that critical context.

As I said before, we had eight years of straight surpluses up until 2018, and 2019 was not a massive loss. So the key indicators suggest the recruitment of Buddy certainly wasn't harmful to the overall financial perfromance of the club as a whole.

[Big Red]

I have no idea about the surplus' - do they include the AFL disbursement? I don't even understand how the Swans can have so many members when you there are so many empty seats at the SCG (this is before covid) - if I had access to a seasons worth of games I'd certainly attend. I like football, not so much the field stuff - isn't really my thing. I know it's isn't just Buddy's salary, Kurt Tippett must have had a similar effect. All I know is that see players at other clubs that I wish were still at ours, sad but true.

[mcs]

Those that talk up his marketing/promotional side seem to forget that the SCG was rocking a long time before Buddy came along.

Sure one can make that argumet.

But likewise the numbers do tell a fairly interesting story.

I haven't had a chance to dig out the whole lot of the figures (Neilfws may do it if he has a chance and offer some far more sophisticated analysis), but after out 2 flags (05 and 12), we saw somewhere around a 20% increase in membership numbers. This seems to linger as an addition to the 'baseline' membership levels, not just as a temporary increase (i.e there is variation mixed in there from year to year, but a premiership does seem to create a permanent boost).

http://footyindustry.com/files/afl/members/2016/AFlmembers1984-2016_aug13.png

2005 membership - 24,955
2006 Membership - 30,382
2012 membership - 29,783
2013 membership - 36,358

Since 2013 - despite no flags (noting a very good few years in general however), membership grew every year up to a peak of 61,912 in 2019. That is a massive increase no matter what way you look at it. A not insignificant factor in that growth has been the AFL more generally has done a lot to promote 'membership' as a key part of being a footy fan, so there has been serious growth across most clubs. But even taking that into account, it is still highly like that the Buddy factor has had a significant impact on that side - especially given for the good period of 2014-16 in there, 2017-19 wasn't quite at that level.

Even if you say that a quarter of that growth is due to the Buddy factor, that is still somewhere ~ 8,000 memberships. No idea what the average revenue per membership is, but it only has to be somewhere around $150 to 'offset' the wage of Buddy. And that is before any other off field impacts more broadly.

The intriguing period will be the 'post Buddy' period, to see what may happen to numbers. But I suspect we may see some fairly robust numbers should our upwards trajectory in performance is to continue.

Crowd numbers are much tougher to decipher - partially due to our split membership basis (Sydney and Melbourne) that means a growth in membership necessarily is directly reflected in home crowd figures (I suspect a similar trend would be seen at any sporting club in Sydney - it does seem to be an odd market in terms of crowds), partially because of the impact of the years playing out of Barry's palace in the west, partially by more routine factors such as wet weather, who we play at home any given year, times when games are scheduled, how we are performing as a team, redevelopment at the SCG etc.

They do tell some interesting stories however: https://afltables.com/afl/crowds/swans.html#1a

Highest 3 average attendance years were 1997 (35.8K) , 2006 (35.6K) and 2007 (34,2K).
- Reason for 1997 is obvious
- 2006 and 2007 averages supported by also being the high points of attendance at Homebush (45K on average in 2006, >60K at each game in 2007 as were very well targeted blockbusters). SCG averages for those seasons were 30.4K in 2006 and 25.2K in 2007.

- Next three on the list are 2016 (33.9K) ,2017 (33.4K) and 2018 (33.3K).
- Every year of the Buddy period comfortably is well in front of 2013 (28.2K) and 2012 (24.9K)

Not going to try to draw any conclusions from crowd numbers - there are far too many factors in there to say anything with any genuine conviction that there is causality to accompany the obvious correlations.

[mcs]

I have no idea about the surplus' - do they include the AFL disbursement? I don't even understand how the Swans can have so many members when you there are so many empty seats at the SCG (this is before covid) - if I had access to a seasons worth of games I'd certainly attend. I like football, not so much the field stuff - isn't really my thing. I know it's isn't just Buddy's salary, Kurt Tippett must have had a similar effect. All I know is that see players at other clubs that I wish were still at ours, sad but true.

As always, the finance of footy is difficult to unpick - best useful piece of info I could find was some analysis from 2019 in this spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...-GA/edit#gid=0 . Some useful info and links to reports here: http://www.footyindustry.com/?p=36848

At least gives some idea of how it all pulls together - but its tough to unpick. Really need a proper historical series to draw any meaningful conclusions, but I suggest there is more then just correlation between a sustained period of good results and Buddy being at the club - and missing finals in 2019 was probably the difference between a loss and a surplus in that year more than anything else. If nothing else, I think its safe to say having Buddy at the club has certainly helped improve overall financial results during that period.

As for the question between members and empty seats at the SCG. Plenty of factors to take into account:
- ~20% of our members are Victorian based. I'd suspect a very small proportion of those members go to any significant number of games in Sydney in any given year.
- A lot of memberships (not sure on the breakdown) are not full 11 game access to the SCG. Not sure on the breakdown between the categories.
- Sydney sporting fans are an interesting bunch when it comes to attendances at footy. Very similar trends are seen in NRL in terms of significant membership growth not necessarily resulting in huge increases in crowds at games. For whatever reasons, there isn't the same fervour to be at every game in Sydney like there is in the absolute footy mad towns of Adelaide and Perth, or even for the biggest clubs in Melbourne.

I suspect a reasonable target is probably averaging 40K a game at home by somewhere around 2025 - probably a push, but not entirely unachievable.

I'm sure there is some much better analysis out there around all this, but if I can't find some, might spend some of the long hot summer thinking more closely about it all.