EBENEZERSports
The Sydney Swans scandal was the last thing the AFL wanted, though it was convenient in terms of helping the Cats waiver saga fade away
Read full story on theguardian.com →
Sport — Jonathan Horn
Remember the Geelong concussion waiver scandal? Feels like about a dozen outrages ago, doesn’t it? The Cats president, Grant McCabe, raised the issue on the weekend, putting the onus back on the AFL to come clean on how much they knew about Jake Kolodjashnij’s “voluntary assumption of risk” agreement. By then, the alleged events at the Pullman Hotel had cannibalised the news cycle. By Monday, a country Victorian pub was issuing statements about player behaviour. By Tuesday, Geelong was newsworthy for the potential acquisition of Zak Butters, Toby Greene and Rowan Marshall.
When it comes to the concussion story, both Geelong and the AFL have employed some classic crisis management strategies – deny, dilute, diffuse, distract, delay. Both parties initially denied the existence of the agreement, and pushed back on the journalist who broke the story. They then sought to confuse the issue as much as possible, dropping the word “complex” into every second sentence, hoping that the general public would be so bewildered at what this was actually about that they’d quickly lose interest. They diffused the situation by framing it as an administrative oversight rather than a question of ethics and leadership. Sydney took care of the distraction part of the strategy. And engaging James Peters KC to examine Geelong’s evidence continues to delay the findings.
The Swans scandal was the last thing the AFL wanted, though it was convenient in terms of burying the Geelong story. But the rest of the strategy has been deliberate. The AFL has people in its corporate affairs team who have worked at the highest levels of state and federal governments. They’ve worked in prime minister’s offices and on state election campaigns. They have seen it all, and plotted out a strategy for every scenario. But footy throws up its own complications – club loyalty, intense public interest and media coverage, the cross-pollination of leaders from league to club, and the existential threat of CTE. Some of footy’s scandals, such as the Luke Sayers “dick pic” story, have been utterly inconceivable and irresolvable.
The AFL and its CEO handled the Sydney scandal a lot more convincingly and authentically than they did the Kolodjashnij issue. They framed it as a procedural error, something to be flicked down to third man with a fine. But a fine means nothing. Geelong is a wealthy club. They’ve reaped hundreds of millions of dollars from state and federal governments. A fine would be a minor inconvenience, a 50-metre penalty in the grand scheme of things.
And it would obscure what has been lost in all of this – that it was much more than a compliance issue, or a case of shoddy governance. People who should have known better have said silly things. The concussion campaigner Peter Jess called it “a position not better than modern slavery”. Dr Monique Ryan MP said the league had lost its “social licence”. Between hyperbole like that and Andrew Dillon doing the rounds of the various radio boxes talking about “learnings” and “complexity”, the opportunity to speak in normal sentences about this most important of issues was smothered.
For this is about so much more than paperwork. It’s about the moral and ethical responsibility of the league and clubs to protect their players. It’s about balancing the competing interests of footballers, coaches, administrators, unions, insurers, lawyers and families. It’s about individual agency. It’s about the long-term viability of the sport. It is complex, as the AFL and Geelong keep reminding us. But that complexity should have been an opportunity to have a nuanced, adult conversation, not a way of shutting that conversation down.
And it’s about something else, something that no KC investigation or six-figure fine can ameliorate. There is a perception, a frustration, and indeed a growing reality, that current and former Geelong people are running this sport. The slaps on the wrist for salary cap transgressions, the third-party arrangements, the connection with shadowy benefactors, the fireside chats between league CEO and star player, and the stadium built in part on the taxpayers’ dime have all led to a wider resentment and distrust.
This is not helped by the leadership crossover at both club and league. It’s not helped when the AFL’s former head of football, probably the most important role for players and fans, was the CEO of Geelong when all this went down. It’s not helped when the current club captain was the former president of the players union. It’s not helped when the former president of the club is now the chair of the league. It’s not helped when the current chief operating officer of the league, himself a two-time premiership captain at the club, refers to his chair as a man of “unbelievable integrity”. And it’s not helped when the senior coach, a man also employed as the “chief of leadership and performance” at a longtime club sponsor, claims to have no knowledge of what happened
In isolation, they can be explained away. In totality, they give credence to the view that Geelong is a club that pushes its luck, that straddles the line of what is acceptable, and that is subject to different rules, different penalties and different standards.
This is an extract from Guardian Australia’s free weekly AFL email, From the Pocket. To get the full version, just visit this page and follow the instructions
When it comes to the concussion story, both Geelong and the AFL have employed some classic crisis management strategies – deny, dilute, diffuse, distract, delay. Both parties initially denied the existence of the agreement, and pushed back on the journalist who broke the story. They then sought to confuse the issue as much as possible, dropping the word “complex” into every second sentence, hoping that the general public would be so bewildered at what this was actually about that they’d quickly lose interest. They diffused the situation by framing it as an administrative oversight rather than a question of ethics and leadership. Sydney took care of the distraction part of the strategy. And engaging James Peters KC to examine Geelong’s evidence continues to delay the findings.
This report is published with credit to theguardian.com. Full available text from the wire is above. Read on theguardian.com →
Source: theguardian.com · Jonathan Horn. Published 26 Aug 2026, 05:27 am.
Most relevant
To ignore provocation needs a particular temperament, and Yashasvi Jaiswal will discover this soon enough
Read on The Hindu →
