Port CEO Keith Thomas and Adelaide’s Andrew Fagan take us inside their clubs’ fight for survival as the AFL season prepares to resume
Keith Thomas and Andrew Fagan take us inside the AFL’s fight for survival at Alberton and West Lakes since the coronavirus put the season on hold. Sleepless nights, empty boardrooms and tough conversations but footy is about to return.
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It was after 1am, late by Keith Thomas’ standards, when he walked out of the Convention Centre on to North Terrace after Port Adelaide’s 150th anniversary dinner in February and felt like he was walking on air.
Not because he’d had a couple of glasses of red, but because his football club had just gathered in numbers (1600) almost unprecedented for a footy function in Adelaide these days to celebrate its history and embark on what was supposed to be a year-long party.
And their chief executive along with the Power’s board, players and supporters had just lit the birthday candles.
“We felt on that night that it was the perfect start to what looked to us to be the perfect year,” Thomas said.
“The AFL had provided us with a fantastic fixture in the first half of the season full of blockbuster moments for us to celebrate our 150th, they really listened and understood the significance of the year.
“We were really buoyant coming out of that gala thinking very positively about the season to come.”
Thomas didn’t have a sense of what was coming. No one did.
Not even five days later on March 4 when Port Adelaide’s scheduled game against St Kilda in Shanghai was relocated to Australia did he contemplate the seriousness of the situation.
“We were tracking the coronavirus in China pretty carefully right throughout January and February, and I’ve got to say even though I’d been tracking it, I was pretty naive,” he said.
“When the game was relocated to Australia, I still had no real sense of the tsunami that was coming. But I’m looking at the timelines now and within two weeks our season was at risk, it happened really, really fast but it’s amazing how naive you can be.”
The start of the season teetered on the brink right up until March 18 and Port Adelaide flew to the Gold Coast to beat the Suns on March 21. They were on the plane home the next day when SA announced it was closing its borders and they were headed for two weeks quarantine.
The Crows had lost to Sydney on March 21 in front of an empty stadium for Rory Sloane’s 200th game.
Their chief executive Andrew Fagan watched the game from behind the glass in one of the club’s suites rather than his usual spot in the outer on the members’ wing.
But he wasn’t even going to go until the last minute.
“I thought if our members and fans couldn’t go then I wasn’t going to go either, but I made a last minute decision to attend because I thought it was important to understand what it felt like inside the venue and talk first hand,” he said.
“It was very unique and somewhat eerie.
“There general feeling was we might get one round away and then pause and you held out hope that there might be a way through but there was a sense of inevitability that we had to take a break.
“The (AFL) phone hook-up (on March 22) wasn’t filled with debate, I think everyone understood the significance of the issues locally, nationally and internationally and we needed to take time to chart a path out of this.”
WITHIN a week of the league announcing the season was on an indefinite break, clubs started cutting costs.
Executives took pay cuts, up to 80 per cent of staff were stood down and there were redundancies.
Of a staff of 120 at Port Adelaide, 30 have been made redundant.
Thomas said Port’s strategy was to “absorb the shock” by making hard decisions as the AFL worked on a financial rescue package to save the industry.
“We have to strip this back to almost being dormant, and then work on a way to bring ourselves back,” Thomas said of the early weeks of the shutdown.
That meant some very personal conversations and the scenario was complicated by many staff now working remotely.
“My mindset went to ‘the club must survive and we must do whatever it takes to ensure we stay upright’,” Thomas said.
“But then it becomes very personal, lots of really good people who are invested in the future of this club and doing the best job they can for the club need to have really difficult conversations.
“The approach our leadership group took was to be absolutely transparent, as honest we could be about the circumstances, and be as regular as we could in the communication.
“So for all the people who went on stand down we’ve been staying very close to them and as people come and go in and out of the workforce, we’re trying to keep them connected to the big picture issues we are dealing with so while the discussions are no easier, they’re better understood.”
Just as difficult Fagan says was explaining to staff in May that while footy was coming back, their job for now, was not.
“When we were no longer playing games the obvious question was ‘well how long and when do we start?’ and one of the greatest challenges has been not being able to provide certainty to all stakeholders,” Fagan said.
“They were difficult conversations with good people who have contributed to the club over varying periods of time and through no fault of their own were now having enormous amounts of pressure placed on their own lives.
“Then (when the AFL announced the season would resume) it’s great to have footy back but clearly this wasn’t normality returning for so many.
“And again they were difficult conversations and we still have a number of staff on the job keeper program and are likely to stay there until the end of September.”
THOMAS says he speaks with president David Koch daily and the board is now meeting fortnightly instead of six-weekly at Alberton. All meetings are on Zoom and Thomas sits alone in the boardroom as part of the video link up.
“With my executive team we meet daily and that’s a change, and I’m catching up with Ken (Hinkley) semi-regularly but we’ve really let the football program manage themselves and they’ve done a really good job.”
Fagan speaks with his chairman Rob Chapman and Matthew Nicks regularly during the week and with football manager Adam Kelly every day.
“I would speak to Adam Kelly several times a day, I joked the other day I realised I hadn’t put his number in my favourites since I started and part of it was because his number was always in the last four numbers dialled,” Fagan said.
Fagan has a weekly video call with all staff while working from home.
“I’ve never really worked from home and this was an unusual change, you tend to find some days you’d roll out of bed, grab a cup of tea and sit at the desk and 15 hours later you haven’t moved until you hear the screaming of the kids at the dinner table and go and help out,” he said.
“You’re affectively working around the clock and picking up sleep where you can.
Speaking of sleep, there have been plenty of restless nights but as Thomas says “that’s normal”.
Only usually his mind is racing about performance where as now it’s everything from staff to members, partners, the AFL and fabric of the game.
“What’s keeping me up at night is making sure we have enough time to think carefully about the big decisions we’re making even though we’re under enormous time pressure,” Thomas said.
What has however provided both clubs some comfort has been prompt reassurance from their major corporate partners.
Within a week of the season going on hold, Thomas got a letter from MG’s managing director.
“Saying ‘I know we have a brand new relationship but we are standing by Port Adelaide all the way’,” Thomas said.
“I can’t tell you how reassuring that is, because at that moment I felt we had no solutions in regards to how are we going to compensate these major partners when we didn’t even know if we were going to play another game?”
Thomas had similar correspondence from GFG and Fagan said Toyota and Optus were among the first phone calls he fielded in late March.
“They’re partnerships in the true sense,” Fagan said.
With the league heading towards a reboot in early May, things hit a speed bump when the Crows were investigated by the AFL for breaching strict training protocol by a group of players in quarantine in the Barossa Valley.
“It was certainly a distraction we didn’t need, but from the outset we knew this was a clearly inadvertent breach of an AFL rule for a few minutes of a long training session,” Fagan said.
“As soon as we were alerted it occurred we provided all the information to the AFL to substantiate that and both their decision and the findings of SAPOL reflected that.”
On May 14, AFL boss Gill McLachlan delivered some welcome news that the season would resume on Thursday, June 11, but the SA and WA clubs would be forced to relocate to hubs on the Gold Coast because state border closures prevented teams from travelling.
That meant some football department staff who had been stood down could at least return to work with about 75 per cent of those resuming their duties at Adelaide and Port.
But there is still a portion of staff on stand down like the events teams who need crowds to return for them to have a job.
While the immediate focus is on survival and getting games under way, both the Crows and Power who will meet in Showdown 48 next Saturday night are planning for 2021 as well.
“We are trying to set ourselves up for 2021 by protecting the relationships and circumstances of all of our stakeholders in 2020 as best we can,” Thomas said.
The club’s China strategy remains a work in progress.
“The partners we deal with in China have been through their own trauma, they’ve been dealing with that for longer than us, so they’re at the point of coming out of it starting to recover,” he said.
“We’re basically on pause, the strategic significance of China to us hasn’t diminished, the need for us to continue down that track hasn’t diminished, it’s just an issue of timing for both parties.”
Likewise at Adelaide, no decisions have been made on ESports, baseball, media production and other shared services with sporting groups until they know what their bottom line will look like.
“To do that we need clarity on the amount of debt we’ll end up with at the end of this year, a range of AFL decisions around list sizes and soft cap and pathway programs, what our 2021 revenue will look like,” Fagan said.
“We need to take stock of the continued impact of COVID and government restrictions and the way we can conduct certain activities.
“I do think that fundamentally we need to change how we operate because we do know for certain we’re going to have less people and less money.
“Going forward it’s going to be a different kind of arms race, the battle is how do you do more with less? How do you become more efficient than the next club in football operations and to ensure we have the financial strength to invest in football.
“With the return to play announcement we’ve been able to get programs out to members and it’s facilitated some more detailed conversations with our corporate partners and coterie partners so it’s helped and we’re beginning to look as much at 2021 as we are 2020.”