Andrew Demetriou didn’t just have a front-row seat to the biggest stories in one of footy’s most jaw-dropping decades.

The AFL chief executive had his fingerprints over every decision shaping an 11-year period during which a massive revenue growth and 18-club expansion intersected with the game’s most damaging controversies.

Demetriou sat with want-away Hawthorn forward Lance Franklin in his AFL House office as they discussed his desire to leave the fishbowl of Melbourne for the Harbour City.

Then he absorbed the explosion of his commission boss Mike Fitzpatrick after Sydney swept in to steal Buddy from under GWS’s noses.

Demetriou hosted Karmichael Hunt in his inner-city house as the rugby league star considered a move to new expansion club Gold Coast — a signing that would rock both codes.

The league CEO spent time in conversations with Ben Cousins as his life spiralled out of control — a crisis that would later see West Coast’s senior figures begging for clemency after the club’s drug culture was laid bare.

Demetriou was prepared to park emotion to make the toughest of calls.

Including the decision to offer North Melbourne — the club that handed him an AFL career — $100 million in inducements to move north to the Gold Coast in 2007.

The decision was rooted in the AFL’s belief that it needed a game played every week in Queensland and came only a decade after the Roos were shattered to have a merger with Fitzroy knocked back by the AFL.

Despite the Roos’ financial peril the fan base united to kybosh the deal — a development that resulted in the league registering the team name Gold Coast Football Club two weeks later.

The AFL’s 18-team expansion was officially on.

THE ROOS MOVE THAT WASN’T

Demetriou concedes now the apathy of the Gold Coast residents to a relocated Kangaroos outfit — as well as James Brayshaw’s determination — stopped the relocation in its tracks.

“It was always going to be the poorer choice of two decisions because the Gold Coast had told us pretty clearly, this is the public and all the research, that they wanted their own team,” he told Sacked.

“Not all Gold Coast players but recruited players living on the Gold Coast. With local identities on the board.

“In many ways, James Brayshaw and that cohort did a great job in rallying the troops.

“There was no bad blood from the AFL and I have read reports that there was.

“North are debt free, they are well run. They are on the up with a good list coming through and a good coach.

“I am thrilled they stayed and if someone said to me today North Melbourne should relocate to Tasmania, I would say don’t be ridiculous.”

If the AFL did not hold animosity towards the Roos, the failed relocation hardened their resolve to expand the competition while also retaining an even number of teams.

SUNS v GIANTS

Demetriou and the Fitzpatrick-led commission were adamant the league’s growth mindset meant they would bypass Tasmania and instead attempt to crack the challenging western Sydney market.

Gold Coast would officially come into the competition in March 2011 with GWS to follow a season later.

“You could never have 17 teams,” Demetriou says.

“Odd teams and a bye don’t work, they cost the league money.

“At the end of the day the starting and the finishing point was that you needed to have two games in Queensland and New South Wales every weekend.

“Otherwise, you are going to lose out to rugby league and rugby union and soccer.

“When the Swans and the Brisbane Lions started, there weren’t as many clubs in those two regions, and they’d become big markets, fighting for talent, women, broadcast rights, revenues, lots of businesses growing there.

“So those are the only two places they could go.”

As Gold Coast prepares to embark upon its 12th season next week, it has never played in a final, never had a winning season, never won more than 10 games and sacked coaches Guy McKenna and Rodney Eade, with Stuart Dew under the pump.

Why have they failed so far?

“We picked the people; we didn’t pick the players. They adopted two different approaches and who is to know which one was going to be right at the time,” Demetriou says.

“The Giants adopted a slow build. Cop a lot of pain in the early years.

“That was the sort of Gubby Allen, Kevin Sheedy philosophy, we’ll lose by about 25 goals for two or three years. And we’ll get our draft picks and then we’ll trade some of the picks to get better players and we’ll get a blend of old and young but we’ll have this cachet of young talent.

“Whereas the Gold Coast put in Gary Ablett Jr. ‘We’ll go fast quicker, we’ll go for more seasoned senior players with a few young superstar recruits’.

“One worked better than the other. Gold Coast had injuries and as it turns out history will show that the GWS approach was the better approach.”

Ablett was footy’s brightest flame but of the Suns’ recruits Nathan Krakouer was gone quickly, Nathan Bock was embroiled in a peptides scandal and broke his leg, while Campbell Brown built the culture but played for only three seasons.

GIANT FUTURE ON THE CARDS OUT WEST

Demetriou has never been stronger in his belief Greater Western Sydney will leave a permanent mark on the AFL competition,

“I think one of the Sydney scribes described GWS as my Vietnam, a famous quote,” he said.

“I just said it was a generational change.

“The thing that I loved about the GWS Giants and still do, was that they were going into an area of two and a half million people — and that does not include the Canberra corridor — of a very ethnically diverse, 60 to 120 languages spoken, a very large indigenous population.

“I thought that’s the bread and butter of AFL football. It’s a great democratizer. It’s a game for all people. It’s a game for the masses.

“I thought, what more fertile stomping ground than that, you know, and it’s not going to happen overnight. And it’s still not where it needs to be.

“But they’ve done a phenomenal job. You know, they’ve got more members than a lot of NRL clubs, and they’ve got a great women’s program, and they’ve played off in finals and got very close.

“They have done a superb job. I think there’ll be a very big football club at some stage.”

He says of perceptions the expansion clubs are an AFL money pit: “I just say spend $300 million and you’ve got back $900 million in broadcast rights.”

INSIDE THE HIGH-PROFILE CONVERTS

Rugby converts Karmichael Hunt and Israel Folau were thrust over the top of the trenches by the league in their battle to win the hearts and minds of rusted-on rugby fans.

Both were paid fortunes — $4.2 million over three seasons for Folau and $900,000 a season for Hunt — to win the AFL valuable publicity while the drafted kids were given time to emerge.

Hunt would finish his AFL career having plead guilty to cocaine possession — naming Gold Coast teammates as fellow drug-takers — while Folau’s contentious views on homosexuality occurred after he left the AFL.

Does Demetriou believe the pair were worth the money?

“I do. They generated a lot of publicity,” he says.

“Karmichael could obviously play, Israel Folau in his last game was on the threshold of being quite talented but then chose to go back into union.

“It wasn’t just to upset them. But it was to show that we were being serious about being there. Everyone kept thinking this is a five year exercise and we’ll pack up and go home.

“One of my daughters barracks for the Gold Coast and the other one barracks for the Giants because I adopted them almost like my children. So I’ve got a soft spot for both clubs.

“Karmichael Hunt came to this home. We sat down and had a cup of coffee with he and his girlfriend and I was trying to persuade him to play AFL.

“I found him to be very presentable and personable. He was a talented athlete. No one I think has done what he has done, played elite Union, League and AFL.”

BUDDY SHOCK

The mike-drop tweet came from the GWS account at 12.23pm October 1, 2013.

Sydney had pulled off one of footy’s great heists after orchestrating a free agency deal with footy’s most dynamic forward, allowing GWS to believe he was their man while operating under the cover of darkness.

Commission boss Mike Fitzpatrick erupted in a phone call to Sydney chairman Richard Colless, who said of that phone call: “There was no warm-up, no introduction — the opening pleasantries were the ‘F’ bomb and the ‘C’ bomb.”

But if Colless says Fitzpatrick behaved like a “Mafia Don”, Demetriou says as the league chief executive actually wasn’t that shattered.

“You might find this hard to believe, but I wasn’t disappointed that he wasn’t going to GWS,” he says.

“First of all, I didn’t mind that he was going to Sydney.

“If memory serves me correctly they picked up some very good players post Lance Franklin (Callan Ward, Phil Davis, Tom Scully).

“I know there was an interest in getting Buddy, I spoke to Buddy in my office.

“I didn’t tell him which club to go to. I know that he wanted to leave Hawthorn. But I never said we wanted (him) to go to GWS.”

Sydney accused the AFL of diluting their contentious cost-of-living allowance (COLA) in retribution for stealing Franklin from GWS but Demetriou said the decision was not made in vindictiveness.

“At the time the whole COLA discussion was, ‘Were they using it in the way it was intended to be used across the list?’

“It wasn’t about Buddy. I know people want to draw that conclusion.”

Was it the right thing to do to get rid of COLA?

“Yes it was.”

BEHIND THE TANKING DISGRACE

Melbourne was eventually found not guilty of tanking after a 2012 investigation into 2009 allegations Dean Bailey’s Demons had attempted to orchestrate results to maximise their draft picks.

Yet after a 203-day investigation, Bailey was suspended for 16 weeks and football boss Chris Connolly for a season for “acting in a manner prejudicial to the interests of the competition”.

It was the tip of the iceberg given clubs had for many years felt conflicted over winning late-season games that would rob them of a cherished priority pick.

Demetriou had repeatedly said there was no such thing as tanking.

Richmond coach Terry Wallace famously dubbed Demetriou “The Fonz” because once he had said there was no such thing as tanking, he could never admit he was wrong.

For the first time Demetriou tells Sacked what he witnessed might have changed his mind.

“I’ll just say this, the proposition that if you lose enough games, you’ll be saved as a football club by getting the number one draft pick is just sheer folly. It’s never worked, never worked,” he said.

“And the proposition that clubs purposely go out to lose games is folly.

“Is it possible that someone could create an environment that means a club can’t perform at its maximum thing? Possibly.”

‘THAT WAS A VERY, VERY TRAGIC TIME’

The AFL-commissioned Gillard Report into West Coast’s era of 2001-2007 found a culture of cover-ups and routine drugs use by the club’s star players.

Only exposed nine years later by the Herald Sun, its revelations were so mind-blowing AFL great Kevin Bartlett said it put a “black line” through the Eagles’ 2006 premiership.

The AFL Commission summoned key Eagles leaders to an early 2007 meeting where they were warned the club faced penalties about bringing the game into disrepute, with star Ben Cousins eventually deregistered at the end of 2007.

“I don’t think anything could have been done differently, but it was an appalling time,” says Demetriou.

“The culture of the club, the whole Ben Cousins saga, the fallout …. I remember a famous commission meeting where I think Darren Glass came and (chairman) Dalton Gooding and someone else. It might have been Dean Cox.

“But even they were embarrassed by what had happened at their club.

“They knew they had issues. They were put on notice, they are on probation.

“And they turned it around significantly, in fairness to them.

“But there was no point being a rich, powerful football club, if you had a culture that was systemically getting itself into strife on that level. They’ve turned around. Does it mean it’s never gonna happen again? History has an incredible knack of repeating itself.”

Demetriou says despite the persistent whispers, Cousins’ campaign of deceit meant the league could never pin him down on his drug use even when the illicit drug code was introduced.

“I had to deal with him on a few occasions one-on-one,” he said.

“That was a very, very tragic time. Tragic in many ways, but also for him as a young man who had an addiction, and had an addiction before he even got to the AFL level.

“You know, it started before that.

“And it’s good to see he’s making an attempt to turn his life around, but the levels that he went to, to avoid testing — and we didn’t have testing back.

“People forget why he wasn’t ever testing positive, but there wasn’t testing to that level then, and there wasn’t illicit drug testing even.”