AFL 2021: Port Adelaide launching Chasing Greatness Fund to help clear $13m debt
As part of its ambitious strategic plan that includes winning three premierships, Port Adelaide aims to clear $13m of debt. This is how the Power hopes to do it.
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Port Adelaide is calling on supporters to help clear its $13m debt in four-and-a-half years so it can “chase greatness” on and off the field.
Power chief executive Matthew Richardson told The Advertiser the club had been carrying debt for a long time and needed to eradicate it as part of its ambitious strategic plan that also included winning three premierships and having 100,000 members by November 1, 2025.
The club is launching a “Chasing Greatness Fund” early next week and its first goal is to eliminate $4m of debt acquired last year through COVID.
Richardson said the three core purposes of the fund were on-field success, improving the club’s social and training hubs, and financial sustainability.
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There are six AFL clubs with strong net cash positions, in excess of $80m collectively, including Richmond, West Coast, Hawthorn and Collingwood – sides that have combined to claim eight of the past 11 flags.
“If you want to give yourselves the best chance of winning, there’s no doubt there’s a correlation between financial strength and the ability to be able to win,” Richardson said.
“We’ve got to be able to provide our AFL and future AFLW players with world-class training facilities … to optimise success.
“It’s also about providing a home for the Port Adelaide community and our people that they can be proud of, not just now but into the future.
“Port Adelaide’s story not just over the AFL journey has been … stories of financial vulnerability.
“If our vision is greatness then greatness for Port Adelaide has to include financial strength and that starts with being debt-free.”
Richardson said improving the club’s training centre was vital because what was built at Alberton at the start of the last decade was now rated among the bottom few in the AFL.
He said modernising the social club to incorporate a museum, add an upstairs bistro with a viewing deck looking out across Alberton Oval and expanding the Port Adelaide store was “about our people and our fans”.
“It’s going to be this unbelievable venue,” he said.
“It’ll be a venue they can be proud of.”
Port Adelaide supporters can choose to direct their funds either to one of the fund’s three core purposes.
Fans can provide one-off donations, annual sums or add money to their memberships, like a subscription model.
“It’s about providing mechanisms for people that suit them,” Richardson said.
Richardson said running its core business better and having crowds at 75 per cent and full capacity at Adelaide Oval this year had put the club ahead of its financial modelling in November when it needed to be deliberately cautious.
“Our membership is tracking well, as is our commercial business, underpinned by three major partners for the first time ever … and the increased capacity at home games has us close to $500,000 better off in ticket sales than we forecast at the start of the year,” he said.
Port hope players find inspiration in prison bars cause
- Simeon Thomas-Wilson
Port Adelaide senior assistant coach Michael Voss says the club’s ongoing push to wear its prison bars guernsey in Showdowns can be “a cause” the playing group can rally behind this season.
After their request to wear the prison bars jumper on the field in Saturday night’s Showdown was rejected by the AFL, Power players changed into the black and white guernsey after making their way in to the rooms to sing the song following their win over Adelaide.
Voss said “the intention was to show the support of the club and support of our people”.
“There have been long conversations around it, for us it is now probably parking that conversation and letting those powers to be have those conversations now behind closed doors,” he said.
“But clearly, as you can tell, prison bars are a very symbolic thing for our footy club and we are sort of keen to make sure it has representation for us going forward.”
Port won’t face any sanction from the AFL for the display, and the Power will continue their push to wear the jumper in future Showdowns, with chairman David Koch saying “it’s not going away”.
Whether it will be for Showdown 50, the Crows home game in Round 21, is still unknown with the Power now seeking a meeting with the AFL over its ongoing push.
Adding to this is Crows chairman John Olsen saying his members would not support Port Adelaide wearing the prison bars in Adelaide’s home Showdowns.
“If you go back and look at the response that we’re getting from our membership base, there’s a very clear view from that membership base … the answer is no,” he said last week at a SA Press Club function.
With Koch firing back at former Collingwood president Eddie McGuire on Monday for his comments about Port’s move, describing it as a “direct poke in the eye to Gillon McLachlan and the AFL commission”, the push is set to hang around the Power for much of this season.
The Power and Collingwood will face off at the MCG next week but Voss said he was confident the ongoing push would not distract the playing group in a negative way.
“If distraction means you are actually following through on what you believe in then it’s a worthwhile distraction to have,” he said.
“We are pretty strong on our culture, our background, our heritage and we are keen to stand for that. So that never becomes a distraction.
“For us, if you have a cause that you can roll in behind and believe in, to me that’s as a player you want to play behind that.
“For us, it’s a significant piece but we have a job to do. It wasn’t a distraction before the weekend, it won’t be a distraction now.”
Originally published as AFL 2021: Port Adelaide launching Chasing Greatness Fund to help clear $13m debt
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