Sydney Swans CEO Andrew Ireland might be the club’s greatest ever recruit
FORGET Lance Franklin, Tony Lockett or Barry Hall. Of all the big name recruits to join the Sydney Swans over the years, Andrew Ireland is the best of them. JESSICA HALLORAN investigates why.
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IS your football club operating out of demountables? Having to furnish the player common room with your own backyard chairs rather than concentrating on coaching? Club making a loss? No recruitment manager?
Suffering NRL clubs — you need to hire Andrew Ireland.
Who, you may ask?
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He’s the man who’s been quietly instrumental in much of the Sydney Swans’ success over the last 16 years. One of the most influential background figures in Australian sport.
“Since the game of AFL was invented in 1859, I’d be staggered if there is anyone who knows as much about the northern markets and been able to put into practice for the good of the game, that knowledge than Andrew Ireland,” former Swans chairman Richard Colless told me.
“He basically took a broken club and made it into the best in the country, the Brisbane Lions. He took a slightly less broken club, with a bit stronger base and helped shape it into the great club it is today.”
This Saturday, the elimination final at the SCG between the Swans and the GWS Giants, could be the last Ireland will oversee as the Swans chief executive.
By the end of this AFL finals series he will retire with a legacy most sporting administrators dream of. During Ireland’s 16-year tenure at the Swans the club has only missed the finals once.
On his executive watch membership has gone up dramatically, they now boast 60,0000 members and have a Swans Academy fostering young talent. They’ve gone from a parlous financial state in 2002 to become a profiting sporting powerhouse in a very challenging marketplace.
Under Ireland’s direction they’ve developed an exceptional playing roster. He drove the $10 million signing of Lance Franklin, a gobsmacking price tag which has since been vindicated.
It was in 2002 that Colless, who spearheaded the club’s rise in the Australian sporting market as the Swans chairman for 21 years, personally met with and convinced Ireland to join the Swans as a “football manager”.
After leaving Brisbane he joined the Swans in the newly formed role as head of football. He became the supremo, with everyone in football, including the senior coach reporting to him. He oversaw sports science, recruitment, medical and other operations, so the coach, then Paul Roos, could focus on what he did best: coaching.
Ireland quietly did things differently and looked out of Australia for the club to become better in the early 2000s. Ireland, recruiting manager Kinnear Beetson and then Swans doctor Nathan Gibbs as well as the head of conditioning and senior physio travelled “on the smell of an oily rag” to football clubs in Europe looking at the way major clubs conducted their operations.
They were one of the first football clubs to really look outside Australia for footballers.
“Tadhg Kennelly was one of the best examples of that, but overall what Andrew brought was, dare I say it, world’s best practice,” Colless said.
The statistics don’t lie and Ireland’s direction has seen a consistently successful team.
At times the Swans practices have surprised NRL administrators. At a Carbine Club lunch a handful of years ago Colless remembers crossing paths with the then Sydney Roosters CEO Steve Noyce.
It was the coaching succession plan devised by Ireland, that involved assistant Longmire taking over from Roos in 2011, which had Noyce perplexed.
“How could you have appointed Longmire so early in the season to coach the club next year? When Roos was going to be there for that length of time?” Noyce asked. Colless, also perplexed, said; “Why?”
“Oh, that would never have happened in rugby league, the guy who was waiting would have knifed him,” Noyce said.
At a Carbine club lunch, again, Colless was approached by another NRL type. “I think you are the best sporting club in Australia,’’ he said.
“It’s a nice comment, it doesn’t actually win you any more games.
“But it’s a bit of a statement to where we have come from and now stand.”
Colless has dubbed Ireland as the Swans “best-ever recruit”.
“He’s not an evangelist,” Colless said. “He’s not jumping on chairs, he’s an understated character, but his grasp on issues, unflappable approach to doing things, is a significant part of where we are today.”
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