On October 1, 2013 the footy world shook when a 21-word tweet was posted from the official GWS account: “The GIANTS have withdrawn their offer to Buddy Franklin based on advice that he will accept an offer from the Swans.”

Footy’s biggest player move was about to go down, and not in the way anyone — except a few insiders — expected. But it was far from smooth.

In the final part of a three-part special, the inside story of the Buddy’s deal is revealed plus the explosive fallout and lasting impact of the biggest player move in our game’s history.

READ PART 1: THE BRAINS BEHIND THE BUDDY DEAL

READ PART 2: SECRET MEETINGS AND GWS BOMBSHELL

THE FALLOUT

Publicly, the AFL — through then-deputy CEO Gillon McLachlan — says Sydney is taking an “extraordinary risk” on Franklin, who will be 36 at the end of the contract.

Privately, however, they’re giving them both barrels.

“By the time we got to the finals we were conscious that the AFL were hoping he’d get to the Giants,” Swans CEO Andrew Ireland says.

AFL Commission chairman Mike Fitzpatrick calls Swans president Richard Colless to deliver what Colless later describes as a “torrent of abuse”.

Ireland gets a similar phone call.

“I received an irate call from (then-CEO) Andrew Demetriou. I then got a more balanced call from Gil later that day and obviously Mike Fitzpatrick made that famous call to Richard (Colless),” Ireland says.

Asked if Demetriou’s call was as colourful as the one Colless receives from Fitzpatrick, Ireland says: “Yes, but I’ve been in footy long enough to have had a couple of those so it didn’t worry me too much.”

Pickering says: “When you’ve got the chairman of the Commission barrelling the chairman of the Swans and the CEO of the AFL barrelling the CEO of the Swans, it tells you how desperate they were to get him at their new franchise club.”

“WE’VE BEEN LED DOWN THE GARDEN PATH”

So confident are the Giants that the club has planned Franklin’s unveiling and launch party.

Then they’re like the jilted bride left standing at the altar.

“The real frustration comes from spending a fair bit of time and energy on something that you then find out … you feel deceived,” Giants chief executive David Matthews says.

“That’s the reality of what unfolded. That’s just a fact. We don’t feel emotional about it now, you move on, but when you’re preparing for one of two outcomes and then you find out a lot of those discussions have just been a waste of time … you’re like, ‘We’ve just been led down the garden path here’.

“But what I’m most proud of is how quickly the club responded in terms of securing (Shane) Mumford, then (Heath) Shaw and at the time, Josh Hunt. That’s basically where the money went and that’s proven to be a good set of decisions.

“The question that often gets asked is: ‘Were we ever seriously considered?’ I think we were because if the numbers are right, we offered around $7 million and the Swans $10 million. If he was always going to go to the Swans you’d think those equations would be in reverse.”

Pickering denies any suggestion the Giants had been deliberately misled.

“I don’t think they were deceived at all. I think I made it pretty clear to plan without him. I know I said that and I said the same to Hawthorn,” Pickering says.

The Hawks have three days to match the deal, but the AFL doesn’t need that long to launch an investigation into how the Swans had committed footy’s version of Grand Theft Auto in complete secrecy.

One by one, Pickering, Franklin, Swans officials and others file into AFL House, where they are grilled by Total Player Payment cop Ken Wood and Integrity Manager Brett Clothier.

Asked if he ever met the AFL about Franklin signing for GWS, Pickering said: “Not that I remember.”

Asked if Franklin himself had ever met with Demetriou about joining the Giants, Pickering said: “He might have. I can’t recall if he did. They might have had a chat at a function, I can’t remember that. It might have happened.”

Having explained themselves to the league, player and manager then fly to Sydney, where they prepare for Franklin’s Swans unveiling should the Hawks choose not to match the deal.

They don’t, but there’s another snag.

“The AFL decided they wanted every Swans board member to sign a letter saying that the money would stay in the cap regardless and the length of the deal,” Pickering says.

“One director was overseas. So they had to chase them down to sign a fax and all this stuff. It was ludicrous.”

Franklin officially becomes a Swan on October 8, 2013 and is unveiled the following day.

But it would prove no neat little bow. In fact. the AFL’s fury isn’t even close to subsiding.

In March, 2014 — less than a month before Franklin’s Swans debut — the league announces it will phase out the Swans’ 9.8 per cent Cost of Living Allowance after howls of protest from rivals clubs.

By October, the league has banned the Swans from recruiting via trade and free agency for two years while COLA is being phased out.

“The trade ban is probably the poorest decision I’ve seen the AFL make,” Ireland says.

“As I said in the discussions with them, ‘It’s your rule’. While we advocated for COLA, it was their rule, they set it and we complied with it.

“They were petrified that we might recruit someone else the next year. We were never going to because we had no space, but I know they thought Paddy Ryder might come to us, there were rumours about James Frawley and the AFL said: ‘That can’t happen, it would be embarrassing’.

“We never thought of recruiting Frawley, but they were under a lot of pressure and felt they needed to stop us trading for a couple of years.

“Subsequently they realised it was too unfair because they wound it back a bit in the second year so that we could bring in Lewis Jetta and Callum Sinclair.”

THE AFTERMATH

When you manage three big characters in the same story and there’s only one happy ending, how do you keep everyone happy?

For Pickering, it was always going to be mission impossible.

He managed Franklin, Clarkson and Longmire. He was a former teammate of the latter two and the best man at Longmire’s wedding.

Secrets were kept and relationships were strained.

“I didn’t like it one little bit that Franklin was able to go to their club 12 months after Kurt Tippett,” Clarkson said in 2014.

“It was frosty … because it involved two mates who I had known for 25 years and things were done behind our back and I expected more. But it also reveals the brutality of the game.”

Five years on, Pickering would only change one thing.

“The one regret I have was not giving a bit more information to Clarko. One, he’s a mate and two, he was a client at the time. That was the trickiest part,” Pickering says.

“I had a good discussion with Alastair after it all. In hindsight, I probably could have just given him the heads-up knowing, as a mate, he probably wouldn’t have said a word. That’s the sort of friendship we had, but we sorted it out and we are still mates.

“He’s got a job to do, but he understood I was in an awkward position, too.

“Buddy didn’t want me to say anything to anyone from Hawthorn. He was adamant, so I was caught between a rock and a hard place.

“Bud knows how good a mates me, Clarko and Horse are so he was aware it was tricky for me as well.”

On his first day as a Swan, Franklin tells the Herald Sun: “I’ve come here to do nothing else besides win premierships.”

Five years on from the deal that stunned the footy world, that hasn’t happened. Hawthorn have won another two flags in that time — one against Buddy and the Swans — while GWS have also failed to reach the summit.

So how do we judge the Franklin move in the sixth season of a nine-year deal?

No, he hasn’t won that premiership, but he’s done everything in his power trying.

In five years at the SCG, Franklin has been All-Australian four times, including as captain last year, won two Coleman medals and been Sydney’s leading goalkicker every year.

It’s the biggest player move of the modern era — quite possibly the history of the game — and the reverberations are still being felt.

READ PART 1: THE BRAINS BEHIND THE BUDDY DEAL

READ PART 2: SECRET MEETINGS AND GWS BOMBSHELL