Five years on, go inside how the AFL’s ‘council of war’ saved footy from Covid-induced financial ruin
Five years from Covid officially shutting down the AFL, it’s easy to forget how close the league came to financial ruin. Jon Ralph asks the key stakeholders how the game was saved from despair.
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Exactly five years on from the day that Gillon McLachlan will never forget, it is easy to ignore how close the AFL came to financial ruin.
As Covid closed in on Australia, McLachlan and his AFL Commission pulled the pin on the AFL season on March 22, 2020, on a dramatic Sunday afternoon just days into round 1.
Yet as McLachlan this week revisited one of footy’s most dramatic days as the game closed down until mid-June that year, it was clear the league had no other choice.
On March 22 as state closed borders, Prime Minister Scott Morrison banned non-essential travel and images were beamed from around the world of death and desolation, footy had to follow suit.
The AFL Commission, which had decided the previous Wednesday to at least attempt to start round 1 with no crowds, announced on the Sunday afternoon it was postponing the season.
The Hawthorn-Brisbane Lions and West Coast-Melbourne games went ahead to complete round 1 after an eerie start to the season in which Carlton and Richmond played in front of an empty MCG.
Make no mistake, the competition was on a knife’s edge multiple times throughout the year.
AFL Covid cabinet member Peter Gordon vividly recalls going bushwalking with his wife, Kerri, near the Mornington Peninsula’s Jackalope winery later that season during the break between Victorian lockdowns.
“We were about to start a walk on a bush track in Red Hill and Gill’s name came up on my phone,” former Dogs president Gordon said.
“He said, ‘Listen, don’t ask me about how I know, but Victoria is going to close down again in two or three days’ time. We have something like four hours to make a decision to abandon the season or relocate every single club to Queensland.’”
Five years on from the day the AFL stopped, McLachlan, coronavirus cabinet members Eddie McGuire and Gordon and then AFL coaches Nathan Buckley and Adam Simpson recall how those dramatic hours played out.
THE AFL CEO (GILLON McLACHLAN):
“The thing I haven’t widely talked about is the decision to start the season with all the unknowns of Covid and the dreadful weight of that move,” McLachlan told the Herald Sun.
“What if a player got really sick and caught Covid in a game? But we wanted to put a stake in the ground so the competition survived. So frankly there was some relief on that Sunday that we had got through some games so we could return at some stage. Then we had to reassess everything.
“People were dying and we thought at that stage Covid would be transmitted by sweat so there was so much uncertainty. But starting the season was absolutely the right decision and it gave us a fulcrum to work around.
“The Wednesday decision was very difficult with the footy world divided. Then on the Sunday the decision to stop was easy because the border was closed and that meant the season in its current form was impossible. Now we had to find a way back.
“The future was a total unknown but we had a monthly burn rate of $30 million with no revenue coming in. There was no time to think but we had a great team and we had things to get on to. We had a meeting at Sandown and the people and culture team made decisions. We furloughed 80 or 90 per cent of our (AFL House) staff. That all came that afternoon (and was announced later that week). We had to think about hubs. We had to stabilise the finances. Ray Gunston worked on a line of credit with banks. We had to work with Paul Marsh on the CBA (and player pay cuts). Clubs had no distribution and we had no income so how do we survive?
“If we didn’t (start the season again) then our game looks very different to what it is now. We had no choice (but to go on). You are in a world where that situation just wasn’t tenable.”
THE COACH (NATHAN BUCKLEY)
Collingwood belted the Western Bulldogs by 52 points on the Friday night of round 1.
And yet as the toll of hub-life took its toll amid repeated quarantines, the Magpies’ season eventually ran aground in a semi-final annihilation against Geelong in which the Pies kicked a single goal to three-quarter-time.
“I was only talking to one of our coaches about this recently. He said, ‘We were humming in 2020. That pre-season, we were on fire,’” Buckley said.
“We played that round 1 game and absolutely smashed the Dogs. We were f***ing flying.” “(As he looks up the stats) we just dominated. Taylor Adams had 26 touches. Nine goalkickers, ‘Checkers’ (Brody Mihocek) kicked three. Chris Mayne had 29 (disposals) off a wing.
“That game (against the Dogs) was weird. The overarching memory was that we still sat in the coaches’ box and you could hear the players. We were dominant and our ‘voice’ was huge. You could hear the instructive talk and our review was about that. And then the handbrake went on.
“I think when we came back the angle was about being grateful to play, not knowing what was coming. We had to make the most of it and focus on the now. And that works for a few weeks. But later in the season in the hubs it was really challenging and we were all over it. That was really difficult.
“Then when we played West Coast in that first final (in Perth) we were the ‘Dirty Pies’ and we had to quarantine again before we played that game. We had a long trip back to the Gabba and Geelong just smashed us. We had nothing. No legs … Nothing. Don’t take me back to that game. I don’t need that memory.”
THE COACH (ADAM SIMPSON)
“That was probably the last good game I was part of,” Adam Simpson said with a grin and a shake of his head.
West Coast closed out round 1 with a 27-point home victory over Melbourne only hours after the league declared it would down tools until June.
West Coast and Fremantle players were forced into quarantine in Perth when the season recommenced in early June before they struggled in hub-life when the competition moved to Queensland.
“We were the last game and we were just there to win because no one really knew we would stop the season for that long,” Simpson said.
“We were energised. I think Melbourne wasn’t. When you are away from your family you are like, ‘What is going on here?’ We had a good win and it was a full length game, too. We got hurt by the shortened Twenty20-style games. We liked the full-length games.
“We actually had a good pre-season. 2018 was 2018 (the premiership), in 2019 we were knocked out in the first final but we were still in the window and that year probably cost us badly.
“It was an eight-week break but we were in different lockdowns. Everyone else was free except for us because we closed the borders and we couldn’t do anything. Then we lost three in a row in Queensland and then won six or seven in a row (but lost to Collingwood in the home final).”
“That game at Optus Stadium was bizarre. I remember ‘Schoey’ (Will Schofield) was in the players’ box with the window open yelling abuse to the Melbourne players and you could hear it because everything was so quiet.”
WESTERN BULLDOGS CLUB PRESIDENT AND COVID CABINET MEMBER (PETER GORDON)
“At that stage it was almost a council of war,” Gordon said.
“We had agreed to play those first games in the empty stadiums. Gill was saying we had to close the season down and I had been working with guys from the epidemiology and virology world through my background as a tort lawyer and an earlier class action on medically acquired HIV. Gill was saying, ‘I think we have to close it down’ and I strongly supported it.
“Then Eddie gave this impassioned speech. I was in the front room of my home and everyone had their wives listening in. He spoke about how even in the darkest days of World War I we played on. It was the most magnificent speech. And he was right that even if there was some civil disobedience and noncompliance with the rules it was great to put games on for people at homes.
“I remember being down at Sorrento in a hook-up of club presidents and (Sydney chairman) Andrew Pridham saying people need to understand the economic consequences are far beyond anything we have ever encountered. He was talking about peak cash outflow and I was sitting there pretending to understand.
“But with the economies of footy, you commit all your expenditure in the first three months after the season ends with player contracts and the like. If you cease to operate a competition almost 80 per cent of your revenue goes.
“Clubs were going to run out of cash and the first of them would run out in weeks.
“We had won a premiership so we had funds in reserve with the Whitten Oval redevelopment in prospect.
“Sydney was four weeks from insolvency. In net cash assets ironically we were the third wealthiest. The Eagles had more money than Elon Musk.
“Gill’s initial thought was to appropriate all the cash treasury from clubs at that time and for the AFL to manage the club.
“There was a meeting with clubs with $10 million in the bank and we all agreed we wouldn’t give the AFL our cash. We used a guy who is now a barrister called Geoff Kozminski to act for the clubs.
“Gill found out and said, ‘Oh f***, is that guy four foot 10?’ He is the smartest guy I have ever met. No club who had that money could hand it over because we would create insolvency.
“(When we moved up to the Queensland hub) it was a big decision but it wasn’t really a complex decision. We had to press on and get people working on a plan to get everyone up there. I am kind of proud of it and Gill was an incredible leader during that period.”
THE CLUB PRESIDENT AND MEDIA MAN (EDDIE McGUIRE)
McGuire was a key member of the AFL’s coronavirus cabinet. He was also on air on Fox Footy on that Sunday, keeping viewers up to date on a rapidly moving situation.
“I was the president of Collingwood, hosting on Fox Footy, doing breakfast radio with Triple M and was a lover of the game in the middle of the pandemic.
“It was almost a war mode and the conversations (as part of that decision-making body) were really good. Peter was from a legal point of view, Gill was looking at the overall point of view and I was looking at it from a social point of view.
“The original position was Gill said we shouldn’t go ahead and Peter said the legal advice is not to go ahead. I had hosted too many Anzac Days where I had given the speech about a decision made in 1915 where football would go on because the people on the front line wanted it to go on. They wanted as much normality as possible for them to have something to fight for.
“My position was for the people sitting at home worrying if we were all going to die at that stage. Let’s start the season while we can and give people hope. At that stage if we stopped the season the ramifications to so many people would have been earth-shattering.
“It wasn’t an argument, it was an exchange of ideas. But by the Sunday morning we had the same conversation with the same people and we all agreed it was time to stop.
“So then it swung to me being the voice on air at Fox Footy and (News Corp CEO) Robert Thomson was texting me from New York saying this is the only sport still on in the world so in the second half of that game we almost changed the call to an international call, explaining what the 50m line was.”
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