Inside the AFL’s CEO search farce: What has happened since Gillon McLachlan announced his departure from the top job
It’s been over a year since Gillon McLachlan announced he was stepping down as the AFL’s CEO, yet he remains in the top job. Take an inside look at the disastrous search to find his successor.
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Gillon McLachlan was emotional. After eight years he was done, cooked, finished and ready to walk away from the biggest job in Australian sport.
He’d just come through the toughest period of his career, steering the AFL through the Covid pandemic and it was now back flourishing again.
At the age of 49 he was ready to ride off into the sunset, enjoying those European summers he’d been missing out on.
As usual McLachlan had been impressive at his resignation press conference with the emotion of the decision obvious. He also explained how he’d come to an arrangement with AFL Commission chairman Richard Goyder to stay on until the end of the coming season to tidy up some significant loose ends.
“I think this timeline gives Richard and the Commission the right runway to work through the succession process,” McLachlan said.
That was April 12, 2022.
GILL’S $1M PRICE, TASSIE AND THE ‘BROMANCE’
“If this was a publicly listed company, the Commission would be tipped out. How they have gone about this is just a disgrace.”
The high-profile AFL club CEO is angry and it’s a sentiment shared by many of his contemporaries.
It’s April 19, 2023.
Gillon McLachlan is still the AFL CEO. There is no set date for his departure, no replacement has been named and those loose ends, well there’s now more of them, and they’re still loose.
To understand how the previous 12 months have played out the best starting point is the fact that Goyder has always – and still does – wanted McLachlan to continue as CEO.
It’s a scenario he tried to get across the line a number of times, first with the man himself who wasn’t totally against the idea given he was suffering from a case of buyer’s regret.
McLachlan was understandably wrecked after two years of a Covid-impacted competition, mentally and physically. But as the past year has played out, the batteries have been re-charged and those big job offers he expected to be on his doorstep haven’t really materialised.
Running the Brisbane Olympics was mentioned and a gig at Crown floated but there was nothing which compared with the adrenaline rush of running the largest sporting code in the country.
It has been suggested by multiple club sources that McLachlan put a $1 million pay increase on his head to stay on, raising his annual package to around $3.5 million with bonuses. (McLachlan has denied this claim).
Goyder was apparently more than happy to accommodate and looked at ways of raising the extra funds, allegedly even having a conversation with broadcast partner Channel 7 where it was quickly shut down.
McLachlan’s first deadline for departure – the end of the 2022 season – was already drifting to the end of the year when the Hawthorn racism scandal hit in September. It was a mess, not of the AFL’s making, but it landed in the CEO’s lap and he felt obligated to stay on to try and sort it.
In November, a message was sent around to staff saying the CEO was now staying until after the Gather Round in April the following year while several big-ticket items remained on the agenda, including finalising a position on a 19th license for Tasmania and the new player Collective Bargaining Agreement.
Again as that deadline approached a new narrative was being pushed out. The Tasmanian licence needed Federal Government funding so it now made sense for McLachlan to stay around until the Federal Budget in May.
While this ever-moving deadline scenario played out, the process to find a successor spluttered along with a mystifying lack of urgency.
Goyder said there was “no time-frame” when McLachlan first tendered his resignation and he wasn’t joking.
The bromance between the CEO and his chairman is seen as an issue in this failed “succession process”.
What the pair didn’t work together on was a heir apparent plan which has dumbfounded many given McLachlan came into the job as the beneficiary of a carefully orchestrated handover from Andrew Demetriou.
“Normally there is an heir apparent in the AFL but there has been no real succession plan within the AFL for their CEO, there has been no genuine attempt to try and identify a person,” one club executive said.
“They would argue they have identified several people, I don’t buy that as I don’t think they had a real look at it. Their preparation has been poor.”
What has infuriated the clubs even more is the lack of urgency from the Commission to fill its two vacancies. It has been over two years since former West Coast and Sydney premiership player Jason Ball and former Foxtel executive Kim Williams announced they were retiring from their positions.
The Commission usually has nine members who are elected by the 18 AFL clubs, with each club entitled to make nominations. McLachlan is also a member of the Commission while the role of Chairman is decided by the Commission and not the clubs which is the same for the CEO position.
So since early 2021 there has only been six commissioners alongside Goyder and McLachlan: private equity banker Robin Bishop, academic Professor Helen Milroy, venture capitalist Paul Bassat, former soldier Simone Wilkie, businessman and former Hawthorn president Andrew Newbold and former lawyer Gabrielle Trainor.
With Ball leaving, it left the group responsible with running the game without anyone with football expertise. Remember, the previous Chairman was former Carlton premiership ruckman Mike Fitzpatrick.
“Would you have a banking commission without anyone with banking experience on it?,” one observer stated.
Names such as AFL legend Leigh Matthews and modern day greats of the game Matthew Pavlich, Chris Judd and even the recently retired Geelong premiership skipper Joel Selwood have been thrown up as possible commissioners as has former Sydney Swans and Brisbane CEO Andrew Ireland.
But all the club’s pleas have been met with deaf ears by Goyder and McLachlan which some believe is part of their power play, the less people involved the easier it is to control.
“One of the reasons they are indicating why they haven’t picked new commissioners is they don’t want the new commissioners, the inexperienced commissioners who might lack AFL industry knowledge to have a say in who might be the next AFL CEO,” another club CEO said.
“I find this part extraordinary, they want to decide for themselves and have become a bit of an oligarchy, a little group within a team.”
Adding to the power play, Goyder recently told the clubs that he would only be communicating with each club president rather than the CEOs.
So could this all lead to McLachlan staying on?
“They would need to play Benny Hill music out if they were announcing that,” one industry figure said.
Former Collingwood president Eddie McGuire is not ruling it out, saying the door is still ajar.
“He’s 49 years of age and it’s the best corporate job in Australia. I’m not sure why he would be running away from that one,” McGuire said.
WHO WAS WINNING THE RACE AND HOW DO THE CANDIDATES LOOK?
A female legacy piece was Richard Goyder’s back-up plan which blew up in smoke spectacularly over last weekend’s Gather Round.
In his other roles as chairman of Woodside Petroleum and Qantas Airways, Goyder has actively promoted women and the thought of being the one to install the first female AFL CEO appealed.
Woodside’s chief executive is Meg O’Neill while two of the leading candidates to replace Alan Joyce at Qantas later this year are Qantas Loyalty chief executive Olivia Wirth and the airline’s chief financial officer Vanessa Hudson.
Goyder’s anointed ground-breaker in the AFL was the highly regarded and well-credentialed Kylie Watson-Wheeler, the Western Bulldogs president and CEO of the Walt Disney Company Australian and New Zealand arm.
Her name had been thrown up at the start of the search with a dozen others but the trail went cold as the focus turned elsewhere before she suddenly emerged last week as the chairman’s chosen one.
The AFL engaged New York based recruitment company Spencer Stuart and have paid them over $1 million to run the worldwide search to find McLachlan’s replacement.
First interviews happened in June last year with candidates sounded out including club chief executives Brendon Gale (Richmond), Tom Harley (Sydney), David Matthews (GWS Giants) and Simon Garlick (Fremantle).
The in-house candidates were the AFL’s General Counsel and General Manager Football Operations Andrew Dillon, Travis Auld (GM Finance, Clubs and Broadcast) and Kylie Rogers (GM Customer and Commercial).
Then for nine months nothing happened. The search ground to a halt for reasons no-one has explained.
Behind-the-scenes opinions were being sought from club presidents and other industry figures although the Herald Sun understands that neither the recruitment firm, nor Goyder, sought out Demetriou for his take which shocked many.
“It’s hard to believe Andrew Demetriou didn’t get a phone call, you’d think he would know what is required to be the CEO of the AFL,” an industry source said.
It wasn’t until March that a short list of candidates were summoned to Spencer Stuart’s Melbourne office at 101 Collins St.
By this stage Dillon was considered the front-runner from Gale before Goyder fell in love with Watson-Wheeler’s business nous which included which including being a senior executive at the Hallmark greeting cards business in the US.
The lack of excitement around Gale has been the biggest surprise of the process. There is a sense he was never “really in it” with his relationship with McLachlan and Goyder a sticking point.
“Brendon Gale came second in the process in 2014, one in which Gillon McLachlan was a shoe-in and the anointed one,” a club boss observed this week.
“Since 2014 he has won three premierships, got 100,000 members, put $20 million in the bank and set up external businesses for the Richmond Football Club yet he didn’t make the top two.
“And don’t forget he’s a lawyer, played 250 games and was president of the Players’ Association. I mean how is Kylie Watson-Wheeler ahead of Brendon Gale?”
When the Herald Sun exclusively revealed that Watson-Wheeler had cancelled a speaking engagement in Melbourne last week to be a late addition to the AFL’s lavish Gather Round dinner at the prestigious Magill Estate winery in South Australia, she was quickly wound into favourite.
But Goyder’s plan hit a snag at the Commission table where it’s believed he was rolled by a vote of 4-3 to make Watson-Wheeler the new CEO.
If the clubs were frustrated before, they left Adelaide steaming, particularly after McLachlan engineered a three-year deal, worth around $60 million, for Gather Round to remain in Adelaide.
That was a decision many believed should have been one for the incoming CEO, not the one who was allegedly in his final days.
Watson-Wheeler left the City of Churches embarrassed and flew overseas on a holiday with her children. She never wanted her name to come out given her Disney commitments and like the assistant coach who keeps missing out on the senior job, it’s not a great look.
With Auld linked to the vacant Australian Grand Prix gig, the sense by the end of the highly successful football feast in Adelaide was that it was back to Dillon even though Goyder had apparently been concerned he didn’t want it enough.
The reason the clubs love Dillon is his no-fuss personality, he’s very good at his job and does it without the fanfare which clearly the AFL chair would like to see more of.
If it does fall Dillon’s way – he has been at the AFL for 22 years – how must he be feeling?
He has been in front of the Commission’s eyes the whole time and they’ve spent most of the past 12 months trying to find reasons not to appoint him.
“They have humiliated the candidates,” one experienced AFL figure said. “How does anyone go into the job feeling they have got a really solid imprimatur to be able to create the change they want to create with this environment of uncertainty which has been created by an inept Commission.
“At the end of it all they will appoint Andrew Dillon, they could have picked him out five years ago and prepared him. So much for needing time for the worldwide search, they’ll go with the man who has been in their backyard the whole time.
“Seriously, we are getting laughed at.”
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