AFL 2023: How Craig Kelly will handle Pies conflicts as genius move takes club closer to flag 16

Craig Kelly might be at the club when the club sacks his son. How will Collingwood’s new CEO handle the conflict?

Former Collingwood AFL player Craig Kelly now agent running Elite Sports agency. Australian Rules P/R

Craig Kelly will embark upon his journey as Collingwood’s new chief executive fully aware he might be at the helm when the club eventually sacks his son Will and his high-profile TLA client Craig McRae.

The 1990 premiership defender and wildly successful player manager has finally realised his dream of returning to Collingwood and the journey promises to be the opposite of boring.

Kelly knows where every body is buried in the AFL; has a famously volatile temper; calls a spade a bloody shovel at every opportunity.

In short, he is a walking headline that also enters a club in his son’s make-of-break season, and with his TLA firm managing many of the Pies’ coaches and players in what is a clear conflict of interest in a game where they flourish.

Kelly will fervently hope son Will becomes a 15-year player and McRae secures a Jock McHale-esque tenure but both club or Kelly are smart enough to have considered how to handle either scenario if it goes pear-shaped.

This is a genius move by his great mate and second-year president Jeff Browne given Kelly’s extraordinary business successes, his vast network of football allies and his intellectual property across the trade-draft-free agency space.

Kelly wants to make this club a “juggernaut” again and will attempt to do so by sheer will.

Known for his short fuse, Craig Kelly’s new journey promises to be anything but boring.

Kelly has divested himself of his connections with the TLA management company he founded but retains all of the knowledge built across his insider role across five separate decades of football starting with SANFL Norwood in 1984.

The easiest way to frame it — how can recently owning a company representing 300 of the AFL’s stars and so many of the league’s leading senior and experienced assistant coaches not be a massive competitive advantage?

Twelve months ago Steve Hocking returned to Geelong as its chief executive fresh from a stint as the AFL’s football boss instituting a raft of tweaks and rule changes to speed up football.

A year on Geelong had won the premiership playing a new faster game style that came in no small part due to Hocking’s demand for the Cats to change in line with those rules he had instituted.

Collingwood will hope that as well as driving its core business Kelly’s off-field expertise can hand them similar advantages.

Geelong won a flag by exceptional salary cap management, by getting ahead of free agency trends, by every list management trick in the book.

Can Kelly read the game’s trends ahead of time on free agency, on the inevitable introduction of a mid-season trade period?

Can he use every legally available mechanism available to allow his stars to prosper off the field with the kind of merchandise, apparel, third-party and sponsorship deals that made him a millionaire many times over in business?

Magpies president Jeff Browne now has Craig Kelly on board as they aim to return Collingwood to its former glory days.

The conflict of interest is real and will have to be managed, but at least the size of football clubs and lines of reporting will allow Kelly to separate himself from those emotional decisions.

Collingwood and Kelly are adamant he will divest himself from any decisions on his son, believing the coaching links “legacy” conflicts of interest that are now irrelevant given he will make every decision based on what is best for the Pies.

Son Will Kelly’s injury-prone career has been summed up by the elbow dislocation he suffered in an otherwise promising July 2020 debut, playing only two more games since then and none last year despite 17 VFL games.

Kelly’s new role will make any decision more emotional but in reality he will not be on the list management team given football director Paul Licuria already has board responsibility for that role.

Neither will his role be a precedent with Steve Silvagni the Blues list boss while his two sons were playing and Hawthorn’s Justin Reeves appropriately handling a similar conflict with son Ned.

In truth if Kelly is delisted it will be far from the first painful father-son decision after a collection of Clokes, Shaws and Browns came and went in recent years.

Father Craig Kelly with son Will and wife Meredith Kelly.

It was impossible to see Kelly ever becoming Collingwood CEO when his great friend and client Nathan Buckley was coach because how could he ever separate himself from a decision on when to retain or sack the Pies legend?

In a perfect world Kelly will hand a premiership bonus that he would have negotiated to client Craig McRae in September this year.

But the history of football shows Kelly is more likely to sack McRae than see him win a flag at some stage.

Collingwood has made clear any decision on their senior coaching position would never be more than a recommendation from Kelly and football boss Graham Wright to the board rather than a concrete decision.

But in reality there will always be a spotlight on the TLA-Kelly links given TLA manages or has managed Pies coaches McRae, Justin Leppitsch, Brendon Bolton, Scott Selwood, Andy Otten, Jordan Roughead.

So Kelly will begin on February 20 in what is a return to the big, brash Collingwood of old under Brown and premiership hero Kelly with the Pies believing they have the best CEO in the business.

If winning premierships is about making dozens of elite football and commercial decisions in a row – and avoiding the catastrophic decisions that can bring a club to its knees – then Kelly’s recruitment can only help in the race for flag No. 16.