Whatever you do, don’t mention the war. Or his name. Or even the sport.
That is the strategy AFL chief executive Gillon McLachlan has employed when asked about cantankerous ARL Commission chairman Peter V’landys and rugby league.
The Great PVL pushed off the back fence in an interview with Matty Johns aired on Fox Sports on Wednesday night.
Apart from saying that AFL was “boring” (he’d rather watch The Flintstones), V’landys took credit for saving the rival code from a $1 billion loss because the NRL had ploughed ahead for a May 28 restart last year during the COVID-19 crisis.
The presidents of various AFL clubs had publicly scorched V’landys for his belligerent attitude. Hawthorn boss Jeff Kennett branded him “an absolute irrelevance”.
“I think the AFL were looking at a billion-dollar loss,” V’landys told Johns. “They made a $24 million loss because they started earlier. With all the criticism, with all the name-calling, they started two weeks after us.”
ARLC chairman Peter V'landys and AFL boss Gillon McLachlan.Credit: Digital image
In an interview with the Herald on Thursday, McLachlan refused to bite on V’landys’ inflammatory claims. On anything, for that matter.
“We have great respect for all sports and what they’re doing,” he said on a Microsoft Teams meeting call. “We’re doing our bit and we respect what everyone is doing.”
It became instantly clear that McLachlan wasn’t going to be drawn into a slanging match.
“I’ve got a lot of work to do down here,” he dead-batted. “We’re just doing our best.”
McLachlan then tried to divert attention to the corporate affairs manager who was on the call.
“It’s his birthday today,” he said light-heartedly.
When it was suggested that stonewalling questions about V’landys, or rugby league for that matter, suggests he does have some sort of issue with what’s been claimed, the AFL boss remained unmoved.
“You can be as provocative as you like.”
Draw whatever conclusions you want from this exchange, but it’s a smart play from McLachlan. V’landys wants to goad the AFL into a streetfight and the other code is too smart, or too well-advised, to buy into it. When it has a platoon of club bosses throwing enough punches, it doesn’t have to.
Blow-torching the AFL is also a smart move from V’landys, who’s as much a salesman as he is a populist. Make no mistake: his attacks are by design.
For years, rugby league fans have felt like forgotten stakeholders as the game was overrun by lawyers, former referees and sporting bureaucrats.
In V’landys, they have a knockabout figurehead, with a bunch of dad jokes in his back pocket, prepared to take on the might and snobbery of the AFL, which impudently marched into the rugby league heartland of Western Sydney a decade ago and established the GWS Giants — simply because it could.
At the time, the NRL was blindsided by the AFL. It was left to Phil Gould, who had just taken on the role of general manager of football at the Panthers, to fight the good fight against the rival code, which was sinking no less than $100m into the Giants and had a headline-grabbing inaugural coach in Kevin Sheedy.
Gould met with state and local governments, and even the Giants board. He told Sheedy he didn’t see him as the enemy, and found Sheedy was on the same page. As long as kids were playing sport, who cares about the shape of the ball?
GWS Giants kick off their season at home to St Kilda on Sunday.Credit: Getty
But it was a code war nonetheless, and the expected surge of 2 million people before 2032 into Sydney’s west meant the NRL had to mobilise.
Gould adopted exactly the same strategy with the Giants and AFL as McLachlan is now doing with V’landys and the NRL: he didn’t mention their name. Not once.
“I’ve got little interest in having a conversation about it, knowing how much we have to do,” McLachlan said, drawing a line under the angle of questioning.
And there is a lot to do in Sydney. The once-mighty Swans haven’t made the finals for the past two years, finishing 16th of 18 teams last year. It also did so without injured superstar Lance Franklin. They play Brisbane at the Gabba on Saturday night.
As for the Giants, they failed to capitalise on their grand final appearance in 2019, missing the finals last year after finishing 10th. Perhaps more troubling for GWS was the off-season departure of their biggest name, Jeremy Cameron, to Geelong. They play St Kilda at home on Sunday with a crowd of 10,000 expected.
After all the millions spent, after all the draft concessions given in establishing the AFL’s bastard child in the west, has the GWS experiment been worth it now that the premiership window is closing?
Asked if it would be a disaster for the AFL if neither Sydney side qualifies for the final again, McLachlan said: “No, it’s not. I believe there’s a greater maturity in the market than what you’re suggesting. The ratings were up 30 per cent in Sydney and NSW last year. The Swans have 40,000 members. GWS is mid-20,000s. Community football participation was strong last year. Footy is going well up there and those clubs are both in good hands.”
The NRL is seemingly content with how it’s tracking. Its media department couldn’t be bothered providing statistical analysis supporting V’landys’ claim that it’s winning the code war.
In reality, the number that matters most is the one relating to broadcast revenue. The AFL believes its deal until 2024 is significantly better than the one hatched by V’landys last year, which gave Channel Nine (publisher of this masthead) significant discounts for the next two years. A long-term deal was struck with Foxtel until the end of 2027.
Some analysts predict the gap could be as much as $160m per year, despite V’landys’ insistence that he’s struck a better deal.
Because broadcast revenue wasn’t included in the NRL’s annual report, the true figure won’t be known until the NRL lodges its accounts with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.
McLachlan eventually responded to claims that his code would not have started as it did if not for the NRL’s expedited start on May 28.
“I don’t think they’re related,” he said. “We were working towards a return backwards from where we had a 17-round home-and-away season and finals. We’re a national competition with our own challenges. We focus on what we do, however it is perceived. It’s not being disrespectful. We believe we have the best game in the world and we focus on what we’re doing and that’s how we work.”
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