Andrew Dillon’s leadership is crumbling around him. It’s time for him to stand up

Tanya Hosch’s decision to snub the AFL’s launch of Sir Doug Nicholls round in Darwin this week ran far deeper than the excuses offered by the game’s struggling spin doctors.

The AFL and its most senior Indigenous employee – and first to sit on the game’s executive – are negotiating her departure from the organisation after nine occasionally turbulent years. Neither Hosch nor AFL chief Andrew Dillon were prepared to publicly discuss the highly sensitive situation with this masthead but colleagues and supporters of both remain concerned the break-up could prove acrimonious.

AFL chief executive Andrew Dillon (second from left) at the launch of Sir Doug Nicholls rounds with Hawthorn’s Karl Amon, former South Fremantle champion Stephen Michael and Gold Coast’s Joel Jeffrey.Credit: AFL Photos

Rather than attend the Darwin launch at which she was scheduled to speak alongside Dillon on Tuesday, Hosch remained at home in Adelaide. She attended a Port Adelaide monthly staff lunch at Alberton on Wednesday and – significantly – posted a photograph of Willie Rioli on her Instagram.

Hosch has told colleagues she felt marginalised like other AFL Indigenous bosses and staffers during the recent Rioli crisis, and offered advice that wasn’t taken.

Strangely, given the significance of the ongoing Indigenous AFL tributes and celebrations which will reach their crescendo with next Friday night’s Essendon-Richmond Dreamtime game, Hosch’s email reports that she is on leave.

Tanya Hosch posted a Willie Rioli badge to her Instagram account.Credit: Instagram

Yet as recently as Thursday she was still attending staff meetings on Zoom, telling one colleague earlier in the week that she did not see the point of going to Darwin.

That Dillon’s move to restructure his inclusion and social policy department and manage Hosch’s exit appears to have reached this stand-off off the back of the AFL’s mishandling of Willie Rioli’s alleged post-game threat to Bailey Dale, and in the midst of the Sir Doug Nicholls rounds, underlines how poorly he and his team are travelling – and how slowly the AFL wheel has turned over the past year. Multiple AFL and club sources, not prepared to comment due to the sensitivity of the current scenario, say Hosch’s departure has been predicted for months.

If managing Hosch has become a problem for Dillon, it is one he inherited from his predecessor Gillon McLachlan, who handpicked the notable advocate and policy expert soon after his and the commission’s woeful mishandling of Adam Goodes’ final season.

But from the outset there were issues. Hosch’s supporters said she was understaffed and lacked the resources to make significant change, and her detractors criticised her management style and her relationships with Indigenous players.

It was during the COVID-impacted Sir Doug Nicholls round five years ago that Hosch first looked finished at head office after a Peter Jackson-led Indigenous review, in which key stakeholders reported that the game during her tenure had focused upon Indigenous politics at the expense of football.

Key Aboriginal players had lost faith in Hosch over the attempts to vaccinate Indigenous players during the pandemic, which drove a wedge between the AFL and the players union.

The Willie Rioli saga exposed cracks in the league’s leadership (clockwise from left): CEO Andrew Dillon, Indigenous executive Tanya Hosch, chairman Richard Goyder and football boss Laura Kane.Credit: Artwork: Jamie Brown

But McLachlan retained Hosch, who in 2021 was named South Australian of the Year. The blame should not be squared at Hosch for the game’s falling Indigenous numbers over the past five years, but several months ago key club recruiters were blindsided by her telling them to recruit more Indigenous players at a time national pathways have failed to develop or deliver Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander talent.

Whether or not Hosch agrees to go quietly – she has told colleagues she has struggled and been thwarted in her attempts to make change and combat racism – given her frustration, Dillon must act if he truly believes he needs to transform, bolster and change the leadership of the AFL’s diversity team.

It is an indictment that the AFL has never been better resourced on Indigenous issues, and yet it keeps making it harder for Indigenous players. And that Dillon has failed to move decisively to adequately reshape his organisation almost 20 months into the job.

Lachie Schultz of the Magpies collapses in the hands of medical staff.Credit: Getty Images

As weird as this may sound, the AFL’s ineptitude over the past two weeks could prove the circuit breaker to shake Dillon out of his lethargy. Because if he doesn’t show strong leadership soon, his days could be numbered as he comes under increasing scrutiny from both the AFL boardroom and the clubs. He would do well not to waste this crisis.

Dillon’s supporters lament that he has been let down on all fronts: by McLachlan, who took two seasons to depart and regretted quitting in the first place; and by his chairman Richard Goyder, who has always been a remote leader, himself, and is still clinging to power at the helm of Australian rules football after the Qantas disaster.

Like McLachlan, Goyder has had no succession plan for the commission, which has further  underlined the leadership vacuum at head office. The slow-to-move Dillon has a significantly more cumbersome chairman.

Goyder’s current term is up at the end of the year and never in the history of the AFL Commission has the next chair not been installed by this stage. In terms of club prospects, presidents Andrew Pridham and David Koch have significant support, but the clubs’ once influential voice has waned alarmingly given that the powerful Victorian clubs all have relatively new presidents.

Goyder took more than a year to settle upon Dillon as McLachlan’s replacement and had previously pushed for Bulldogs president Kylie Watson-Wheeler. That push was blocked by his fellow commissioners but not before Goyder joked at a Gather Round launch that South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas would make a good CEO.

And Dillon has been let down by his executive. Key members of Dillon’s team resisted his push to lure Brendon Gale to head office, as part of a new structure that would place Gale above them in the pecking order. Others baulked at the financial package it would have taken to shift the respected Richmond boss out of clubland. Dillon acquiesced.

Many clubs believed Gale should have won the top AFL job but McLachlan never supported him. It has not been helpful for Dillon’s standing that everyone knows he is being urged by the commission to appoint a deputy because of the relative lack of strength among his executive.

The clubs were already gunning for Laura Kane before her embarrassing own goal in recent days over the series of botched communications on why play was allowed to continue as Lachie Schultz lay concussed on the ground. Kane would have worked under Gale had he taken the AFL deputy job. Instead, Kane at 33 was promoted into an expanded role which also included AFLW and talent.

Graham Wright knocked back the opportunity to work at the AFL, choosing to run Carlton instead, and what ensued was a power struggle between Kane and her CEO, Dillon, who wanted to install another experienced football boss in Geoff Walsh as her deputy.

Kane refused and enraged her club detractors by installing as football operations GM former banking and real estate boss Nick Carah, whose football experience had been as a casual match day manager. AFL commissioners remained puzzled that Kane has not worked to surround herself with strong, experienced performers.

Too many of her team feel disrespected and shut out of the decision-making process. That Josh Mahoney was sidelined from his previous football role into the problematic umpiring portfolio has also raised eyebrows internally and across the clubs.

Now Mahoney, along with umpires boss Stephen McBurney, will come under scrutiny as one key link in a chain of communication failings over the Schultz debacle. Under Steve Hocking, umpiring lacked the bureaucratic layers that now exist and frankly look clunky and less effective.

Then-CEO Gillon McLachlan and chairman Richard Goyder in Adelaide for Gather Round in 2023.Credit: AFL Photos

Kane’s failings, too, will empower her detractors but Dillon’s media team – led by outgoing executive Brian Walsh and his deputy Jay Allen – should also be embarrassed.

Walsh and his colleagues have gagged AFL staffers regularly in recent years. The lack of transparency at AFL HQ has deepened by the decade. How symbolic then that the commission arrogantly ticked off on Saturday free-to-air games being pushed behind a paywall for the next seven years.

How galling for the spin doctors that the Schultz saga in essence hinged on an unnecessary, ultimately untrue media release pushed out a week ago. When was the last time the AFL had to issue two further statements – each contradicting the last? That’s three contradictory messages in five days.

Hosch, Dillon, Kane and Goyder were contacted for comment. Walsh and Allen were also contacted for comment.

Interestingly, Swans chairman Pridham, speaking in the heart of Dillon country at an Old Xaverians function in Melbourne last Friday, was asked whether he had any advice for the game’s head office. “Don’t over-complicate things,” responded Pridham. “And don’t forget, your role is to run football competitions.”

There has been stark inconsistency and lack of structure in the game’s off-field judiciary when you compare the penalties handed out to Jason McCartney one week last September and Ken Hinkley the next; the ridiculously light Noah Balta suspension and the botched treatment of Willie Rioli last week underline the recent performance of the game’s unpopular executive happy to play the role of bad cop.

The Balta call drew community and political ire and the decision not to sanction Rioli at all and then backflip over a so-called “pattern of behaviour” began with poor judgment and ended with a lack of empathy.

That respected Port Adelaide football boss Chris Davies wrote to Hosch – and copied in Kane, Andrew Dillon and Brian Walsh – after Rioli’s emotional social media comments about Hawthorn and lamented the coverage of the story calling for the media to be better-educated on Indigenous issues, and no movement came from HQ, was instructive as to the inaction of the machine.

The AFL had the resources to put a plan in place. Port ran their own education session this week and 14 members of the Adelaide media turned up with two days’ notice.

But, in the end, it comes down to Dillon, who needs to toughen up and make the hard decisions he has been avoiding or kicking down the road for the past year. If it is true that he has offered his mate Simon Garlick the deputy role, then this would not initially win the support of the majority of the clubs, who prefer Tom Harley as part of an unofficial succession plan. But at least he will have made the call, and he should move on Garlick now.

Dillon couldn’t help that McLachlan’s slow departure tarnished his early leadership, or that his chairman was slow to support him and then wanted McLachlan to stay even longer to resolve “the Hawthorn thing”. That he should have been at his desk making the tough calls – as McLachlan, himself, was able to do nine years earlier – midway through 2023, rather than waiting through McLachlan’s lengthy farewell through to the end of September.

But Dillon should have stood up to his executive over Gale. He should have overruled Kane over her deputy and thought more carefully about the treatment of Willie Rioli. He should have been more attuned to the deep-seated grievances of the game’s coaches, and made the tough calls earlier on some executives and other staffers before the commission started to call him on it.

And if he believed that Hosch’s time was up, he should have moved more swiftly and not allowed the situation to come to this in the midst of the Sir Doug Nicholls celebrations.

Keep up to date with the best AFL coverage in the country. Sign up for the Real Footy newsletter.