Sydney Swans’ support base second to none

A blockbuster 1.9 million strong fan base, a $10 million guernsey; the Sydney Swans are flying on and off the field. What’s the secret to their success?

A culture of fostering new talent has Sydney Swans young guns Dylan Stephens, Justin McInerney, James Rowbottom, Chad Warner and Errol Gulden ready for Saturday’s AFL grand final. Picture: Phil Hillyard

How did a flock of Swans, cast into the AFL desert that was Sydney in the 1980s, become the football club with a guernsey that is the most valuable property in Australian sport?

In a city with rugby league running through its veins, the Swans through their four-decade tenure have become the “most ­supported’’ football club in Australia with 1.9 million fans.

“The value of our guernsey is No. 1 in sport in Australia,” Swans chairman Andrew Pridham tells The Australian.

“We’ve got the corporate partners queuing up to be on it, and there are only limited spots.”

While Swans officials declined to reveal an official figure, experts The Australian spoke to place the value at as much as $10m a year.

It hasn’t always been that way. Forty years ago when the Swans lobbed in the Harbour City from South Melbourne the club battled to survive.

 

It struggled to pay players (some sold cars to get by), membership hovered around 100 people, sponsorship was poor.

“We were a bit like performing seals in those days, we would do anything to get a bit of exposure, to get our names in the papers, to make ourselves known,” Rick Quade, the first coach of that team in Sydney, told a Swans dinner in the pre-season. Quade this year was made the club’s No. 1 ticketholder.

Today, sponsors stick around on average for 11 years, and rockstar headliner Buddy Franklin – who in 2013 clinched a nine-year mega deal worth about $10m – this week signed for “one more” season regardless of the result in Saturday’s grand final.

Franklin says he “wouldn’t want to be anywhere else”.

The Swans hierarchy will tell you there is no “secret sauce” to the club’s performance. Pridham puts the Swans’ success down to three things: Stability, succession and consistency.

“Over a long period of time, we haven’t done anything radical,” Pridham says. “We’ve just kept doing the same thing and just getting better and better. It’s just consistency and evolution, not revolution.”

Over the years as blood has been spilt in other footy boardrooms, coaches were knifed and axed, external reviews executed, there’s been none of that at the Swans.

“A lot of clubs are always ­having reviews and turfing out coaches and boards,” says Pridham, who has been on the Swans board for 21 years.

“We have a strong sense of ­loyalty and sticking with people through thick and thin, not chopping and changing.

“In the last 17 years, this is our sixth grand final – that’s one in every three years. Not to mention eight preliminary finals.”

Swans chief executive Tom Harley, who captained Geelong to three grand finals and two premierships, says a reason why it is all humming at the Swans is that it is simply full of “good people”.

“It’s not a secret, special sauce. Fundamentally, it goes back to the fact that we’re a football club and what makes every football club or sporting club is its people,” Harley says.

“We are a group of people who are genuinely striving to just be better.”

Harley has helped to oversee the development of the Swans’ soon-to-launch training and ­administration centre in Moore Park, which will also host their AFLW team (also with the highest supporter base of any AFL club). He closely watches the Swans Academy, which has overseen the rise of many senior players.

Chief executive Tom Harley and chairman Andrew Pridham lead one of the AFL’s most successful clubs. Picture: David Crosling

“It’s a bloody exciting time to be at the club,” Harley says.

“We have two All-Australians this year in Isaac Heeney and Callum Mills (who), were it not for the Swans Academy, wouldn’t even be playing the game.

“The club’s come an enormous way, but this is not a full stop. We want to keep getting better. We’ve got some unbelievable opportunities in front of us, built on the enormous work from our pioneers when we moved to Sydney 40 years ago.”

Coach John Longmire has been a key cog in it all (he, too, has been at the club for 21 years). His ability to foster young talent, including rookies, and build a solid list fuelled in part by the Swans Academy (which will have five players in the grand final side) has been his strength.

They have a succession plan in which senior players show the younger ones the way to win games.

“We’ve got a responsibility to give our players a chance to play ­finals and our supporters hope,” Longmire tells The Australian.

While the Harbour City goes mad for the Swans, the wider state remains a tough market to crack, talent wise. It remains the “biggest prize” the AFL is chasing.

Just ask one of the founding ­fathers of modern-day football in Sydney – the longest-serving AFL chairman ever, who steered the Swans for 21 years and West Coast for one – Richard Colless.

“Over six million people live in that corridor from Newcastle to Sydney to Wollongong – it’s 27 per cent of the Australian population and it produces, annually, probably less than one AFL player,” Colless says.

“I think this year so many milestones like media rights and an ­unbelievably exciting home-and- away season, so on and so forth, have almost masked the fact that we’ve been here 40 years.

“We’ve achieved a lot. I think there’s massive financial benefits for the AFL now because of the number of people who watch the game, and I think this Saturday will probably be the biggest, most watched game ever. Six most-watched televised games all ­involve Swans.”

He makes it clear the Swans’ success in recent times has not ­relied on a subsidy from the AFL (the last one was in 1997).

Colless says the Swans don’t see themselves as a “benchmark for anything or that the way we ­operate is superior to our ­competitors”.

“All I’d say is our values are clear,” he says. What those values are exactly, Colless says remains “private”.

“I think we’ve determined if the club is going to survive, let alone prosper up here, then we have to have – and this all sounds very corny – but we actually have to have clear values, about which we don’t talk about publicly, but that’s not unique to us.

“I know that sounds a bit holier than thou, but you have to share the same values. And I think you achieve a supporter base that is passionate but is not necessarily rabid.”

Colless says the statistics show what the Swans are doing is working. “If you look at the 50 years ­between 1946 and 1995, the Swans played in six finals over a 50-year period and we got beaten, generally very comprehensively, in every one,” he says. “Over the next 25 years – by next Saturday – that statistic will be 48 finals, including seven grand finals. We have gone from being easybeats and, on occasions, a rabble.”

Colless points out the 35,000 Swans fans at the SCG gave Collingwood a standing ovation after that one-point preliminary final.

“It wasn’t a token gesture, it was a full-throated ovation as they walked off. I thought that said a fair bit about both teams,” he says.

“It said a fair bit about our club and I think it says you don’t have to be a bogan or a yobbo to be passionate. You don’t have to hate your opponents.

“Respect is something that I think we place our value on. But it’s not just respecting yourself and your colleagues, it’s respecting your opponents and the game.”