Gold Coast chief executive Mark Evans explains why football department cuts are important for the game

Football departments will be slashed to a skeleton staff of just 25 for the remainder of the 2020 season. How will that impact clubs? Gold Coast chief executive Mark Evans gave an insight.

Football departments have been dealt a serious blow for 2020. Picture: AAP Images

Gold Coast chief executive Mark Evans says cuts to football departments are “important” to ensure the game’s financial viability and to minimise the risk to players once AFL is rebooted.

Football departments will be slashed to a skeleton staff of just 25 for the remainder of the 2020 season and football department expenditure capped at 70 per cent of pre-coronavirus levels when the season resumes next month.

While the savage cuts have led to concerns among clubs, Evans understood they were necessary both for the players’ and fiscal health.

“I think it’s important for us to play our part for getting through this year,” Evans said.

“We’ve seen the players take pay cuts and I’m assuming the AFL will have some similar cuts and football departments and administrations of football clubs will be the same.

“We’ll find our way through that. It’s obviously a bit to work through.

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Football departments have been dealt a serious blow for 2020. Picture: AAP Images

“There are two parts to the restrictions. One is a financial restriction to make sure that we sail through this period OK.

“But the second is about mitigating the risk of the number of people they come into contact with. If we can keep that as low as possible, particularly in the early phase of heading into training and playing, then we give the season the best chance of progressing in an uninterrupted fashion.”

Asked how many staff at the Suns would lose their jobs, Evans said “no one would be let go”.

But he acknowledged the club would likely have to “recalibrate” for 2021.

“What we will have at this point in time is 24/25 people who can come into contact with players as part of their training regime,” Evans said.

“So by the time you have coaches, physiotherapists, doctors, welfare managers it will leave very few other people to interact with them during training.

“We’ll start with that and then we can build up a little more when we get into matches when we get more staff to perform those roles on match day.

“We don’t have any details from the AFL around 2021, we probably expect like most businesses we will need to adjust and recalibrate what we do.

“The best thing to do is get this season underway to protect as much of the broadcast and partner and membership revenue as we can and then build into programs next year where we can get everybody back to the football in the numbers that they were pre-the coronavirus epidemic. “

Evans said the club would conduct COVID-19 testing for all its players and staff who will be in contact with them when football programs resume.

And he expected all players would follow medical advice to receive flu jabs.

He said the club and players were prepared for tougher restrictions than the rest of society when football resumed.

Gillon McLachlan confirmed the footy department cuts earlier this week.

“The AFL will release its protocols around return to play and return to train and that includes testing regimes and it will include some stronger restrictions than normal society,” Evans said.

“We have to understand that if we want this season to continue uninterrupted that we have to play our part in that.

“That means there might be restrictions where you can’t go and visit other households and things like that, even if those restrictions have been eased in society, we may still be a little more protective than that.”

All Suns players have now returned to the Gold Coast except for Luke Towey, who is still in Ireland.

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“The AFL PA and the AFL are working through with the Federal Government about what will happen to the Irish players, so we are on stand-by to get him back as soon as we can,” Evans said.

After a ban on players playing in any state league competitions that restarts this season, Evans said the Suns would investigate the possibility of scratch matches against the Brisbane Lions for players that weren’t selected in AFL teams.

“Going into Round 1 we had some discussions with Brisbane around some opportunities for players that weren’t selected in the AFL team to potentially do some match simulation,” he said.

“We’ll take that discussion back to Brisbane in the coming days to see what can be approved and what we can get through and we’ll find a way to get through that this season.”

Originally published as Gold Coast chief executive Mark Evans explains why football department cuts are important for the game