It wasn’t exactly a tough decision for the Sydney Swans to name the Club Champion medal in honour of Bob Skilton – he’s won the award nine times, or nearly twice as many times as anyone else.

In fact, among 1,411 Swans players, only five-time Swans club champions Herbie Matthews and Peter Bedford, along with four-time winner Paul Kelly, have even won more than a third of Skilton’s nine Swans club championships.

And in 120 years of VFL/AFL football only nine-time Fitzroy Club Champion Kevin Murray can match Skilton’s domination of the Swans most prestigious individual award.

Quite simply, it was a no brainer for the name of the triple Brownlow Medallist and Swans Team of the Century captain to be attached to the Club Champion when naming rights for the award were declared in 1995.

Skilton is one of 52 players to win the Swans Club Championship since the inception of the award in 1926, with 19 players having combined for 58 of them.

Skilton leads the all-time list from Matthews and Bedford (5), Kelly (4), Gerard Healy (3), Billy Williams (3), Ron Clegg (3), Adam Goodes (3) and Josh Kennedy (3). Multiple winners include:

CONSECUTIVE CLUB CHAMPIONSHIPS

Not only did Bob Skilton win a record nine Swans Club Champion awards – he won a club record five in a row from 1961-65. And that was after three in a row from 1958-60 and before two in a row in 1967-68.

The two players who broke the Skilton stranglehold on the award were 1960 Club Champion Frank Johnson and 1966 winner Max Papley, grandfather of current Swans player Tom Papley.

Only two other players have won three Swans Club Champion awards in a row – Brownlow Medallists Peter Bedford (1969-71) and Gerard Healy (1986-88).

Josh Kennedy, the 2017 Swans captain and 2015-16 Club Champion, is looking to replicate the Bedford and Healy treble in 2017. This would give him four club championships in six years after he also won the Bob Skilton Medal in 2012.

Herbie Matthews won four Swans club championships in five years – 1936-37 and 1939-40.  And Ron Clegg won three in four years, triumphing in 1948-49 and 1951.

Other back-to-back club champions have been Billy Williams (1946-47), Paul Kelly (1992-93 and 1996-97) and Paul Williams (2001-02).

TWO MEDALS IN ONE YEAR

Further to the remarkable Bob Skilton record, he completed the club championship / Brownlow Medal double not once but three times in 1959, ’63 and ‘68.

Adam Goodes did likewise twice in 2003-06 while six other Swans have claimed the same double once – Herbie Matthews (1940), Ron Clegg (1949), Peter Bedford (1970), Graham Teasdale (1977), Barry Round (1981) and Gerard Healy (1988).

Swans Brownlow Medallists not to win the club championship in the same year were Fred Goldsmith (1955), Paul Kelly (1995) and Greg Williams (1986).

Goldsmith was beaten for the Swans Club Champion award in 1956 by Ian Gillett, while Kelly was upstaged in 1995 by his great mate Tony Lockett, and Williams was beaten in 1986 by Healy.