CEO Tom Harley was in the hot seat to answer member's questions on Monday night in a special webinar. Here's a recap of some of the key topics of discussion as he spoke about the 2024 AFL and AFLW seasons and looked ahead to 2025.
On the Grand Final
We don’t shy away from the heartbreak and devastation of the performance. I want to acknowledge and recognise the pain, it’s felt everywhere.
I understand (the anger and sadness), I have been involved in Grand Finals where we have fallen short as an administrator and also as a player with significant expectations going in. I have also seen the jubilation.
I say this as genuinely and authentically as I possibly can, I hear the angst and I feel the pain. I am a firm believer you have to be willing to risk it all and put yourselves in the arena to feel the emotion of winning. The trade off, you have to willing to risk the emotion of not winning. I get it, I hear it. There’s a balance of empathetically supporting your people and also deeply analysing where we fell short.
The really fine pointy end of high performance is a grand final. It is the last hurdle and that is what we need to look at. Making sure at the forefront of our mind with our program design, our technical aspect of the game, our mental work with the players and the environment more broadly, is how do we take that next step? When our players come back to the club, we will dive into that with a very specific focus on getting better when it really matters.
We need to move forward, part of that process is understanding the pain. I know as a player when you get there and fall short, that stings and we have players who have felt that experience a couple of times and people around our football club who have felt it.
You have to acknowledge it, understand what you do well and the right people who will make the right decisions to analyse what we need to get better at. I can assure our members that we are absolutely doing that.
On the demand for Swans games in Sydney and interstate
One of the by products is playing good football is the demand for tickets. We had 4-5 sellouts and an average crowd of 39,000 and welcomed over 500,000 people through the gates of the SCG, so making sure we cater for as many people as possible is important.
Although we don’t have control over the number of games we play in Victoria, we certainly advocate really strongly for our Victorian based members with the games we do play there. If we play the more strongly supported clubs, they may take more of a fully ticketed approach to the game, we saw that with the Essendon game this year.
On the 2025 fixture (which will be released this week)
What we asked for is a balanced fixture from a fans point of view. We know that some of our members and fans love the blockbusters Friday and Saturday nights. We know that the day and twilight games are more family friendly, so let’s get the right balance there. We loved Opening Round last year and can’t wait to see it again this year.
The fixture will have something for everyone and importantly we will travel the country - we want to play in all the markets in particular, Melbourne.
On Chad Warner
Chad is obviously an unbelievably important priority to us this off-season as he has for the past 12 months. We went into this season, (which speaks to our relative inactivity in the trade period) with a clear retention focus on the squad we had. Logan McDonald, Will Hayward, Ollie Florent, Errol Gulden and James Rowbottom were all retained. The conversations (with Chad’s management) are ongoing and we are in constant dialogue. What I do know about Chad is that he is very settled in Sydney. He is enjoying the club, developing and playing really good football and we hope those conversations continue and we’d love to extend him long term obviously.
On Luke Parker
He’s a champion of our club, a three-time club champion and former captain. The conversations were ongoing throughout the year. Luke had a year to run on his contract with us, he was offered a three year deal from North Melbourne and mature conversation ensured on the back of that. I was with John (Longmire) when Luke informed us of the opportunity at North and if you put it down to opportunity and tenure, North Melbourne was seen as a more appealing offer. We understand that. It would be fair to say, I think, the future will hold more of those long-serving greats of clubs extend their careers at other clubs. We saw it with Sam Mitchell at Hawthorn and West Coast and Luke Hodge with Hawthorn and Brisbane. Luke and Kate were such a significant part of our club. Farewelling him at our Club Champion event was an emotional night when he and Sam Reid were on the stage together.
On the 2025 Draft
We have two first round picks in this year’s draft, albeit late in the first round.
Then we have two more picks in the 40s and 50s after that and we would love to use all those picks. The talent is deep in this draft. We are really bullyish that the draft is deep and we need to replenish our talent stocks. That will play out in the next couple of weeks. There is some QBE Academy talent we are looking at in the back end of the draft, we are confident we have a strong draft hand and like any draft we go in wanting to get the best position (noting live trading) and then select the players that will take us forward.
On the AFLW Season
We are very much in a review of the program and performance period and then we go into preparation for the draft and trade period.
We are going to be active, we have capacity to move things around. We make no apologies for trying to get better. This year we hold pick 4 in the and that is a very valuable asset.
On our final AFLW game this season
One of the great things about the win was around Brooke Lochland. Brooke was one the women who came and started our program, an inaugural co-captain and for her to have a send-off game and have a positive impact in her final moments as a Swan was a really great.
On the redevelopment of Henson Park
Henson Park is undergoing redevelopment which I am reasonably confident will be ready for next season. This means new changerooms, great amenities for fans, undercover seating, broadcasting facilities and all the mod cons, so that will continue to be a great home ground for our AFLW team. We will still have the opportunity to open our season at North Sydney Oval too.
