sydneyswans.com.au: First things first, the Sydney Swans have had a lot of success off the field this season, starting with the club breaking the membership record, and reaching more than 40,000 members for the first time. How significant was that achievement?
Andrew Ireland: It was a sensational result for the club. I can remember not quite a decade ago when we had a Board meeting and we were trying to get to 30,000 members, there were comments we should be trying to get to 40,000. Some of the people there that day thought that suggestion was fanciful, so to see it happen this year was a great result.
It’s fantastic that we have that many members and they come from two groups: the ones who have stayed with us over a long period of time, and we do have a lot of people who are over 20-year members, and the second group is all the new members who have started to come along as well. We’ve always said that the place we get the most new members from is the advocacy of the members who have been here a long time, and that’s worked really well for the club. While we’re absolutely thrilled with this year’s milestone, the reality is that our targets need to be higher if we are going to compete with the big clubs in the competition.
SS: With membership at an all-time high, we’ve also seen terrific attendances at Sydney Swans home games. What do you think is behind the rise?
AI: I think it’s a lot of things, but I’ve always maintained that absolutely our core product is the football team you put on the ground, and when they win as many games as the club has won this season, and play really attractive football, it’s something that people want to come along and see.
Obviously with the new SCG stand now being completed, the stadium is getting back to full operation, and coming to our home games is a great experience.
We’ve always been of the view that we’re still in a growth phase of the business, so we’re still keen to get as many people into our games to come and see what it’s all about, so the crowds this year have been really pleasing.
SS: The club’s Principal Partner QBE and Major Partner Volkswagen have both recently re-committed to the club. How exciting is that news and how important is their support?
AI: I guess with the way QBE do their business, their renewal might have snuck through a little bit this year, but for them, with two years to run on their contract, to give us a three-year extension out to 2019 is an amazing commitment from QBE and will bring the relationship to 33 years. They’ve been unbelievable partners and clearly help in a large financial sense, but more than that they actually work really closely with the club. Right through their business, right through to their most-senior executives, we’ve got a really good working relationship. Certainly their decision to be the naming rights partner of the Academy was critical for us to get it started and to do what we wanted to do with it. Without QBE, we wouldn’t have the Academy anywhere near the level that we have it, so they have been outstanding.
Volkswagen, to get to the end of their first term with us, and then to renew for a further three years is fantastic. As a Major Partner of the club, they work really hard in the area of fan engagement. Certainly the Sydney Swans Fan Day wouldn’t be the same without the level of involvement Volkswagen put in, and the same can be said about the Fan Zone on match day.
SS: On-field the Swans have also had plenty of success, winning 17 games for the season and finishing as minor premiers. What have you made of the 2014 season, particularly after the slow start which saw the club lose three of the opening four matches?
AI: I think one of the things people might have missed is that the AFL changed the rules significantly last year in ensuring the players had more time away from the club. This meant that our senior players didn’t come back and start training until mid-December, which is much, much later than they’ve ever done before. Coupled with that, we had the season coming forward to its earliest start ever in mid-March, so we always recognised that we were going to be a bit light on coming into the season.
Obviously we didn’t want to have as slow of a start as we did, but I was reasonably comfortable after we won the game in Adelaide in round three. I thought we played some really good football that day and even though we got beaten by the Kangaroos back in Sydney the next week in the wet, I wasn’t overly concerned, even though we clearly needed to start winning. It is a credit to John, the other coaches, and in particular the playing group who drive the results, they never missed a beat after that. To win 16 of the next 18 games was an outstanding effort, in what is such a highly-competitive competition. The demands to perform week in, week out are really high, so for the group to be able to do what they’ve done is a real credit to everyone involved in the footy side. If you asked football clubs, all clubs would be trying to get top-four because history says it gives you a platform and a chance to have a real crack at winning the premiership, so to finish as minor premiers really is a credit to the coaching staff and playing group.
SS: At the start of the season when things weren’t going as well, a player that attracted a lot of criticism was Lance Franklin. He’s since become a crucial player to the side and has just won his third Coleman Medal; how have you rated his year and the way he’s carried himself in his first year at the club?
AI: First of all, I’m really pleased for Lance. To make the decision to change clubs isn’t an easy one for any player and obviously given his profile and the type of deal we needed to do to bring him here was always going to attract some really close scrutiny. The reality is I thought some of the comments earlier in the year were a fair way off the mark and were pretty reactionary. Some comments even from the NAB Challenge, having watched footy for a long time, the pre-season competition is more about players getting into form for the season ahead, so I wasn’t really concerned about that. I think if you look at it, in round two when we played Collingwood, I think he was our best forward on the night, and then the next week against Adelaide he might have been arguably best on the ground. He then had a quiet game against the Kangaroos, but from there he’s played good football for most of the year. I think everyone has been able to see what a great player he is.
When we made the decision, and when Lance spoke to us about coming to the club, we knew that with the way we were going to need to structure it, it was going to be a big deal. In our mind, he was a pretty unique player and there aren’t too many better players to have ever played the game and he does bring real excitement with the way he plays the game. I think we’ve seen how the fans have embraced him, and to see him win the Coleman is a really nice way for him to cap off his first season with us. I know he’s really focused on finals now and he’s said that from the first time he walked into the club.
SS: Another area of the club which has attracted attention this year is the QBE Sydney Swans Academy. We’ve just seen that the bidding system for the 2014 National Draft will not change this year; what are your thoughts on that decision and any criticism the Academy has received?
AI: If you talk about it in a general sense, I thought the criticism of the Academy was pretty pathetic. The reality is that there was no sense that the development of football, or of players to come into the national draft, had improved one bit for all the money that was being spent in New South Wales. While there were a number of really good programs, the numbers just didn’t show improvement. We had always argued that if you really wanted to make an impact in NSW and Queensland, then you needed the AFL clubs to have a vested interest in trying to drive the outcomes. With that in mind, we’ve been really happy with the programs we’ve been able to put together with Dennis Carroll as the Director of our Academy and Chris Smith running it, and initially Paul Roos coaching and now Michael O’Loughlin, driving a really intense and great program. We get kids as young as nine or ten trialling for it and we’ve always had a view that it would take a number of years before we would see players benefitting from the programs and come out the other end as potential draftees.
We have been willing to invest an awful lot of money into the programs, but the AFL established the rules, and although we do lobby for them, at the end of the day they approve them. The fact that the first time a boy of potentially high quality was seen to be coming through, we have people complaining about it, and that’s why I say it’s pathetic. Most of that was coming out of Melbourne, where they don’t know or don’t care about how hard the game is to develop in the northern states. With that in mind, I’m really pleased that there have been no changes made this year. It would have been an abysmal decision by the AFL to try and change things so late in the year. It’s never occurred before with the rules, so that’s a sensible decision, and now we’ll just see where it goes in the future.
I was very much involved with the introduction of the bidding system, because we always felt that the father/son rules were too skewed and it was ridiculous to see the case of Tom Hawkins, being the best player in the under-18 competition at the time, able to go to Geelong as a round three selection. The bidding system has changed that dramatically, and there may well be a better way to make it even closer, but the thing that the AFL has always accepted even if they do bring in a new system, is that they will have to provide compensation or an ability for clubs who run Academies to get a benefit from doing it.
The other thing is, as much as you might try and rate what a draft pick is worth, which is the complicated thing they are trying to do, no two drafts are the same and no two players are the same. There have been great first round picks and there have been lesser first round picks. It’s never guaranteed and to try to micromanage every bit of that when there are so many unknowns about the outcome would be a mistake.
SS: With our finals campaign beginning this Saturday afternoon at ANZ Stadium, there have been questions raised about whether there was a chance our second final could be played at the SCG. What is the club’s view on that?
AI: The first thing to say is that that club has been really appreciative of what ANZ Stadium has been able to do. The reality is that the dynamics of having two stadiums vying for the club’s business has been good, as when there is competition, you always end up with better outcomes. Both stadiums now compete against each other, and it’s meant that the outcomes for the football supporter have improved dramatically.
There is no doubt that the SCG would like to have all of our games played there and ANZ Stadium obviously still want to host some of our games. When you come to the finals, it’s really a separate arrangement, as the AFL has a direct arrangement with ANZ Stadium which includes that finals football will be played there. This all goes back to the fact that originally the Olympic Stadium wasn’t going to be an oval after the Olympics, and so a lot of money from both the Swans and the AFL has contributed to the cost of that realignment and part of convincing the stadium operators to change the outcomes of what they wanted with the Olympic Stadium was that they would deliver some AFL games there. So, the reality is that we are committed to finals football out there until 2016 when the current arrangements finish. Within those arrangements, the stadium has to be available to schedule a game when the AFL want it, and most times that can occur. Occasionally it’s happened, when in 2005 we played Geelong at the SCG with Nick Davis’ famous final four goals, there was a clash which meant the game couldn’t be played at ANZ Stadium.
As we head into finals this year, the first week of finals will clearly be played at ANZ Stadium. After that, obviously the NRL finals are on and there are more Sydney-based teams playing this year than last year, so there might well be a case where there is a clash. We know ANZ Stadium have always tried really hard to clear up the competition between the two codes and have always pushed to try and get the AFL games on, and the AFL worked with them in 2012 when we played Collingwood on the Friday night in the preliminary final. At that stage it was really important as the SCG was being developed and there really wasn’t an alternative to move the game. That’s a long way of explaining where we get to, but hopefully it’s a problem we have right up to the preliminary final.
SS: Have negotiations started with ANZ Stadium and the SCG beyond 2016?
AI: We are talking to both the stadiums and we just started that process. These things generally take a while to pan out, so we’ll see where that takes us in the months ahead. We’ve got two more years of commitment to both stadiums at the moment and hopefully we’ll be able to sort something out in the period ahead.
At the moment ANZ Stadium are talking about building a roof on it, so it would certainly be a pretty exciting place to go to if that eventuated, so there are a lot of things for the Board and the administration to consider.
SS: The club is currently based at the SCG. Are there any plans to move the club’s training and business base away from the stadium?
AI: I think the main thing is our footy department really enjoys being based at the SCG, but on the other hand our facilities are probably becoming pretty tired and old, despite the fact we spent nearly one million dollars upgrading our change rooms last year. We’ve been in these offices for 12 years and are approaching 13 seasons, and space is getting tight as the business has grown. We are, and have been for the last six months, considering what our facilities would look like going into the future. I think fundamentally there are a couple of different approaches, and we’ve been talking to a number of different people about what we might do. We’re certainly speaking to the SCG, but if we stay at the SCG there will always be some confines as we’ve got a pretty tight environment around us, as well as a stadium that has to function operationally on match days. So whatever we’re able to do with our facilities at the SCG, I think will always be a little compromised as they always have to fit into a pretty defined area.
At the other end of the spectrum is what a lot of the overseas teams do and that is move their footy operations a long way from where they play. If you go to Manchester United, while they play at Old Trafford, their training facilities are actually 20 kilometres away from Manchester, out in the country where they’ve been able to get space and the like. Fremantle are doing something similar at the moment where they’ve got a $110-million project to move from Fremantle out into another location, but they get a bit more land and can build multiple ovals. Then we’ve got some other options like Centennial Parklands who have talked to us, as well as the Entertainment Quarter, which looks like it might change hands. Some of the plans there are to redevelop the EQ area to be a sporting hub, so there are probably some opportunities in that space as well.
It’s a project that the club has developed a strategy group for and is one the Board is looking at, and we’ve been doing that for the best part of six months. We’re hopeful that in the next six months we can come up with a definitive plan about where we’re going to go.
SS: Are there any particular areas you’d like to see the club improve in terms of facilities?
AI: We really need to improve all of our football facilities, but the one that stands out is the gym. The reality is with the way the gym is at the moment, it’s not that we haven’t got enough of the right equipment, just its size means that we have to put our team through split into thirds. It means that at any one time we’ve got two thirds of the group sitting around not being as productive as perhaps they could be if you could put the whole squad through in one block. That is something that could be accommodated with more space at the SCG. What we would not be able to deliver at the SCG is a big indoor training facility, which we’ve seen with Essendon recently moving out to The Hangar. When you see that, you can see the things you would use it for, and if we had an indoor space it would be something we certainly would use for the Academy. Certainly, if you again look at the European soccer facilities, and it’s probably due to the weather more than anything, but they have to provide indoor facilities for their Academy kids in the middle of winter. Luckily in our climate, it’s probably not as pressing.
These are some of the things we weigh up and the other big thing we’re faced with if we’re talking about building a standalone facility, and we’ve been through this with architects and the like, is that we’re probably talking around a $40 million spend to build it. We’re not a wealthy club and we tend to spend as much money as we can on our footy programs and doing the other things we want to do well. We haven’t got any debt so we are reluctant to bite off a huge amount of debt because inevitably if you’ve got a lot of debt and then your team starts to not perform as well, the first effect is that your football programs get cut, and that’s something we don’t want to see happen. How we progress with getting the facilities to where we want without debt is probably the conundrum. I should say here that to this point we’ve been really fortunate that along the way the Sydney Swans Foundation have helped us as much as they can. Even a year ago when we spent the million dollars down in the change rooms, that was with huge support from the Swans Foundation and particularly Basil Sellers who has been a tremendous benefactor to the Swans over an extended period. The Foundation, to their credit, have always said that the project they would most like to support us with was if there was a major facility upgrade.
It’s a big project, and I would think in this next year there will be some exciting outcomes in terms of the stadiums and the facilities.
