Sydney is a football club that has been lauded for, and indeed traded off, its magnificent culture. The trademarks of the “Bloods Culture” were written on butcher’s paper. On the field, it was about blue-collar football, selflessness and embracing the grind. Whenever they played the flashier West Coast, they called it a clash of the Cortinas and the Ferraris. Significant people at the club dispute that there was ever a “no dickheads” policy. But off the field, premiership player Luke Ablett wrote in 2014, the culture was “the character traits that you aspire to. That might be training standards, recovery standards or what you do and where you go on a Saturday night.”
The club operates in a challenging market where Australian rules football is not followed and covered as obsessively as it is in other cities. The Swans, as the late Dr Geoffrey Edelsten always insisted, have had to do things differently. They have positioned themselves in direct contrast to the nine NRL teams in Sydney. They are popular with the city’s LGBTQ+ community. They were the first professional sporting team to enter a float in the Mardi Gras. Their diversity action plan was the first of its kind in the AFL. This Sunday will be the first time the men and women’s teams have played on the same afternoon at the SCG.
