Last September, in a function room at the MCG, Delta Goodrem performed her hit song Sitting on Top of the World. Halfway through, she was joined on the dance floor by Gil McLachlan. The outgoing AFL CEO was at the top of his game. He’d just signed off on a $4.5bn broadcast rights deal. The previous weekend had seen some of the best finals football ever played. McLachlan stooped, twirled and dipped. Delta blushed. The room gurgled.
Less than a fortnight later, an extraordinary story landed on the ABC website. McLachlan knew the Hawthorn racism allegations were coming. He knew they were bad. But he didn’t know the ABC would drop them in grand final week. Still, he was suitably grave. He used all the right adjectives. He and the AFL did what they do best – they took control. They laid out the terms. They chose the barristers. They wrote the terms of reference. Their lawyers would collate the evidence. They would release the findings.
A few days later, on grand final day, McLachlan sat next to Lachlan Murdoch. It would be interesting to know what they talked about. The contested ball differentials? Their upcoming bucks festivities at the Super Bowl? The cultural threats posed by ABC journalists? Raised in Manhattan, educated at Princeton, and the owner of a $30m super yacht, Murdoch was nonetheless no fan of ABC elites. A month earlier, speaking at the IPA’s new Centre for the Australian Way of Life, he had lamented that “to listen to our national broadcaster and much of the media elite is to hear about a uniquely racist, sexist, slavish and monochromatic country”.
When the Hawthorn story first dropped, everyone was “horrified”, “shocked”, “sickened”. By late spring, it was as though it had never been published. Chris Fagan and Alastair Clarkson denied all allegations. Investigations continue. McLachlan himself enjoyed some rest and recreation. He played polo with James Packer in Argentina. He joined Murdoch and Gordon Ramsay at the Super Bowl for the bucks celebrations of celebrity chef Guillaume Brahimi, who was marrying a chicken heiress.
McLachlan flew back early. There was so much back home that was still hanging. “The Hawthorn thing”, as he called it last week, was ongoing. There was no new CEO. There was no new general manager of football. There was a collective bargaining agreement to negotiate. There was a Tasmanian team to get off the ground. There were concussion class actions looming.
In McLachlan’s role, you have to be everything to everyone. You have to canoodle with the Murdochs and charm the Auskicker of the week. His real talents always lay in backrooms – in driving hard bargains, in massaging giant egos and in controlling complex narratives. AFL chairman Richard Goyder marvelled at his ability to see around corners, to get on the front foot and to take hold of a crisis.
At first, the Hawthorn allegations seemed to play to his strengths. They were something to get to the bottom of, and to move on from. “There will be learnings from this,” he said. But the complainants refused to play by the AFL’s rules. One of their lawyers said the process should focus on “minimising power differentials” and “undertaking the process of decolonisation”. McLachlan, in his final days as CEO, probably didn’t have “undertaking decolonisation” on his to-do list. It’s not something that can be thrashed out over a long lunch. Generations of prime ministers, politicians and Aboriginal leaders have been unable, or unwilling, to address it, let alone achieve it. Are a bunch of football administrators any better equipped?
The Tasmanian and concussion issues are similarly fraught, and beyond his control. The new Tasmanian team is now in the hands of the Albanese government. At a time of rising inflation and interest rates, the prospect of a rugby league-loving, Sydney-based prime minister allocating hundreds of millions of federal budget dollars to a footy stadium in Hobart is no sure thing. There is pushback from prominent Tasmanians and from club presidents. Likewise, there is a looming class action, said to be north of a billion dollars, from former players whose lives are in disarray as a result of head knocks. There are some horrifying stories emerging. There are legal sharks circling.
When McLachlan announced that he was stepping down last April, the breeze was at his back. The tributes were glowing. His legacy seemed secure.
More than 11 months later, with just over 48 hours until the opening bounce of the 2023 season, he’s still there. This week, he gave some nice, cosy interviews to selected journalists. The biggest challenge facing the game, he said, was not racism, not gambling, not Tasmania, not umpiring, not the death of grass roots clubs, and not the haemorrhaging of money on the Gold Coast. No, it was “shifting demographics and shorter attention spans”.
It said a lot about his tenure. McLachlan has always measured the health of the game through bums on seats, through eyeballs and through balance sheets. By those metrics, as his employee Damian Barrett wrote, he is “one of the greatest brains in the history of Australian sports administration”. But as his long farewell drags on, the game faces some of its biggest ever threats – some existential, some unresolvable, all unlikely to be ameliorated by a charming CEO and his carefully crafted compromises.
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