As Hugh McLuggage lined up for the Brisbane Lions’ controversial winning goal against Hawthorn in the AFL preliminary final at the MCG on Saturday, publican Kane Tancredi had reason to be nervous.
He is a lifelong Lions fan after all, but there was more than just his mood riding on the kick. As the publican at Brisbane’s official pub in Melbourne, the Royal Derby in Fitzroy, he has over the last few years come to understand one thing about his hospitality business. When the Lions are in the big dance, his cash register sings.
“That’s probably about a hundred-grand kick for me,” Tancredi says of McCluggage’s dramatic go-ahead goal. “I don’t know how not to budget for it now. It’s that big. I was basically praying to the footy gods on Saturday, not just for my team but for my bottom line.”
This is now the fourth consecutive grand final the Lions have contested, including victories in the past two years. “The first one when we lost, we just had enough kegs,” Tancredi recalls.
“When we won the next year, I reckon we would have had about 80 kegs all up, and by 9pm, I was travelling to other pubs getting six kegs here, six kegs there, and I was just putting kegs down in the cellar, it was an absolute nightmare. And we still ran out on Sunday.”
The glow from this Lions dynasty is far reaching. It coincides with record Australian rules football participation in Queensland, with 625,000 registered participants last year growing at 7% annually. The popularity of the club has helped justify the construction of the new 63,000-seat Brisbane Olympic Stadium, at a cost of $3.8bn.
Even the little man has been looked after. The Roar Deal podcast, founded in 2023 by AFL reporter Michael Whiting and Brisbane radio host Dom Fay, has become a commercial success. They sold out 260 tickets for their live recording at the Royal Derby on Thursday within minutes, at $35 each.
“This will be the fourth one they’ve done here in a row,” Tancredi says. “We didn’t anticipate how big that would be.”
The podcast now earns more than $6,000 a month on Patreon, equivalent to the Australian median wage. Each September over the past four years, there has been a significant jump in earnings.
Whiting, Fay and Tancredi are not doing it for the money. Rather, the financial reward for these Lions fans is a bonus in this hard-to-believe period of sustained success. It might be inconceivable, if the Lions did not already have form. The three-peat secured in 2003 had a galvanising effect on the merged entity as it found its feet in Brisbane.
Tancredi believes the feats of recent years have rejuvenated the club’s proud Fitzroy traditions and reconnected them with the modern club, aided by the efforts by the Lions to cultivate the official Melbourne-based supporter group, the Lionhearts.
As the owner at the club’s official venue in Melbourne, with walls full of his own Lions memorabilia and a mural outside depicting former players Kevin “Bulldog” Murray, Jonathan Brown and Chris Johnson, Tancredi has also become an important figure in the community.
“A local, a Lions supporter that comes in a lot, he lost his job late last year, he couldn’t afford a grand final ticket and he offered me a piece of memorabilia if I’d get him a ticket,” Tancredi says.
“I actually got him a ticket. I gave it to him and didn’t take the memorabilia, so he got to keep both. But he was so emotional about being able to be there.”
Tancredi, who traces his Lions connections through both sets of Fitzroy-dwelling grandparents, has also become friends with Brisbane’s greats. “Jonathan Brown and Chris Johnson are on the side of the pub so they come in all the time,” he says. “Browny rang me one night and said, ‘We’re at the seafood restaurant across the road and I brought some boys in to come and see my face.’”
