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.
Watching Sydney play home games emphasises this point of difference. A Swans game is a party. And in recent years, the club has moved away from the attritional football of the highly successful Paul Roos years to personalities and a style of play that engages what is a notoriously fickle market. Their best players are good looking, personable, marketable, sublimely talented and supposedly squeaky clean. It was central to the acquisition of Lance Franklin and to a lesser extent Charlie Curnow. And it’s evident in the swagger and the popularity of current stars Chad Warner and Isaac Heeney.
In between kicking goals, Heeney flogs oral hygiene and teeth whitening products. Indeed, he plays his football like he’s starring in an advertisement. Even at full exertion, he looks like he’s about to sabrage a bottle of champagne. We often speak of elegant cricketers – the likes of David Gower, Greg Chappell and Damien Martyn. But Heeney brings his own elegance to what is often an inelegant sport.
Heeney and Warner are among five Sydney players who have been stood down for the rest of the season. None of the men have been arrested or charged, but four have been connected to the police investigation into an alleged sexual assault at the Pullman Hotel in Melbourne in the small hours of Monday morning. Since the story broke, there has been condemnation of the language of sports journalists and broadcasters. Some of the coverage has indeed been crude – a mix of the reptilian and the race to the exclusive. But as writer Martin McKenzie-Murray noted in a scathing piece yesterday, “most, if not all pundits, have earnestly pre-empted their footy-based reflections with an acknowledgment of the gravity of all this”.
This is foremost a police matter. It is something that plays out every day in this country – in bars, in bedrooms, in laneways, in courts, on social media, with strangers and most commonly with people known to the victim. It is central to law reform, to the way we legislate and understand consent. Judges, barristers, police, politicians, bar associations and victim-survivors all have different views on how to ensure justice and enact change around allegations of sexual assault or violence towards women. This has been a rare instance where sporting organisations have known their place.
But it is also a sporting story. It’s a story of high-profile, incredibly well-paid elite athletes who get more education about consent and respectful relationships than any other section of society. It’s the story of a devastated supporter base. It’s a story of a governing body that has failed to lead on so many other issues that matter, and that has finally had a chance to be decisive and to use proper language.
And it’s the story of a football club that has long been held up as a cultural exemplar – a club that has positioned itself as one of the most progressive in Australia. Indeed, the best analysis of Bloods Culture I’ve read came from former player Brandon Jack. “Within the playing group,” he wrote, “there was bloodthirsty hunger and drive that to an outsider would border on bullying. If nothing else, we were the rigorous enforcers of conformity.”
These claims of cultural exceptionalism have long been a myth, a marketing hook, a performance boost. It has been something you write on butcher’s paper, something you strive to execute better than the club up the road who are probably writing something similar. These “young men of outstanding character”, and these walking brands are like any other footballer or any other member of the community – subject to the same prejudices, the same cultural influences, the same failings, and yes, the same laws.
Sydney and the AFL, to their credit, didn’t shirk from this. For once, the club, the industry and the governing body put community expectations above commercial and footballing imperatives. Writing on butcher’s paper is easy. Hoisting a rainbow flag is easy. Diversity action plans are easy. The Swans and the AFL did something hard, something rare and something culturally significant, and they are to be commended for it.
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