It’s the biggest story of this football season to date. But young Collingwood star Jaidyn Stephenson’s suspension for betting on AFL games is also one full of contradictions and uncomfortable juxtapositions.
They were obvious even as the dramatic news was being heralded on Wednesday. The league’s official website broadcast a live feed of the press conference at which league AFL General Counsel Andrew Dillon announced the penalty meted out to Stephenson.
The news conference finished and the live stream concluded. The next vision appearing on the screen was an advertisement for BetEasy, an AFL sponsor. Read a news report on the AFL website and you would have been surrounded by gambling ads and promotions.
There were contradictions in Stephenson’s explanations of his actions in his own televised mea culpa some hours later, and in subsequent news reports of how the information came to light.
“Obviously in the moment I was a little bit ignorant, I thought it might just be a harmless sort of thing,” an emotional Stephenson said. “After the third time it was weighing on me, it was starting to build up. I was just feeling way too guilty.”
But that third of the three games in which Stephenson placed various bets on his Magpies and individual players, including himself, was against St Kilda.
It was after that game that news reports said Stephenson made an off-hand aside to teammate Jeremy Howe about how a teammate had cost him a “multi” by failing to pick up the number of disposals Stephenson had wagered on him gathering. It was Howe who twigged to the trouble Stephenson had placed himself in and advised him to tell Collingwood football manager Geoff Walsh.
While technically that still constitutes the supposed “self-reporting” which many believe has seen Stephenson cut some slack in terms of his penalty (a $20,000 fine and a 10-game suspension which will allow him to return for finals), is it an act of guilt?
Guilt isn’t an emotion which doesn’t really tally with that immediate post-game reaction about a teammate costing him a winning bet.
There are contradictions around the sanction itself which lend their weight to a more sympathetic disposition to Stephenson, too. Or, if you’re of the opposite opinion, support a case he may have got off lightly.
Those of the latter view believe the spot bets Stephenson placed on himself kicking three or more goals, or teammates kicking goals, were situations manipulated easily enough.
AFL investigators, after poring over game footage, decided outcomes weren’t affected, but the possibility they could quite conceivably have been (and even the suggestion of match-fixing) is as grave as it gets in most other sports.
Alternately, Stephenson’s penalty of 10 games, plus another 12 (that part suspended) is the heaviest yet dealt to a player for a gambling offence. In 2011, another former Pie Heath Shaw was rubbed out for eight games, two fewer, despite placing a bet specifically because of inside information to which he was privy, and after being caught out rather than confessing (of a sort).
The penalty smacks of another managed outcome for which the AFL has developed some sort of reputation.
Heavy enough to appease those on the AFL Commission who reportedly were after an even tougher outcome. But one still enabling Stephenson the chance to play finals and avoid getting a big, powerful club too far off-side.
The biggest contradiction, though, and of course the most uncomfortable juxtaposition, is the AFL being seen to wield any sort of big stick whilst having so enthusiastically jumped in bed with the gambling industry.
While the Collingwood youngster sits out half a season because of bets totalling $36 and is sanctioned and publicly chastised, the league apparently feels no embarrassment raking in a reported $10 million through gambling sponsorship.
His gender and his tender age make him exactly the sort of demographic to which those ads all over AFL products and media content would be appealing were he not pulling on a Collingwood jumper each week, the spruikers congratulating themselves on another successful “catch”.
And there’s enough of those spruikers out there. Controlling the proliferation of betting and bookmaking agencies in this country since regulations were loosened has been like a game of whack-a-mole.
They are a constant backdrop these days to any sort of professional sport, their entreaties to social groups previously not even targeted by gambling interests snaking their way into seemingly every commercial break, every aspect of coverage beyond the actual four quarters of football.
Is it any wonder that at least one (surely there are many more) of the 800-odd naïve and impressionable young men playing AFL football got sucked in despite the obvious red flags every player has waved in their face about their professional obligations?
Even before Stephenson’s indiscretions became public, the whole gambling and AFL players issue continued to gurgle away, an ominous background rumble coming from a blocked and overworked toilet.
Those working in the arena of gambling addiction yell constantly, occasionally having their voices heard enough to cause some headlines before the 24/7 football coverage caravan has its attention diverted and moves on.
There are always rumours about this star player or that battling serious problems on the punt, be it the horses or American sports. In recent weeks, those whispers have amped up to a dull roar about a couple of leading AFL players in particular.
Every time the noise grows, a sizeable number of AFL executives shift nervously in their seats.
Not just about the potential need for more crisis management, but about how they can be seen to be gamekeepers for the integrity of the competition on the one hand, whilst happily pocketing the cash doled out by the very agencies whose involvement endangers that integrity with the other.
Stephenson’s folly is just more collateral damage, and that pile will continue to grow whether or not the AFL dallies with betting in a commercial sense.
But the naked hypocrisy is so embarrassingly public, garishly splashed all over league football’s commercial properties, that the league can’t even afford to come out whole-heartedly against its perversion of the purity of the game it administers.
The AFL has happily waded into a range of social causes, in my view often quite rightly. But those particular moral stances aren’t so (literally) costly. Taking a similar stance on gambling as a means of revenue (even while some of its member clubs are doing so when it comes to poker machines) appears a bridge too far.
And in a sport teeming with contradictions, conflicts of interest and ethically-compromised overseers, this one is by far the most embarrassing.
Rohan Connolly is one of Australia's foremost sportswriters – a veteran of both broadcast and print media. In the era of sanitised corporate sports media his is a perspective worth exploring. You can read more of Rohan's work at FOOTYOLOGY.
