World Footy News

The Australian's Chip Le Grand interviewed Colin Carter as he came to the end of his long stint on the AFL Commission. Carter was one of the key people behind the scenes who directed the evolution of the debt-ridden Victorian Football League through to the vibrant Australian Football League, he pushed for the continued expansion into new areas of Australia, and remains a strong advocate for investment in South Africa. The interview can be found here, but is reproduced below given that it is a rare insight into some of the driving forces behind the sport's radical changes over the past couple of decades.

Just keep moving, says ideas man

Chip Le Grand | March 01, 2008

THIS is how Richard Colless, chairman of the Sydney Swans, describes the life cycle of a strategist.

The birth of an idea is often greeted with ridicule or apathy. Once the idea takes its first tentative steps, emotions harden into anger. Then once it is fully grown and vindicated, no one can remember a time when it wasn't there. The same can be said of Colin Carter's time in football. When Carter sat down more than 20 years ago to write the strategic manifesto known simply as the Blue Book, most of the ideas were seen as a threat to the very existence of football as it was known. They are now universally accepted as fundamentals within the national competition.

Carter saw an expanded competition with a salary cap and a draft and equal financial payments to the clubs. More contentiously, he saw weaker Victorian clubs either merging or relocating to survive. He saw a new team in South Australia and another in Western Australia. (If truth be known, he actually saw two in each state.)

Carter didn't see everything. By his own admission, he didn't think 10 clubs would still be operating out of Victoria this century. And no one foresaw the riches of broadcast money which now flow into football, providing the commercial lifeblood of the game. But as the AFL commission's resident "big picture" man since 1993, Carter has witnessed an extraordinary realisation of his early football vision.

When Carter sat at his final commission meeting last month, he warned his fellow board members that the renewed push into south-east Queensland and western Sydney would be hotly criticised. He also knew his grand plans for football in South Africa were considered a "joke" by many in the game; as bluntly expressed recently by Hawthorn president Jeff Kennett.

But while there is no certainty that football will flourish in western Sydney or on the Gold Coast - much less in South Africa - Carter appreciates the greater risk of standing still.

"If we finish up in 20 years time with 14 of 16 teams below the Murray and 55 per cent of Australia's population north of the Murray then I think people would look at the competition and say it is a bit of a joke," he told The Weekend Australian.

"We also miss out on the extent to which public interest is created by rivalries and a sense of ownership. When you have got 16 teams skewed so badly, that is a bad structure."

In a broad-ranging interview - his first and only, by Carter's reckoning, since joining the commission 15 years ago - the Melbourne businessman and philanthropist spoke candidly about the forces driving the AFL into new areas, the near-hopeless task facing weaker Melbourne clubs of trying to match the financial clout of the bigger clubs, and the economic certainty that 10 clubs in Victoria will not survive indefinitely.

Carter also spoke passionately of his vision for a South African-based team before he dies, the hypocrisy of suspending players for marijuana use when alcohol abuse is a bigger problem in football and society, and nominated end-of-season breaks as the frontier issue for an expanded illicit drugs policy.

"We are hypocritical and the pollies are hypocritical because almost all the drug problems come from alcohol abuse," he said, noting that of 35 first-strike positive tests by AFL players, 34 admitted to being drunk at the time.

"I am not soft on drugs. I have never tried drugs in my life and I think they are hugely damaging. But how can we rub someone out of two years for testing positive to marijuana when we have club presidents who get caught for drink-driving?

"We would like to make a further incursion into what most of the nation regard as a personal liberty; to test people in that high-risk time on vacation. I would have thought we would have a pretty sympathetic ear from the players to look at that but if the whole agenda is being run by people who say string 'em up regardless of the facts, that endangers a sensible approach to it."

Carter, a senior adviser to the Boston Consulting Group and a leading advocate for indigenous advancement through his work on Noel Pearson's Cape York Institute, is best known within AFL circles as the architect of a succession of strategic reports; the 1985 Blue Book, the 2001 Carter report into game development and the most recent New Generation report.

Along with celebrated VFL reformers such as Allen Aylett and Ross Oakley and original commissioners Graeme Samuel, Peter Scanlon and Peter Nixon, Carter is a founding father of the national competition.

AFL chairman Mike Fitzpatrick described Carter as one of the most influential figures in the 150-year history of Australian Football.

Samuel, the economic rationalist who butted heads with clubs over some of Carter's less palatable ideas, said the Blue Book and Carter report remained the twin "foundation stones" of the national competition and game development. But beyond the arguments and findings within these reports, Carter's views on the game have rarely been aired outside commission meetings.

To assess Carter's contribution to football is to map the evolution of the modern game from the dysfunctional, debt-ridden days of the old VFL to the powerful national competition which yesterday announced record revenues of $285 million and a new attendance mark of just over 7 million for the 2007 season.

The story begins in the executive summary of the 1985 Blue Book, which Carter helped produce as a consultant to the AFL. In it, he cites falling attendances, bankruptcy at clubs and charges of VFL and club mismanagement. He advocates national expansion not as a take-over bid for the Australian sports market, but the only way for VFL clubs to survive.

The story ends on this year's pre-season trip to South Africa, with Carter witnessing first-hand the local fascination in the game. Carter for the past five years has lobbied for gradual increases in investment in game development in South Arica against resistance by some fellow commissioners and senior AFL executives.

"I was a sceptic, as were many of our executives," AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou said. "But we have all signed up to it now. We believe it."

Remarkably, many of Carter's views have remained constant throughout. The first is that giving a greater share of competition money to clubs will never address competitive inequities. As Carter explained, it just fuels inflation within the football market without addressing the underlying problem.

"The thing which drives competitive outcomes is not the absolute level of wealth but the relative level of wealth between clubs," he said. "There is a mistaken belief that if the competition gets another billion dollars and that is spread around, that will change everybody's circumstances. If you give the same amount of money to each club all you do is raise the cost structure.

"When I did that report in 1985, the average revenue of a VFL club was $3m and I was observing how it had come from $300,000-a-year in 1975. It is now $30mn and yet the same number of clubs are financially on the margin. I have always refused to believe that more money coming into the game saves clubs. All it means is Collingwood has more to spend, the West Coast has more to spend and North Melbourne has to spend the same amount keep up.

"Because Collingwood and Adelaide have four to five times as many supporters as the weaker clubs, unless you can figure out a way of changing that relationship - and it shows no sign of changing over my lifetime - it means that any idea that a weak club has to raise money can not only be emulated by a rich club but trumped. It also means the pattern that exists at the moment of the weaker clubs essentially being cross-subsidised by the others through special distributions will not change.

"The hard question is, if the gap is getting wider despite our equalisation stuff, how long is that a sustainable strategy? We don't want clubs to die. I would prefer them to move or merge than die. I think the chances of having the same Melbourne clubs in 50 years time are zip."

The 2001 Carter report into game development, written soon after the money from the AFL's first broadcast rights mega-deal starting flowing into league coffers, identified western Sydney and south-east Queensland as the two most strategically important markets for the growth of the game. It also warned the AFL was underspending in those markets.

Collingwood president Eddie McGuire took heated issue with Carter over the AFL's policy of salary cap concessions for Sydney and Brisbane but says Carter's long-term view of the game was essential for its growth.

"Colin was able to take a helicopter view of football at a time when everyone else was in hand-to-hand combat to survive," McGuire said.

The AFL's speculative venture into South Africa, particularly the league's decision to send three clubs into South Africa on community duties this summer and none into western Sydney, has sent mixed signals about football's priorities. Carter said there should be none and that NSW and Queensland remain at the top of the AFL agenda.

He also insists South Africa is a long-term project worth pursuing, regardless of the scorn it invites.

"When you go to South Africa, you have cricket grounds, which solve a huge problem in most other countries for us. You have got a young population, most of whom have got nothing to do after they finish school. If you turn up with an organised program like Auskick, you get killed in the rush. They love our game; they are good at it.

"I am not asking the AFL to believe South Africa is the answer. But everyone who has been down there and knows something about footy reckons the talent is there. The business plan has 30,000 participants in two or three year's time. If we are steady at it, I reckon we could have another South Australia or Western Australia in South Africa in 20 years time.

"We are spending half of one per cent on South Africa. I am gobsmacked by people's scepticism about it. This isn't part of an AFL strategy but I don't find it at all improbable that we could have a team based in South Africa in my lifetime."

Although Carter has stepped down from the AFL commission, he has not left football entirely. Apart from maintaining his fervent support for Geelong, the club he served as director before joining the commission, he has succeeded the late Ron Evans as chairman of the AFL Foundation, the league's charity and philanthropic arm.