Good onya, Skasey and Doc!

For a little while back there in the mists of time — the mid 80s — the then Victorian Football League flirted with entrepreneurial ownership of football clubs.

 

In 1985 the Sydney Swans were ‘acquired’ by flamboyant medical entrepreneur Geoffrey Edelsten. Within a couple of years, despite a spending spree that included Tom Hafey, Bernard Toohey and Greg Williams, Edelsten was gone, replaced by a consortium including TV host Mike Willessee and Just Jeans boss Craig Kimberley.

 

By 1992, the Swans were a basket case and the AFL stepped in to prop up its bridgehead into NRL territory

 

In 1986, a consortium bankrolled by high-flying entrepreneur Christopher Skase was awarded the licence for a VFL team based in Queensland.

 

When Skase’s house of cards collapsed in late 1989, the AFL took over and re-sold the ‘Bears’ to Gold Coast businessman Reuben Pelerman. Within a couple of years, with Pelerman losing money hand over fist, the Bears reverted to a traditional membership-based club structure, although only with significant funding input from the AFL.

 

And so the AFL must be feeling a lot like it has avoided the fate of the FFA, now embroiled in a stoush with “billionaire” businessman, Nathan Tinkler, over the Newcastle Jets and without the resources to write off the exercise to ‘experience’.

 

And the NRL must be watching rather nervously given Tinkler’s recent ‘acquisition’ of the Newcastle Knights NRL team.

 

FFA has also recently had to deal with another “billionaire” businessman in Clive Palmer wanting the sandpit to be run his way or no way.

 

And, of course, rugby league was split asunder when Rupert Murdoch decided he wanted to control a whole competition.

 

For all its manifold faults and inadequacies, the VFL/AFL has been, Edelsten and Skase notwithstanding, mercifully free of meddling by super-rich owners. Not even John “Pig’s arse” Elliott at the height of his powers could truly thumb his nose at AFL House and the consequences be damned. His attempts to do so eventually netted his beloved Caaarrlt’n a series of Wooden Spoons and a decade in the football wilderness.

 

At some point, the AFL must have considered some sort of private ownership for the Suns and Giants. Thankfully, their brush with Edelsten and Skase would have given them pause to reconsider and find a more reliable way to do things.

 

And so, fellow Aussie Rules fans, we should be grateful to Skasey for buggering off to Majorca when he did and to the Doc for taking his pink helicopter off to wherever he parked it.

 

In the meantime, there was all the fun and games of the Chase for Skase and more recently the Doc and his new beau have given the glitterati at the Brownlow something to titter over.