Under normal circumstances, Sydney’s game against North Melbourne would have been one of those bloodless, half-arsed dead rubbers of which there were quite a few in round 24. It would have been an opportunity for the Swans to rest a few superstars, and tune up for two home finals. It would have been one of those jolly Sunday-afternoon SCG romps the Swans are renowned for.
It would have been a day of celebration for the club – the first ever double-header, a chance to talk about inclusion, respect and culture. The alleged events at the Pullman Hotel a week ago, after which five Swans players were suspended for breaching club standards by “drinking … staying out late … and bringing women back to the hotel”, put paid to all that of course. It put paid to a lot of things – trust, relationships, reputations, careers, endorsements, campaigns.
It brought forth much else – opportunist lawyers, performative and presumptive op-ed columnists, out-of-their-depth chief executives, amateur sleuths, thrice hourly “breaking of silences” and a lot of rage. It’s very much a story for our age – with battlelines drawn, with facts disputed and with all sense of scale and perspective torpedoed. Much of the anger early in the week was directed at the sports media for framing this as a football story.
Some poorly-worded tweets from newshounds and a tin-eared statement from Sydney’s CEO set people off. But this is a sports story. It’s the story of a club, of a team, of individual players, of a supporter base, of an entire footballing ecosystem.
It’s the story of a club and players who purported to have cracked the code, to have landed on that perfect balance of performance, marketability and, ahem, culture. It’s a story that proves how fragile those claims to sporting magnificence can be. If you waded through the muckraking, the rumour-mongering, the conclusion-jumping and the straw-manning, one thing stood out – the devastation of the supporter base.
On air, in print and in person, there was a sense of betrayal among Swans fans. It was particularly evident among women and older supporters. There was the thudding realisation that they’d been sold and bought a lie – the lie of the clean-cut, squeaky-clean superstar, and of the unimpeachable culture.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
