I hate Ian Collins...
Ground deal dispute causes club ructions
Caroline Wilson | February 18, 2009
AFL boss Andrew Demetriou and Telstra Dome chief Ian Collins unofficially shook hands before Christmas last year on a deal that would have resulted in $6 million a season being distributed to the Victorian clubs that played at the Docklands ground.
Demetriou was so confident that he had secured an improved stadium agreement for the struggling clubs that he mentioned it at a meeting of club chiefs soon after.
At least one club — North Melbourne — was so confident of the improved new deal that it included an extra $750,000 in its initial financial estimates for 2009. The multimillion-dollar cash injection would have involved a massive re-writing of the special assistance fund, an annual $3.1 million of which is shared by the Kangaroos and the Western Bulldogs.
However, Collins later told Demetriou that the deal was off after the Telstra Dome chief executive took it to his board and its representatives — which included superannuation funds that, in turn, knocked back the agreement that could have secured the medium-term future of several Victorian clubs.
It was after the deal fell apart that the AFL launched legal action against the board of directors of the stadium it will one day own, claiming Football Federation Australia had been handed a more generous ground agreement than several of the AFL clubs that created Telstra Dome.
Among the AFL's legal grievances was its claim that the new naming-rights sponsor of the stadium, Etihad, contravened the league's deal with its official airline, Qantas.
"We were told by Andrew that he had made a deal with 'Collo'," Bulldogs chairman David Smorgon confirmed to The Age. "However, Collo came back and said that after consulting with others — I can only assume he meant his board — that the deal was off."
The Kangaroos now face a budget shortfall of $750,000 for 2009 — exactly the amount it had hoped to reap from the new Telstra Dome deal. Of the five home clubs, the Bulldogs fare the worst out of their ground agreement, followed by North, St Kilda, Carlton and anchor tenant Essendon.
Those five clubs would have secured the lion's share of the $6 million, a portion of which would have been handed to all the Victorian clubs that play home games at Telstra Dome, which will have its name changed next month.
While Demetriou and Collins — the latter was Demetriou's immediate predecessor as the AFL's football operations manager — have continued to meet and attempted to negotiate, the relationship between the Docklands stadium and its major tenant remains strained.
When the $6 million deal was rejected the AFL established a working party consisting of three club presidents — Smorgon, Collingwood's Eddie McGuire and Geelong's Frank Costa — along with two Victorian club chief executives in Carlton's Greg Swann and Richmond's Steve Wright to represent the clubs.
The group has already met once with the Victorian Government in an attempt to state its case regarding financial returns from the MCG, which the AFL believes is handing a superior financial deal to other football codes despite its total reliance on Australian rules football.
Demetriou refused to comment on the Collins deal when contacted by The Age, while Collins was unavailable for comment.