The AFL is its own beast. That’ll make finding Goyder’s replacement fascinating

23 hours ago 4

Opinion

September 13, 2025 — 9.33am

The Australian Football League is a beast of a business. For the reporting period ending October 31, 2024, the AFL’s gross revenue was $1.04 billion. The company’s operating surplus came in at $618 million.

Following distributions to stakeholders, including clubs, state leagues, and the AFL Players’ Association, the AFL’s net profit for the same period topped out at $41.3 million. Tax-free. Add into the mix, the AFL has a net asset base of $482 million.

Standing up those figures in context illustrates the gargantuan footprint of the AFL as a corporate entity. The Australian Sports Commission’s aggregate allocation to all National Sporting Organisations, National Sporting Organisations for People with a Disability, State and Territory Sporting Institutes, and other partner bodies for 2025/26 adds up to $245 million. A quarter of the AFL’s annual gross revenue, and way less than it hands out.

Put differently, the AFL trousers more than the Australian government gives to the entire sports sector. And 10 years ago, the AFL’s total revenue was just half as much as it is currently, as was its audited surplus. Indeed, in the company’s *2016 financial year, the AFL made an operating loss (*as it did in each of the years disrupted by COVID-19).

I raise this to illustrate these points. First, whatever the myriad causative factors are, triggering so much angst about the prolonged reign of outgoing AFL Commission chairman Richard Goyder, one at least must presume the sprinkling of his fairy dust has something to do with the present robustness of the AFL’s financial position.

Second, while the deployment of taxpayer funds into Australia’s sporting sector is by no means insignificant, anyone who tells you it’s too much has rocks in their head.

Third, because of this abject rudeness of the AFL’s financial health, and its non-reliance on government handouts, the corporate governance principles which are forced by government on Australia’s funded NSOs and other bodies, simply don’t apply atAFL House.

No agonising skills matrices. No maximum number of years in office. No gender equality or the money gets turned off threats. In that sense, the AFL is its own self-contained sporting ecosystem.

Which is at the same time a blessing and a problem, rendering things all rather interesting. And proceedings could get vituperative before too long. Goyder has this past week foreshadowed that he won’t seek re-election to the AFL’s board of directors at its next annual general meeting.

His impending exit can be attributed to a chairman finally deciphering the tea leaves conveying the message that his number might be up. His tenure has been anything but a straight path. Also, Goyder commenced as AFL Commission chair in 2017; these roles don’t materialise regularly.

AFL Commission chairman Richard Goyder at this year’s hall of fame function.

It’s plain that the process of choosing Goyder’s replacement is as Byzantine as the plot of the 2025 Oscar-nominated movie, Conclave. It’s a process that is also not entirely codified. Nature abhors a vacuum, and the pole that one must shimmy up to claim power is lathered in grease. How Goyder is succeeded, well, that’s a murky process.

Say what you want, but it’s kind of mind-blowing that a billion-dollar company of such social standing in Australia as the AFL is, has no orderly succession plan in place.

It’s reported that the candidates vying to fill the void do, or might include former AFL lawyer and Collingwood president, Jeff Browne; plaintiff-centric compo lawyer and former Western Bulldogs president Peter Gordon, and another certain former Collingwood chieftain and early dinnertime game show host Edward Joseph McGuire, AM.

Assuming the accuracy of the registers maintained by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, neither Browne nor McGuire has served as a director of the AFL; Gordon, however, did, between 1990 and 1993.

Bringing any person in from outside the current cohort of AFL directors is a task mightily more difficult than it sounds. We’re talking about a very particular type of billion-dollar business here. The sheer magnification of omnipresent public scrutiny, applied to decision-making, is manifest. Most corporate executives and professional directors would be chewed up and spat out sideways.

Each potential candidate I’ve named has done astonishing things professionally, and in some cases, other eyebrow-raising things that astonish. Browne has probably forgotten more about the intersection of sport, law, and business just in the last week than I’ll ever know. If he’s lost to the process through wicked political jiggery-pokery, the process is poorer and weaker for it.

On paper, any sport’s governing body would be fortunate to have him as a director. But these things aren’t ever a contest of achievements and excellence. It was Mario Puzo’s Don Lucchese who put it best: “money is a gun; politics is knowing when to pull the trigger”.

For a company of its standing in Australian society, the process of the AFL selecting a chairperson is remarkably unsophisticated. The AFL’s constitution isn’t a complex document. Essentially, it works this way: clause 60 of the AFL’s constitution mandates the company must have between six and nine directors, although clause 75 then says the company in general meeting may increase (or reduce) that number. Presently, and by my count, the AFL has 10 directors.

Former Collingwood president Eddie McGuire after the Magpies’ finals win over Adelaide.

At each AGM, two longest-serving directors – together with anyone else who hasn’t faced the voters in three years – are compelled to retire from office. But there’s no constitutional limit on the number of times a person can be re-elected.

Clause 64 mandates that new, non-executive commissioners are elected by the “Appointees”, themselves being the voting representatives of each of the AFL’s 18 clubs. If the total number of retiring directors offering themselves for re-election, and any new nominees not already directors, exceeds the number of vacant positions (being two), an election takes place. In secret.

Which conjures the adage that the only voters who’ll tell you the truth about who they voted for are the ones who’ll admit they voted for the other bloke.

Sections 67(h) and (i) provide that the highest-polling candidates, in a first-past-the-post election, are declared elected, provided they also receive a majority of votes from the voting representatives of the 18 voting club representatives in attendance.

For all the talk about subcommittees vetting candidates and making recommendations to the AFL Commission, that’s all convenient wallpapering in reality because pursuant to clause 70, any three clubs could band together and nominate anyone they wish to be elected. The AFL doesn’t have an independence-rooted governing system or anything approaching it.

Given that the clubs’ Appointees also control the voting on candidates to elect as directors, the clubs wield enormous power. If it’s true, the next AFL chair must come from the new directors to be elected – whether because none of the current directors want the job, or because the current cohort each know none of their own are up to it – the clubs hold four clean aces.

Clause 73 of the constitution states that the AFL commissioners select the chair from one of their own, which is orthodox corporate governance that stops a chair being foisted on the board. But the members hold all the power to put into office those to select from.

That the conversation about “who’ll be the next AFL supremo?” is even being had smacks of disorganisation and political skulduggery. You’d have thought there’d be enough political savvy permeating the air, in the offices beneath Marvel Stadium, to circumvent a shambles of process. But there’s evidently not; and that’s why we’re here.