If by few you mean the last two then sure (and no doubt this year too). It was 8 years straight of profits prior to that.
And more broadly, a 'less expensive' player really just translates to spending more on other players under the cap (given there is a minimum % a club must pay), amd then undoubtedly a significant reduction in off field revenue given no "Buddy factor"....
"You get the feeling that like Monty Python's Black Knight, the Swans would regard amputation as merely a flesh wound."
Saw Buddy in the 'hood yesterday - he looks pretty settled.
I don't think that critique affects the central assertion of my overlong post - thanks for reading it my the way. I am aware of that explanation. However, in a recent interview with Buddy's former agent that subject came up and rather than trot out that simple explanation, Pickering hesitated and then ignored the question.
The other thing I should clarify, is that I'm not making any judgement call on Buddy's value etc. for no other reason than because a proper cost-benefit analysis is a retrospective, and the Buddy deal isn't.
Loose translation from the Latin is - I am tall, so I hit out.
I also think the swans blinked with regards to how a successful GWS with Buddy as their marque forward would impact the swans bottom line.
An unfounded fear in my opinion. The swans have the affluent eastern suburbs and corporate Sydney tied up, and needed to just back themselves.
Anyway, a successful GWS, grows the sport in sydney for both clubs.
But, if having a glamour full-forward is the swans operating model (and history strongly suggests this), then we'd better be all in on Aaron Naughton if there is a chance we can extract him.
R'n'R, I find your thinking plausible, even persuasive, but I'm not completely convinced i.e. you may be mostly right, or maybe not. I can't say.
The part in your reasoning that I find less compelling is that I don't see our bid as a straight-out 40% overbid on GWS. The worth of the total contract we offered was substantially greater - but the amount per year was actually significantly less. It seems we weren't in a position to outbid (or even match) GWS over 6 years and this was the way we could present a competitive offer. Maybe we really did believe Buddy would play out the contract (as has proven to be the case) - although we could not have been totally confident about that - and so it was a legit offer, not just a way of outbidding GWS by offering an artificially long contract duration.
Another point is that I don't think it's a given that we would have known what GWS were offering. Pickering may have told us the GWS offer as a means of getting us to match or outbid them, or then again he may not have (may not have been allowed to).
So, for me, as far as your main point goes - that the AFL topped up the GWS offer with $3m of their own - the jury is out. There may never have been $10m on the table from GWS (via the AFL or otherwise).
All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated, and well supported in logic and argument than others. -Douglas Adams, author (11 Mar 1952-2001)
You are correct, we'll never know for sure whether Buddy had a total of $10 mill offered from the Giants and the AFL.
But possibility of the extra money just being a feature of the extra duration forces us to disregard the posts by Mel_C that the $$ figure was not initiated by the Swans (see below).
As you say, the jury is still out - mind you a jury failed to convict Joh Bjelke so they can be funny things at times.
Loose translation from the Latin is - I am tall, so I hit out.
Actually I don't think the question is whether the AFL were in for $3 mill - I think it's pretty cetain - the only question in my mind is, did the Swans know that some of the money was from the AFL?
Loose translation from the Latin is - I am tall, so I hit out.
I was excited at the time to get Buddy but looking back I wish we had never got him.
Has taken way too much salary cap and caused us to lose too many good players.
In order to justify such a huge % of our cap over such a large amount of time he needed to deliver more on the biggest stages but has either been injured (2015 finals, 2016 GF,) or gone missing (goalless in 2017 SF, destroyed by Davis in 2018 EF). This year, we didn't need him to kick 6 in a dead rubber against the Suns, we needed him to nail that crucial set shot against the Giants to win.
Those that talk up his marketing/promotional side seem to forget that the SCG was rocking a long time before Buddy came along.
I suspect by the end of the buddy era we will have a less talented list compared to the year before he came to us, be in a worse financial position, and have no premiership silverware to show for it.
We simply overpaid, and its cost us.
What we pay Buddy on the field, for all intensive purposes, has zero to do with our overall financial position. Because there is a minimum we have to pay under the cap anyway. So if we didn't have Buddy, we would have been paying others instead that salary, so the net effect of 'overpaying for him' is effectively zero in terms of salary.
And while one may postulate any sort of counterfactual about what a 'better team' may have achieved on the field (if you want to argue we would have done better paying other players more with the Buddy money), I do not think it is credible to suggest he has not had a significant impact for the club off the park. Not an easily quantifiable impact because one can not create a viable counterfactual to compare it with.
But I find it very hard too believe anyone could mount a strong case that would suggest in any shape or form we are as a club financially 'worse off' because we recruited Buddy - once you take COVID out of the equation. That is the only reason we are in a 'worse' financial position at the moment - it is simply ridiculous to omit that critical context.
As I said before, we had eight years of straight surpluses up until 2018, and 2019 was not a massive loss. So the key indicators suggest the recruitment of Buddy certainly wasn't harmful to the overall financial perfromance of the club as a whole.
Last edited by mcs; 26th September 2021 at 05:43 PM.
"You get the feeling that like Monty Python's Black Knight, the Swans would regard amputation as merely a flesh wound."
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