Buddy hypothetical

[Ruck'n'Roll]

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).

Liam Pickering (Buddy's manager at the time) was speaking about the Buddy contract on SEN the other week. He said he provided the swans with a dollar amount and Ireland came back with the 9 year contract. Buddy was shocked when he realised how old he would be when his contract finishes.

The topic came up because they were discussing a player that had signed a 5 year contract and whether large multi year contracts were a risk. Buddy's 9 year contract was brought up and that's what Pickering responded with. So the discussion was more about the length rather than the dollar amount.

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.

[bloodspirit]

This post contains no judgement whatsoever on Buddy’s past or present performance, his value to the Swans, the overall success ROI of the contract or other similar subjects. This post is all about what machinations could have brought Buddy's ground breaking contract into exitance 8 years ago and that is all – history not currant events.

I have always found the Buddy deal difficult for me to get my head around. However, a few bits of information have fallen into place recently and I think I’m getting closer to comprehending it now - and have decided to share.

To start with, I’ll look at the $$$’s – I’ll address the duration of the contract a little later. The Giants' offer was for $7 mill, the Swans offer was $10 mill.

Not even in the currently hyper-inflated Sydney real estate market does a bidder surpass the previous bid by more than 40% - to suggest the Swans did, is to suggest utter incompetence on their part.

I’m not suggesting this.
But I have always wondered how the Swans got to $10 mill?
It’s been suggested that the Swans were given that number by Buddy’s agent, in which case did Pickering pluck that number out of the air? Or was a $10 mill payday already a possibility for Buddy. I believe so.

So where did the extra $3 mill come from?
I think there can be only one possibility, the AFL itself.
Finding an extra $3 mill in your salary cap would be extremely difficult for a club, but not so for the AFL, who’ve invested $267 mill into GWS.
Does a 7 year ambassadorial role for the most bankable star in the AFL to headline their push into the leagues heartland - $3 mill sound implausible to anyone here? It sounds like a bargain to me.

At the time Andy Demetriou denied offering inducements to any player to leave their current club. He later acknowledged that the AFL “could” offer Buddy an ambassadorial role – so the money was available.
Inducement? Ambassadorship? - You say tomarto, I say tomayto.

The above suggestion is the only way I can see to reconcile the size of our Buddy’s offer with his frequently expressed and apparently sincere preference for the Swans. If the above is substantially correct then Buddy did not gouge the Swans for an extra $3 mill – Buddy effectively gave us last refusal by allowing us to match an existing offer.

I believe the Swans actually managed to outbid the Giants and the AFL offer combined – an astonishingly bold move.

The AFL under Demetriou has always had a completely self absorbed and almost biblical “Whoever is not with me, is against me” approach to conflict. Anyone who thwarts their desires, or even inadvertently damages their brand, will be punished.

In the case of Buddy, he actually spurned their offer. Mike Fitzpatrick’s immediate reaction, a threatening and expletive riddled phone call to Richard Colless – is a textbook illustration of the narcissists (or narcissistic organisations) response to not getting their own way.

It was followed by the scrapping of COLA - unfortunately this affected all the expansion teams, so the AFL added it’s ridiculous trade ban to remove all doubt as to who was in the naughty corner.

Is that it? Maybe not quite. The AFL may have had a whack at Buddy too.
With Buddy in the Sydney market you’d think the AFL marketing department would make saturation use of his unparalleled star power to promote the game wouldn’t you? Astonishingly this is not the case. It’s actually really hard to find much in the way of AFL-originated Buddy based marketing. Nor did Buddy get to enjoy the anticipated AFL ambassadorial role.

Finally let’s turn back to the duration of the contract.
Matching the Giants and AFL offer combined the Swans put considerable pressure on their salary cap. I suspect achieving the necessary $10 mill was only possible by amortizing the costs, with the use of a 9 year contract.
Many in 2013 thought the idea of a 35 year old making a significant contributions to his team was preposterous, but Buddy’s proved them wrong.

It was also reported that Buddy himself was shocked at the duration of the Swans contract. However, there's never been any suggestion that Buddy was unhappy/shocked with the $10 mill, so maybe he was less across some of the other details – in particular the duration of the contract. His decision to dismiss his manager immediately after he'd just negotiated the biggest contract in AFL history is very hard to convincingly explain otherwise.

Sorry for the length of this post, and hope it won’t preclude it form receiving due consideration.

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).

[barry]

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"....

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.

[Ruck'n'Roll]

Buddy changed management because he wasn't going to need Pickering to negotiate another AFL contract. He now needed someone to negotiate off field deals not connected to footy. I think he moved to Jesinta's management.

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.

[giant]

Saw Buddy in the 'hood yesterday - he looks pretty settled.