We need a circuit breaker.
Start with Xavier and Richardson. You can bring in any players you can name, but if the club has totally lost its way internally then the buck stops with the head of footy and head of commercial arm.
Ffs, it feels like we spent more time and effort trying to develop a friggin world of warcraft team than we did trying to develop real footballers. Honestly, what the fark was that!!?
Oh, we need revenue streams. For what? To pay players who don’t want to play for us because it stopped feeling like a footy club years ago!?
And in fairness , it predates the current executive. This club has mis-prioritised it’s aims for decades. Even Hirds era was misguided - even beyond the obvious saga (which was, tbh, a symptom of the overall outlook, not the cause of it).
Maybe it’s a personal rankle, but I vividly recall when Jackie Mihocek , myself and others got shut out of training. In the name of “professionalism”. The club got so far up its own backside that “professionalism” became the coverall excuse for any and all manner of arrogance and stupidity. It completely forgot that the Club exists entirely because of its people. Both within and without. It put more than half the playing list on a light aircraft in a typhoon because “professionalism” dictated that half an hour of faster recovery (from a preseason match of all things ) was the 0.05 percent advantage we would sieze. An absolute cluster fark.
Then we moved into damage control (understandably) , but marketing spiel became the preeminent selling point, not footy. The club survived due to good commercial arrangements, yes, but ultimately it all rested on a bedrock of fan support. We never left. We waged a constant rear guard defence of our club. We still do - look at the anger of the Saga thread that continues. Members joined up that never had. Records were set. But why? And here’s where the heirarchy failed again. Because we loved and love the club. Not because the admin was so good. Not because they provide brilliant services, because of fancy marketing, because of corporate claptrap speak. No. What admin presumably took as endorsement of them and their actions was actually a rebound from the Saga disaster. We back our boys and our club to the hilt. We’re through the heartbreak, now we’re all onboard. But we were backing a phantom, a thin miasma that looked like the Essendon Football Club but was shredded into misty entrails of fog when we reached out to embrace it. Because the club, the real club, has been drifting away even as we watched the facade get a fancy new livery.
And now the cats out of the proverbial. You can’t corporate speak out of this one. You’re losing the players. And you’re losing the fans. One is the heartbeat, the other the lifeblood. Insiders are talking of strife and crisis. Not financial crisis, that’s irrelevant. Something far worse. A crisis of belief in the essence , the reality, of the institution itself. If the Corporation has strangled the club, then it has also drawn its own noose.
The real professionalism lies in recognising that an Australian football club is exactly that. In not trying to make it a new age conglomerate. In recognising that no one gives a ■■■■ if it makes a billion dollars, or can double speak in corporateze , or can outsmart itself by dreaming up spurious new “ideas” rather than admit that it’s already tried to be too clever by half. And that includes backgrounding media on outgoing players, seemingly in order to deny what we can already see. I hate that that happened. Hate it. It plays us all for fools even if it’s true.
I sit here on October 11 and I’m certain of several things. The Essendon Corporation has lost many of its current playing group. And it has lost the belief of its fans. They can argue the point all they like, they can justify whatever they like. It doesn’t change the reality. Rightly or wrongly, I don’t believe in Campbell . Not to do what we really want EFC to do. And I don’t believe in Richardson, not to run a Footy program. And I’m unsure on Rutten, mainly because I can’t get a read on where he sits in regard to clear internal playing list unrest.
All of that adds up to a diabolical situation for me as a fan. And therefore for the club as a, well, club. I can perhaps best sum it up as I desperately want the EFC to survive. The corporation feel needs to be expunged.
End of stream of thought rant.