Drummond’s Apology Raises the Real Question: Who Governs the AFL?

It is not often an AFL Commission chairman fronts the cameras to say sorry, so when Craig Drummond did precisely that this week over the Jake Kolodjashnij concussion contract saga, it was worth sitting up and taking notice. The apology itself was brief and, to his credit, unambiguous. What it leaves behind, however, is a set of harder questions about how the game’s governing body actually governs.

What Drummond Actually Said

Drummond’s statement acknowledged his own part in how the Kolodjashnij matter was handled, without going into forensic detail about who said what to whom and when. That is understandable up to a point — these things are rarely tidy, and a chairman wading into the specifics of a contractual dispute involving a player’s health risks making things murkier rather than clearer. But it also means Crows fans, Cats fans and everyone else in the competition are left to take the apology largely on trust, without a clear account of the sequence of events that made it necessary in the first place.

That is not a criticism of Drummond’s sincerity. By most accounts he is a considered operator, more banker than showman, and this newspaper column has generally found his stewardship of Commission business to be steady rather than reckless. But an apology without an accompanying explanation is, in governance terms, only half a job.

Why Concussion Contracts Are Different

Football has spent the better part of a decade dragging itself, sometimes willingly and sometimes kicking and screaming, towards taking head trauma seriously. The AFL’s concussion protocols are now genuinely rigorous by world sporting standards, and the game deserves credit for that. Which is exactly why any suggestion that contractual or commercial considerations were allowed to intrude on a concussion-related matter involving a player at Geelong lands so heavily.

To be clear, nobody serious is alleging Geelong or the AFL deliberately compromised anyone’s health for commercial gain — that would be a serious allegation with no basis in what has been reported, and I would not make it here. What is at issue is something more mundane but still important: whether the AFL’s own processes for handling a player’s medical and contractual situation were followed with the rigour fans have a right to expect, and whether the chairman’s own conduct fell short of that standard. Drummond clearly believes it did, or he would not have apologised.

The Commission’s Recurring Governance Problem

This is where the Kolodjashnij saga becomes less a Geelong story and more an every-club story. The AFL Commission occupies an unusual position in Australian sport: it is simultaneously the regulator, the competition organiser, the major broadcast rights holder’s negotiating partner, and — through League-run entities and its influence over club finances — an interested party in outcomes that affect individual clubs. When a chairman becomes personally entangled in a dispute involving a specific player at a specific club, even with the best of intentions, it tests the boundary between oversight and interference.

Adelaide people know this tension well enough. We have had our own history of feeling like decisions affecting our club were made in rooms we were not in, by people weighing considerations we were not told about. I raise that not to relitigate old Crows grievances but to make the point that this is a structural issue, not a Cats-specific one. Any club could find itself on either side of a similar situation next year.

What Accountability Should Look Like

An apology is a start, not an endpoint. If the Commission wants this episode to actually strengthen the game’s governance rather than simply draw a line under an awkward week, there are a few sensible steps that would not require reinventing the wheel:

• A clear, publicly available account of how player medical information is meant to interact with contractual negotiations, so clubs and player managers know exactly where the boundaries sit.
• Some separation between the chairman’s role in commercial and broadcast matters and any involvement in individual player health or contract disputes, formalised rather than left to good judgement in the moment.
• A commitment that when these things go wrong, the AFL explains not just that a mistake was made but what the mistake actually was, in enough detail for fans and clubs to understand it.

None of this is radical. It is the sort of governance hygiene that any large, publicly scrutinised organisation — and the AFL, with its broadcast deals and membership base, is very much that — should have as a matter of course.

Geelong’s Position and the Player’s Interests

Spare a thought, too, for Kolodjashnij himself, who by all accounts has simply been trying to manage his football career and his health at the same time, and now finds his name attached to a governance stoush he did not ask for. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the contractual detail — and I have no interest in relitigating Geelong’s football department decisions here, that is a matter for Cats fans and the club — the player deserves to have this resolved with minimum fuss and maximum clarity about his medical situation going forward. That should be the priority above any commission chairman’s reputation, Drummond’s included.

Geelong, for their part, have generally been a well-run football club, and there is no reason to assume malice on anyone’s side of this. Sagas like this one usually turn out to be the product of process failures and crossed wires rather than anything more sinister, and it would be unfair to the club or its officials to suggest otherwise on the evidence available.

A Test for the Commission, Not Just the Chairman

The temptation with a story like this is to make it about one man’s apology and move on by the weekend. I would resist that temptation. Drummond fronting up and saying sorry is a reasonable act by an individual, but the more interesting question for the competition is whether the Commission as a body learns anything from it. Does the AFL tighten up how sensitive player health matters are handled at the executive level? Does it build in more separation between commercial oversight and individual club affairs? Or does this become another one of those episodes the game absorbs, apologises for, and quietly files away until the next one arrives?

Adelaide supporters, this columnist included, have plenty of scar tissue when it comes to trusting that AFL House always gets these calls right. Drummond’s apology is a small, welcome sign of accountability. Whether it amounts to anything more than that is entirely up to what the Commission does next, and on that front the jury, as ever with this administration, remains out.