Photo by Scott Barbour/Getty Images

Not for the first time in the past 16 months there’s something smelly following Andrew Demetriou.

The former CEO of the AFL, who finished his highly successful yet sometimes tumultuous 11 year tenure in the highest profile job in Australian sport last Wednesday, is widely expected to take up the kind of cosy board position with a high profile company that most former CEO’s seem to semi retire to these days.

Yesterday however courtesy of Caroline Wilson at The Age came the somewhat surprising announcement that Demetriou would be joining the board of local Sports Marketing company The Bastion Group.

Bastion, apparently, is the brainchild of former Adelaide and St Kilda fringe AFL footballer Fergus Watts, the man famous in my house at least for being the most overhyped trade acquisition in the history of the most overhyped week (month, decade, century) on the AFL calendar – Trade Week.  If you paid attention to the pundits in that fateful week following the 2005 season you might have been excused for believing Watts was the missing link that would lead the Saints to their most glorious days since Barry Breen last pulled on the red white and black, rather than a journeyman who would finish his career two seasons later with a grand total of 6 AFL games to his name (albeit a career crueled by injury), 5 of them played before his arrival at (then) Moorabin – but I digress.

Watts, 28, is the Managing Director of Bastion and has been joined on the board of the fledgling business prior to Demetriou’s arrival by, among others, his father Jim who chairs it, himself a former CEO at St Kilda at the time of Fergus’ arrival at the club from Adelaide; and none other than Hamish McLachlan, he of all things Channel 7 footy and brother of the second most famous hair helmet in Australia and Demetriou’s recent replacement, new AFL CEO Gillon McLachlan.

According to the Press Release issued by Bastion Demetriou “has taken an equity position in the Bastion Group, one of Australia’s most innovative Strategic Communications Groups, where he will serve as a board director, leading strategy, acquisitions and growth.”

Well that doesn’t really tell us anything other than the fact that Andrew has put his money where his mouth is on this one, but perhaps more tellingly in that release is the tidbit that Bastion “encompasses strategic communications agency Undertow Media; Sponsorship, events and activations experts Bastion EBA; Government and Community Relations firm Bastion S+GO and boutique Lifestyle Management firm Mr Cornelius.”

I’m pretty sure buried in that list of things Bastion encompasses and specializes in was a mention of Sponsorship.   Yes there it is, let’s have a little look at that.

According to adnews.com.au “A power play could be brewing for control of AFL sponsorships worth millions of dollars after former AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou emerged as a share holder and board member on the little known sports sponsorship and communications company Bastion Group. “

It appears according to adnews that Bastion might be attempting to move themselves into the same market space as Gemba, a well established business who among other tasks have been involved in helping facilitate sponsorship deals with the AFL , Toyota and Telstra.
One of the more prominent Directors of Gemba is a man whose name has been tied to Demetriou’s for all the wrong reasons over the past 16 months, exiled Essendon coach and former champion player James Hird.
Hird, you might recall, spent a couple of years in between stints as player and coach at Essendon very successfully helping to get Gemba off the ground, a role in hindsight he might have preferred to have stayed in given the storm that erupted last year surrounding the Bombers.  The article from adnews.com.au continues “The appointment of Demetriou to Bastion comes as rival company Gemba, which has helped engineer AFL sponsorships on behalf of clients such as Toyota and Telstra, faces major challenges.
Suspended Essendon coach James Hird remains a director of (sic) the Gemba and there has been discussion about the impact the ongoing controversy surrounding the football coach could have on the business”

Watts is quoted in the article presumably hosing down any speculation on this topic that is yet to really surface by saying “To be honest any AFL dealings is a very small component of what we do,…
(chasing AFL business) is not something we have spoken about, it’s not something that’s of huge strategic importance to us, it’s not about going in and farming the AFL.”

One imagines that may change with the addition of the man who until 7 days ago had run that very organization with a brash confidence that often seemed to cross the line into arrogance for the past 11 years.  Demetriou may not have a lot of friends at Essendon, but he certainly has some at AFL House.

The Demetriou/Hird story is one that most readers will be very familiar with, and if you aren’t it’s going to take longer than a few paragraphs on this page to cover it.  But in case you’ve been living under a rock for the past year and half…

Hird was the coach at the Essendon Football Club during 2012 when the club undertook a controversial supplements program under the stewardship of supplements expert Stephen Dank and conditioning coach Dean Robinson.
Hird was suspended by Demetriou and the AFL Commission for one year as part of Essendon’s penalties after the club, members of the coaching staff including Hird, and Football Manager Danny Corcoran were hit with the vague charge of “Bringing the game into disrepute”.
A charge never tested in any kind of trial in this case by the AFL but one with weighty enough potential penalties to convince Essendon President Paul Little to accept sanctions on behalf of the club – including being excluded from the finals series of 2013, loss of draft picks for 2 years and a $2 million fine.  He also by all accounts lobbied Hird very hard to accept his proposed penalty as part of the sanctions rather than take the AFL and Demetriou to the Supreme Court, a move instigated by Hird a few days previously in part aimed at having Demetriou removed from sitting in judgement of he or the Club in any way.
Hird had lodged a Supreme Court writ to do just that and apparently took a lot of convincing not to get his version of events heard in that sphere, something the AFL were seemingly extremely keen to avoid.

Demetriou for his part has recently publicly insisted that ‘it was never personal’ between he and Hird, which of course is a nonsense.  No one ever imagined it was Hird’s good looks and winning personality that drove the former AFL chief to pursue such heavy sanctions against him, rather the fact that he was made the very public face of the scandal.  Someone who could be blamed either directly or via half truths and innuendo by the media for not only instigating the program in the first place but indeed for pulling the wool over the eyes of the players – portrayed by the AFL and some AFL sympathetic media as innocent babes being lead by Hird into dangerous and possibly performance enhancing territory.  Dank was already on the outer having been fired by the club the previous season, and no one else cast a big enough shadow to carry the weight of such a scandal.  No one except Hird.  So whilst it may not have been a personality issue that led to Hird being targeted by the AFL, it was as personal as it gets.

It appears Demetriou and the AFL Commission thought, incorrectly as it turned out, the sanctions they imposed on the club and Hird would neatly (‘ish) put the saga to bed inside of the season it broke in.  But more on that some other time…

Anyway so where does that leave us on Demetriou’s new venture?  Let’s see, he’s apparently at least temporarily either delayed or spurned more prestigious positions (including rumors which had him as the frontrunner to be the new boss of the ATP, he himself adding weight to talk of joining the board of Crown, and a rumored possible directorship at one of the AFL’s chief media partners, the Seven network) to take up with a small up and coming marketing group; whose business in part has them brokering sponsorship deals for the AFL.  The company he has joined may or may not be attempting to move in on the territory of a far bigger and more established firm, one whose most prominent director recently had his public reputation ruined in an entirely unrelated setting in a fight with the AFL – under the leadership of none other than the brother of Bastion board member Hamish McLachlan and, you guessed it, Andrew Demetriou.