Everything is about sex, except sex: sex is about power.”
Robert Michels, 2002
There’s a poster on the wall of my local fish and chip shop celebrating the 1995 grand final cup. It’s faded and sun damaged and at 31 years old might not even belong to the current owners. It’s a small reminder, a whisper really of how entrenched football is to this city. Even if it has a benign presence, it’s there.
This is an industry worth billions of dollars to the state, the AFL operating under a multi-billion dollar economic umbrella. The league reported an operating surplus of $67.9 million on over $1 billion in annual revenue. One billion dollars of annual revenue for a sport that only exists in Australia, and is largely tethered to Melbourne. In 2025, payment for top-tier players hit the $2 million per annum threshold. As well as this, many players have lucrative side contracts worth many more millions. The AFLs influence is everywhere.
So even if you aren’t necessarily interested in the game that runs through Melbourne’s veins, chances are you have felt its economic impact. The poster on the wall at the fish and chip shop. The bumper sticker you stare at waiting for the lights.
This week a scandal erupted when five Sydney Swans players — Isaac Heeney, Chad Warner, Nick Blakey, James Jordon and Riley Bice — were stood down for the remainder of the 2026 season following an incident at Melbourne’s Pullman Hotel after the Swans’ match against Essendon. The players had been drinking and had women in their hotel room, behaviour the club determined was a serious breach of its standards. Separately, Victoria Police are investigating an allegation of sexual assault arising from the same evening. No charges have been laid and the players have not been formally accused of the alleged assault.
The scandal has rocked the front pages and airwaves of the city, with people from all walks of life having an opinion or two. It’s not the first time, however, that the league has been rocked by a sex scandal.
Indeed, Melbourne has a long and uncomfortable history when it comes to the intersection of AFL, sex, masculinity and power.
The St Kilda schoolgirl scandal
In 2010, St Kilda Football Club found itself at the centre of one of the most extraordinary and enduring scandals in modern AFL history.
The story began when a 16-year-old Melbourne schoolgirl became involved with two St Kilda players after meeting them through a school football clinic. The club and the AFL launched an investigation after the girl told her school principal that she had become pregnant. The players said they believed she was 18. The investigation found no criminal offence had occurred and no charges were laid.
But that was only the beginning.
Later that year, the teenager — by then 17 — became publicly identified as the “St Kilda schoolgirl” after nude and semi-nude photographs of several St Kilda players appeared on Facebook. The images became the subject of legal proceedings and a media frenzy. The girl claimed the photographs had been sent to her; St Kilda player Sam Gilbert disputed this, alleging that she had taken them from his computer. A Federal Court dispute followed, and the story expanded into a bizarre collision between football celebrity, social media, sex, privacy and public humiliation.
The scandal then widened again when the teenager released footage involving player manager Ricky Nixon. Nixon, who represented St Kilda players, was filmed in a hotel room paid for by the football club. He denied having a sexual relationship with the teenager but later acknowledged having had “inappropriate dealings” with her. His relationship with the young woman ultimately resulted in him being stripped of his player-manager licence and barred from reapplying for two years.
What makes the St Kilda story particularly relevant now is not simply the sensationalism of what happened. It is the way the woman at the centre of the story was portrayed.
She was variously constructed by the media and football community as a schoolgirl, a temptress, a liar, a disturbed young woman, a victim, a woman scorned and a troublemaker. Deb Waterhouse-Watson’s research into the scandal has subsequently examined precisely this phenomenon: how women who enter the orbit of professional footballers can find themselves subjected to a series of contradictory and highly gendered narratives, while the institution of football retains enormous cultural authority.
The AFL had already introduced its Respect and Responsibility program in 2005, ostensibly to create a safer and more inclusive environment for women and girls within Australian football. Yet the St Kilda scandal exposed the enormous gap that can exist between an institution’s stated values and the culture surrounding its most powerful players.
And this is where the question of power becomes more interesting than the question of sex.
It goes back even further
The current Swans scandal also has a direct historical echo in an AFL story from 2004.
In March that year, the AFL was suddenly dragged into the national football sex scandals that had already engulfed the NRL. Police were investigating allegations involving St Kilda players Stephen Milne and Leigh Montagna after two women complained about an encounter following the club’s pre-season Wizard Cup victory. No charges had been laid at that point.
At almost exactly the same time, SBS’s Insight broadcast the allegations of an unnamed woman who claimed that a prominent AFL player had been involved in an alleged gang rape several years earlier. She alleged that the player and four other men had assaulted her at a Melbourne nightspot. The AFL said it would contact SBS to seek further information.
The significance of the story is partly historical. In 2004, Australian professional sport was beginning to confront a series of allegations about the sexual behaviour of its male players. The NRL’s Canterbury Bulldogs had already become embroiled in a major sex scandal, and allegations were subsequently reported across other football codes. Within weeks, the issue had become a national debate about footballers, masculinity, alcohol, group behaviour and violence against women.
But there was another element to the 2004 story that feels remarkably familiar more than two decades later: the question of whether the footballer himself was the story, or whether the institution surrounding him was.
When an ordinary man is accused of sexual misconduct, his profession may be incidental. When the man is a professional footballer, however, his identity as a footballer becomes inseparable from the story. His club, his teammates, his sponsors, his supporters and ultimately the entire mythology of the sport become implicated.
The footballer isn’t simply a man. He is an asset.
He has a contract. A salary. A market value. A sponsorship portfolio. A social-media following. A brand. And, in the case of the biggest stars, millions of dollars of commercial value attached to his public persona. And nowhere is that power more visible than in Melbourne, a city drenched in an almost $70 million dollar surplus for the league.
The AFL is not simply a sporting competition. It is a cultural institution, an entertainment industry, a media machine and a commercial ecosystem. Its players are celebrities, its clubs are brands and its supporters are consumers who can spend decades emotionally and financially invested in the success of a team.
When something goes wrong, therefore, the consequences extend far beyond the football field, but we also feel as though we’re all involved.
This week’s Sydney Swans scandal has already demonstrated that. The five players have been suspended by their club, Victoria Police are investigating an alleged sexual assault, and sponsors and commercial partners are being forced to consider how they respond.
But perhaps the most revealing part of the story is not what happens next to the five players.
It is what happens next within the culture that produced the conditions in which this kind of story can continue to emerge.
Because this isn’t 2004.
It isn’t 2010.
We have had two decades of research, education programs, cultural campaigns, gender-equity initiatives and an entire AFLW competition demonstrating that women are not peripheral to Australian football.
And yet, here we are again.
The question is no longer whether football and sex are connected. They plainly are.
The question is whether the enormous power, money and cultural influence of Australian football can finally be used to change the conditions surrounding that relationship.
What will you, me and everyone we know do now?
