"Weak, weak, weak!": Cochrane slams AFL over academy changes

Former Gold Coast Suns chairman Tony Cochrane has voiced his immense disappointment with the recent changes to the Northern Academy draft rights.

In recent weeks, the AFL introduced sweeping changes to the National Draft system, significantly limiting clubs’ ability to match bids for the acquisition of academy and father/son prospects.

While the changes were incredibly necessary in balancing the draft, Cochrane feels as though the AFL’s swift act to shut down the strength of the academies undermines the work put in to establish the current system.

“To be really frank, (I’m) completely disenchanted with the whole thing,” Cochrane told SEN’s Whateley.

“I spent 15 years fighting the fight up here for our great Indigenous game, trying to establish a football team in a hostile environment is never easy.

“I go back to the year that Mark Evans (Suns CEO) and I fought tooth and nail to keep the game alive in the COVID year when you couldn’t play at all down in Victoria, we started the hubs up here. I fought with everybody.

“I’ve happily welded away up here for a long time because I love our game. The AFL commission do a great job of talking up how they love the growth of the Northern States.

“What they really mean of course is that they love the growth of the bottom line from the TV rights and media rights. Virtually all the growth in those key metrics in our game are north of the Murray where 52 per cent of the population happens to reside.

“If we’re going to truly be a great national game rather than the VFL, we have to engage and we have to build audiences. What they’ve just done with the academies is an absolute disgrace.

“They should hang their heads in shame. Weak! Weak, weak, weak!”

Why do you think it landed the way that it did?

“Because it’s run by a group of guys and girls out of the state of Victoria.

“You’ve got to look at the history behind this. I think you’ve got to take an overall position here. Yes, I am putting the case for the northern states, but this goes way back and it had some real history, when we started our academy up.

“Laura Kane came out to all the clubs last year and annoyed that the AFL had recognised 27 major items of what they considered ‘competitive balance workstreams’.

“That includes everything from interstate travel, through to teams playing the line share of their season at the MCG, some teams out of Melbourne sometimes not travelling for two to three months at a time – there is a whole range. Free agency, which I think is the greatest farce of them all.

“They recognised all of these competitive balance things, which we all recognise; it’s a very, very difficult system to get competitive balance exactly even and fair. No one has an argument with that.

“27 items – which one do you think they fixed? Which one do you think they jumped on, and the commission and their wisdom decided, ‘right, the academies have got to be really cut back here because it’s way too big of an advantage in the competitive balance’.

“The four northern states in the 27 major items of competitive balance had ONE in their favour. One. That was the academies.

“Out of those 27 items, the ones they decided to fix was the only one that was slightly – and I say slightly – was in favour of the northern four clubs.

“It’s just extraordinary that the other 26 competitive balance issues are still mute. Nothing has happened. Not a thing. Not a paper. Not a ‘yep, we are looking at this one next and we are going to come down heavily on this and try to make it fair’.

“It just speaks to the fact that it’s lip service.”

Listen to the remainder of Cochrane’s chat below: