The public response to the Sydney Swans scandal has been fascinating. Before we knew very much at all, people were ready to be outraged. Perhaps understandably so. One in five Australian women has experienced sexual violence since the age of 15.
Put footballers, women, alcohol, and alleged assault in the same story and it’s as if we already know how it ends. Entitled athletes. Women as collateral damage. Another sporting culture gone bad.
There is something encouraging in that response. Behaviour we once might have shrugged off now makes us deeply uncomfortable. But our heightened sensitivity to violence against women is one thing. Filling in the gaps before we know the facts is another.
So, as we wait for clarity while police investigate an alleged sexual assault – and park what we can not responsibly know or speculate about – there is another question worth asking. What are we actually angry about?
The staying out late. The drinking. The reported adult entertainers. Bringing women back to the team hotel. Doing it in the lead-up to finals. Letting down teammates. Getting caught.
All have become part of the public reaction. But if no crime occurred and we still think something went badly wrong, we need to be able to name what that something was.
Talk to people around football, as I have this week, and the answers are revealing.
For some, the bender isn’t the line that has been crossed. Neither are the adult entertainers. It’s the brazenness of bringing it all back to the team hotel, in the biggest month of the season, with your teammates’ year on the line.
For others, the qualifier is simpler: after the season. Drink. Party. Hire adult entertainers if that’s your thing. Just don’t do it now.
That raises an uncomfortable possibility. Some of the behaviour that shocked the public may not be considered particularly shocking inside parts of football. For some, the transgression was doing it at the wrong time, in the wrong place – and getting found out.
The Swans, however, clearly decided a line had been crossed. Five players were stood down for the remainder of the season, including finals, for breaching club standards, while a Victoria police investigation into an alleged sexual assault remained ongoing.
If I could sit down with the Swans administrators, there is one thing I would want to understand: what, exactly, was the line for you?
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The club has been clear that its sanctions were separate from the police investigation and related to breaches of its standards. No one has been arrested or charged and the five players have reportedly denied any criminal wrongdoing. But what is less clear publicly is where that line actually lives. Player contracts, codes of conduct and team rules necessarily govern professional athletes, but we don’t know how explicitly the conduct at the centre of this incident is dealt with in those documents.
There is a meaningful difference between breaking an explicit contractual rule, breaching a team protocol and falling short of a broader behavioural standard that requires the club to exercise judgment.
The same is true of rules about bringing women or other guests back to a team hotel. Such rules might be designed around security, safeguarding, player welfare, preparation, privacy, teammates or reputation. The rationale matters. Otherwise, there is a risk that “standards” becomes shorthand for an inherited moral code about what respectable behaviour is supposed to look like, without ever interrogating why.
Then there is the gut response. Listen to parents, fans and much of the public this week and the reaction is visceral: it feels gross. Seedy. Not OK.
We shouldn’t dismiss that as pearl-clutching. Perhaps that discomfort tells us our standards sit somewhere higher than simply “not illegal”. But discomfort alone can’t define the standard. If it warrants ending five players’ seasons, we should be able to articulate what the line is, what harm it exists to prevent and whose values sit behind it.
Because amid all the very real emotion, I think we’ve become entangled in three different conversations.
The criminal line: whether a crime was committed.
The workplace line: what standard was breached, why that standard exists and whether the consequence was proportionate.
And the much murkier cultural line: what behaviour is accepted, tolerated or normalised long before either of those lines is crossed.
We keep moving between the three as though they are interchangeable. They aren’t.
The absence of a criminal charge would not erase a workplace breach. And dealing with a workplace breach doesn’t answer the deeper cultural question.
Because perhaps that is the discomfort underneath all of this.
Not simply what happened on one night, but what this night might tell us about a version of male sporting culture where heavy drinking and the sexualisation of women can sit alongside bonding, celebration and blowing off steam – and how much of it we tolerate until something goes spectacularly wrong.
Not everything that makes up a culture is illegal. Legal is an extraordinarily low bar for culture.
Of course, there is another response: footballers aren’t moral leaders. They’re athletes. We shouldn’t expect young men who are very good at kicking a football to raise our children or model our values.
Except the industry doesn’t treat them that way. It sells their personalities, their stories, their reputations and our emotional attachment to them. Brands aren’t paying footballers solely for what they do with a Sherrin. They’re buying the influence attached to the person holding it.
You can’t monetise someone’s influence and then declare it irrelevant when that influence becomes inconvenient.
Perhaps that’s why this story has become such a Rorschach test. Some see violence against women. Some see entitled athletes. Some see employees who let down their workplace. Some see a rotten culture. Others see adults making private choices that became humiliatingly public.
Those are different objections requiring different solutions.
If criminal charges follow, there is a process for that.
But if they don’t, those of us who felt immediately and viscerally that something had gone wrong will have to decide whether there was nothing wrong after all – or finally get precise about what we were angry about in the first place.
Because if we can’t name what was wrong, beyond what may or may not have been illegal, we have very little chance of making it better.
