From the Pocket: AFL tribunal verdicts sit as uneasily as any in recent memory

Two cases rocked the football industry this week, one your typical footy folderol that everyone hyperventilates over for several days, the other an incident that cut to the core of a league trying to effect serious cultural change. In both instances, all parties professed absolute certainty in their version of events.

First, to the relatively trivial matter, where umpire Nick Foot alleged that Port Adelaide’s Zak Butters abused him by asking: “How much are they paying you?” Complicating matters was the fact that the senior umpire, and I can’t believe I’m typing this, also moonlights as a betting analyst for Sportsbet. All parties brooked no doubt as to what had happened. Foot was “100% adamant” he was insulted. Butters was “100% sure” he wasn’t. Ollie Wines was “100% confident” it didn’t happen.

There were similar levels of certainty in the infinitely more challenging Lance Collard case. Instances of homophobic abuse are usually pretty cut and dry. A slur is made, a microphone picks it up, a report is filed and a grave apology is issued. The Izak Rankine saga was an outlier of course, mainly because so much was at stake on the field. Throughout that deliberation, the impression was that the slur itself was being graded, ranked, weighed up and that the sentence was open to negotiation. For many prominent voices in the game, all of whom were careful to express how abhorrent it was, it landed somewhere in the vicinity of a dangerous tackle.

The allegations against Collard were different to anything that had come before, mainly because he denied culpability. To recap, he whacked the nephew of Michael Voss in a VFL game in late March, sparking an all-in brawl and a hotly contested verbal exchange. Darby Hipwell, a former prefect at Brighton Grammar, a final year law and philosophy student, and a summer intern at one of Australia’s most prestigious law firms, said he had absolutely no doubt that Collard called him a “fucking faggot”. Collard swore in a stat dec he said “maggot”. In his defence, Collard’s lawyer, a St Kilda board member, said Collard had voluntarily exposed himself to the risk of perjury in order to clear his name.

Collard has history. He was banned for six weeks in 2024 for the repeated use of a homophobic slur, the largest ban in the AFL’s protean punitive system for addressing the issue. Hayley Conway, the CEO of the Pride Cup and the woman who conducted education sessions after his suspension, said Collard was “quite remorseful, shy and also really thoughtful in his comments, especially as the session went on”. St Kilda’s Indigenous player development manager, Katrina Amon, spoke of a young man lacking in strong male role models, who has struggled to adjust to the demands of playing in the AFL, and who financially supports his grandmother who he lived with prior to being drafted. There were echoes of an interview Rankine conducted prior to the season, where he described an upbringing in and out of foster care, with violence, petty crime and homelessness.

There are issues of class and privilege at play here, issues we dance around in our country, our sport and our legal system. I could veer off into an examination of the power imbalances in that tribunal hearing. But to do that would stray into the kind of paternalism we invariably fall back on. Instead, we need a better system for dealing with these disputed cases, a system that is better equipped to get to the crux of the matter – did he say it or not? If we can’t have any confidence in that, how can we be sure the AFL is capable of tackling the broader cultural and societal forces driving this kind of abuse?

To achieve this, we need proper guardrails and procedural fairness and I’m not convinced Collard was afforded that. This is a league that can’t even tell us whether a ball came off a shoelace or not, let alone whether a footballer used the word “faggot”. It ties in with the bewilderment around the Butters case and the continued frustration that the AFL appears to make up the rules and penalties as it goes along. This is applicable to relatively piddling areas such as the score review system to issues of the utmost importance such as an investigation into systemic racism. In so many instances, it’s almost as though they work backwards from a verdict.

That played out this week in two very different cases that landed remarkably similarly. Both verdicts sat as uneasily as any in recent memory. Both were classic “he said, she said” cases. In that scenario, and there is years of evidence to back this up, it invariably boils down to what the AFL said.

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