Brownlow medallist Gerard Healy has taken a look back at Gillon McLachlan’s tenure as CEO of the AFL after the league’s boss announced the timing of his departure on Wednesday.
While McLachlan originally announced that he’d leave the league in early 2022, a lack of a clear successor and various looming issues delayed his exit as he still remains in the top job.
Now with an end date of Round 5 of the 2023 season, Healy reflected on McLachlan’s near-decade run atop perhaps the nation’s biggest sport.
“It was a big announcement yesterday, I was thinking about it overnight,” Healy said on SEN Sportsday.
“Yesterday, we finally got the official date of the end of Gillon McLachlan’s reign as the CEO of the AFL, it’ll be Round 5 in 2023, the ‘Festival of Footy Round’, or whatever it becomes known as.
“It’s held in Adelaide, a fitting end for the boy from the same town.
“It brings to a close a 10-year career at the top of arguably Australia’s biggest sport, where it’s grown exponentially under his guidance and it’s expected to grow even in his final few months when the 19th license for Tasmania becomes official.
“That and the advent of AFLW will be two of his most memorable legacies … it’s a testament to the growth of the sport under Gillon’s guidance.”
While some have criticised McLachlan for various reasons across his tenure, Healy pointed to the considerable growth of the game and the manner in which he ran the league as proof of clear success.
“There’ll be time for a more detailed analysis over the next few months of his achievements and challenges that could have been handled differently,” Healy said.
“Like you, I didn’t agree with every call, but that’s the burden of leadership – you can’t please everyone all the time and you can’t get it right all of the time, but who is to say what’s right and wrong?
“On balance, I think you’d be a harsh judge to say he’s been less than very good at his job.
“He’s been a great frontman, comfortable behind the microphone, articulate, humorous, unflappable, inclusive, strategic and dedicated to do the big hours and the multitasking that the job requires.
“His negotiating skills are well recognised, and his ability to break records with TV rights deals have been masterful and so important to a game that has so many mouths to feed.
“As always, even in the final months, there are serious challenges ahead – most notably the Hawthorn Indigenous player review, the CBA and Tasmania just to name a few.”
While McLachlan still faces considerable challenges, his biggest – that of navigating COVID – is behind him and Healy believes how he ran the game through the pandemic was his “professional Everest”.
Given that the game not only survived but thrived during both 2020 and 2021, Healy pondered whether McLachlan will be remembered as the competition’s greatest-ever CEO.
“But as big as they are, nothing, nothing at all, will ever come close to the challenge the game faced when stopped at the start of 2020 by COVID, which ultimately was Gillon’s professional Everest,” Healy said.
“No CEO has ever faced anything like it, an existential threat that had so many moving parts and so many major decisions to be made with so many partners of the sport and Government bodies, both Federal and State.
“Finding a way through COVID looked at times impossible, but the game not only survived, it flourished.
“Given the circumstances, it was a truly remarkable achievement by him, his team and some significant others.
“It’s clearly in my mind elevated his performance as the sport’s leader to a level of greatness few before him have even come close to achieving or in fact, needed to achieve.
“He was the perfect CEO, for the perfect storm.
“When the historians and opinion writers get to work over the next few months, they’ll be challenged by one question only, to put his career into context.
“Is Gillon McLachlan our greatest-ever CEO?”
Listen to Healy’s full McLachlan editorial below.