Fighting for St Kilda: Bassat shares his ambitions for the Saints

Saints president Andrew Bassat is trying to change the narrative surrounding his club. He explains why and shares his ambitions for the future with Ashley Browne.

Browne: In your business career at Seek, you were the great disruptor. Have you had to adopt the same mentality at St Kilda?

Bassat: You don't disrupt for the sake of it, but you adopt the strategies that you think you need to do in order to win.

Some of those strategies are different to what people expected of us, I think, but we care more about winning than we care about making people happy or making people like us.

Have you found it more difficult to challenge and change accepted behaviours in business or footy?

It’s been a lot harder than I expected in footy.

There's much more inertia, more people are used to how things are done. People are used to not challenging the system. So, it's been tough at times, but we are getting there.

Is it tougher to be hard-headed and make rational decisions in footy than in business?

It’s a hard competition and the job of leadership generally is to make the right long-term decisions and not get swayed by the noise.

And in business, the noise is small compared to football.

You’ve been critical of the AFL’s draft system, pathways and that sort of thing. If you could wave the magic wand, how would you fix it?

You can't ignore the importance of developing the northern states, but overall fairness shwould be a big part of the discussion, not an afterthought.

I'm not a big fan of the father-son rule because there’s the romance and there's fairness and romance is winning out versus fairness.

Academies...make it a fair price. You should never get more than one player in the first round in a given season and there should be some sort of protection against the top four sides getting top four players; they should have to pay a premium when they get them.

So how do you feel when Chris Fagan, of all people, directly criticizes your club?

You have to laugh, don't you?

In a very unfair system in which they have been probably the greatest beneficiary, we been criticised for adopting literally the only strategies that are available to us to try and get from bottom to top.

We thought we were close enough that if we brought in some talent, and if we kept our key talent, we could make the move into the top half the ladder and hopefully stay there.

How’s your relationship with the other clubs?

Overall, our relationship with other clubs is mostly fine, but we have copped some flak for our willingness to challenge things.

Quite a lot of clubs actually now agree with us but would prefer to do so privately to avoid the flak.

Others have changed their tune now and support the system now they are in line for a benefit.

What about with the AFL? You’ve been outspoken at times.

We were going nowhere being meek as a club and the system was getting more uneven, so what do we have to lose?

We're taking a risk with our strategy. It may not work, but doing nothing definitely wasn't going to work.

Your brother Paul is a longstanding AFL commissioner. How does it play at family gatherings when you are critical of the League?

It's not for me to represent Paul’s views on these issues, so I'll leave that to him, but unfortunately for him he gets the less-filtered version of my views than the public gets.

At times, depending on his mood, he's up for hearing me out. Other times he is less up for it.

What did you learn from Josh Battle’s departure 12 months ago that helped you with player retention and recruitment?

We should have been moved a bit quicker to re-sign him. He was a key player in that team, and we should have been more proactive.

To be honest, Hawthorn did a really good job taking a whole of family approach with him.

So, we've learned to make sure we don't have the hole in how well we look after the family that we had two years ago.

From the outside you look like there's a lot of power and authority vested with Ross Lyon. What checks and balances are in place?

I feel Ross is a very, very good coach who has earned a lot of respect from everyone at St Kilda and as such has a very strong voice. But there are plenty of checks and balances.

For example, we've been public about the fact that at the end of last season I did a review where with the full support of Ross, I spoke to anyone I wanted to in his department on a confidential basis. That's a pretty accountable and open situation.

We’ve promoted Lenny Hayes to general manager of football and he’s nobody’s version of a pushover. And Carl Dilena (CEO) is also a strong person.

So, Ross is a very strong coach and he's got strong views, but there is a good team working together at the top, not just a one man show.

When do you expect the club to be debt-free?

We got the off field right first under (previous chief executive) Matt Finnis.

Carl is building on that and now we've started really investing in football. What will drive revenues more than anything is football success.

So, once we start getting into contention, I'm really confident membership will go up and that sponsorship will go up. I think we'll be debt-free pretty quickly. I think we'll surprise people by how far we can take our football pathclub.

If you look back to that 2004-2011 period, St Kilda attracted large crowds. You are a sleeping giant.

There is this large latent support.

What hasn’t always happened is periods of being good on-field coinciding with good administration.

We haven't always turned on-field success into anything sustainable, but we feel if we get better on-field we've now got the administration that can do that.

You should beat your record home-and-away crowd (81,386) for this game against Collingwood. Are more MCG home games on the agenda?

We'd love to have four MCG games and seven Marvel games.

This isn't to disparage Marvel, but we think there's probably four games a year where we can get 70,000 to 80,000 crowds. That's (MCG) where Grand Finals are played.

And what we've volunteered to the AFL, if that happens, we'll accept substantially less variable funding from them.

But we need to earn the right and we've been given the opportunity with Collingwood, which we're very grateful for.

We need to perform. We need our members to show up and the crowds to come. And then hopefully over time, it could be two games, three games, and eventually four.

You’ve had some major successes in business. How does that joy compare to Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera taking Melbourne apart last year?

Ninety per cent of me was unbelievably excited.

I suspect that game will be remembered for a long time in terms of just gettinggiving us momentum and confidence as a club.

So that ranked pretty highly with anything in business.

The 10 per cent of me in the room afterwards was conscious that we still hadn’t signed 'Nas' or Max Hall, but 10 per cent of me was worried because he hadn’t signed and nor had Max Hall who also dominated that day!

How important was his re-signing?

Incredibly important.

I don’t think we’d have been able to bring in all those new players, had Nas not stayed.

It’s critical for our club to be building and not taking one step forward and two steps back.

Nas is a very good person. He's very well liked and he’s got leadership all over him, so we're excited to keep him for sure.

What's your expectation for 2026?

I don't want to put a position on it, because it's so lumpy, right?

But injury permitting, we should be a year or two older on average age and we have added four new top-flight players with hopefully Mattaes Phillipou and Max King back as well, which should make us better.

We'd like to play finals and win finals, but we're not necessarily going to be disappointed if we don’t depending on our overall progress.

Tell me about St Kilda supporters.

They’re resilient. All their life they've been long-suffering and they still turn up.

Many buy memberships every year despite our lack of success. Many donate money every year in the hope of making a difference.

And some who turn up to literally every training session.

Our supporters are magnificent and deserve success and that's why we're working so hard to deliver it.

Do you lie awake at night and imagine what a second St Kilda premiership would look like?

Yeah, we're not trying to get ahead of ourselves, but at times very occasionally over a drink, we do and we think about the celebrations. It'll be fun.

And as much as when you win a flag, you’re meant wake up the next day trying to win the next one, I reckon we’d wait a couple of weeks before we do that.