Peggy O’Neal has vented over Richmond’s failed first bid for an AFL Women’s club licence - a decision that the Tigers’ president terms “unjustified”.
On that rejection at first attempt, Richmond CEO Brendon Gale has reflected: “…the thing we did learn is you’ve got to play the backroom game”. While O’Neal admits: “I still to this day don’t know the reasons for the decisions”.
Richmond will launch the fourth AFLW season on competition debut, in a match next Friday night against Carlton.
The Tigers’ path is revisited in The Originals, a new podcast series to mark the club-changing milestone.
A new Richmond Football Club team. A new Richmond Football Club podcast. Written and presented by award-winning journalist and author, Sam Lane.
Subscribe and listen to The Originals on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or Spotify
Richmond was not the unequalled membership juggernaut, or the modern men’s AFL premiership-winning powerhouse it is today when it applied to join AFLW as a foundation club for 2017.
But the Tigers were widely regarded as leaders when it came to addressing gender inequity.
Richmond formally investigated deeply entrenched problems relating to women in its own backyard – ranging from poor female membership engagement to blockages in professional pathways - and committed to fixing them.
It commissioned a pioneering report undertaken by an external consultant, Dr Pippa Grange, that was co-funded by the Australian Sports Commission and the AFL. Richmond also led the establishment of a sport ‘Male Champions of Change’ group chaired by then-Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Elizabeth Broderick.
Quite aside from O’Neal’s unique position in Australian sport – she remains the only woman AFL club president - the Tigers were considered clear front-runners for an inaugural AFLW licence.
Thirteen clubs applied before the 2017 competition launch, and the AFL ultimately issued eight.
“I think the thing we did learn is…you’ve got to really lobby. Lobby really hard. You’ve got to push you’ve got to politick, you’ve got to influence. And we probably thought we were above that, to be honest,” Gale says in the first episode of The Originals.
“And maybe it was a hubris. We probably thought: we’re strong in this space, we’ve got a really strong record and we deserve a licence.”
Gale confesses he’s scarcely watched a match of AFLW in its first three seasons, apart from the grand finals, because the Tigers have been excluded from the football code and wider culture-changing phenomenon.
Richmond has built its foundations, before its 2020 AFLW debut, through fielding a team in the top Victorian women’s football league in 2018 and 2019.
A women’s match between St Kilda and Richmond that was planned with AFL involvement, but never played is also detailed in The Originals. Melbourne and the Western Bulldogs ultimately became the pioneering AFL ‘pilot’ clubs for women’s footy, roundly regarded as rightful AFLW foundation clubs from season one.
The first known team of women to play for Richmond; some wore masks. Get the backstory in the launch episode of The Originals podcast.
Subscribe ahead of next week's second episode on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or Spotify
