Players need crucial off-field behaviour education

It is a sobering reflection on the state of our male- dominated football codes when their reputation can be torpedoed by a 17 year old girl with just a mobile phone full of salacious images and access to internet social networking sites.

In recent days we have had the girl at the centre of the St Kilda AFL nude photos scandal announcing a new plan to release video she claims shows footballers taking party drugs and encouraging a teammate to hit a woman.

Meanwhile the AFL’s most powerful player agent Ricky Nixon has his job and reputation on the line, and police running DNA tests on his underwear after the same girl levelled sex and drug allegations against him.

True or not it’s another shocker blow to football clubs and by extension, the public reputation of all players. Photos of naked footballers cavorting at parties, a photo scandal of a player simulating sex with a dog, sundry claims of girls being used as sex objects. Star players arrested for public disorder. The list seems endless.

Player reputations are in the gutter as time and again we read of allegations of player misbehaviour, sexual assaults, sleazy behaviour and the community groans and wonders how the clubs let their celebrity players get into such situations?

It seems to be a nationwide problem so what are sports clubs doing to ensure their high profile players and officials are aware of the legal risks they face from off-field partying?

It seems there is a crucial need for a life skills education course for young men signed as instant sporting celebrities, paid a lot of money and turned loose on a community where their fame can draw fans, hangers-on and groupies.

The catalogue of player misbehaviour around Australia in the past year shows sporting clubs – specifically football clubs - still have a way to go in educating their players of their wider community responsibilities.

Simplistic as it may sound you have to ask if clubs have called in lawyers to brief their testosterone –powered players?

Number one lesson for any sportsman is that they are not immune from the law. If they commit a crime, they can be charged with an offence, just like any other member of the community. They do not have immunity because they are a celebrity sports player.

Only when this lesson gets through can we build on it and devise proper risk aversion programmes.

Professional sports people are often regarded as public property and they are closely watched by the public for the slightest misdeed. Players need to realise that being a star footy player sometimes means living in a goldfish bowl. 

So clubs need to ensure their players are fully briefed on what could happen to them if they get into situations off the field, it could save a lot of heartache later. After-match parties, Mad Monday revelry and late night excursions around bars and nightclubs all make for a volatile mix of risks.

Add some young women to the mix and all the ingredients for trouble are there. Do clubs drill into their players’ minds their responsibilities off-field, in pubs or nightclubs or at parties or after-match functions?

Drunken revelry or a sex scandal could ruin lives and end careers, especially with today’s trend for incriminating images and videos to be uploaded to social networking sites like You Tube and Facebook .

This is where another issue arises. The 17-year-old girl, who made headlines last year after posting nude photographs of St Kilda players on the internet, was able to do so because such photographs existed in the first place.

How she acquired them is secondary to the fact the players themselves seem to have this underground culture of having explicit images of themselves and colleagues stored on mobile phones or computers.

Not just players but also their bosses with the AFL’s most powerful manager, Ricky Nixon, facing a dodgy career future after also falling foul of the same girl who has single-handedly torpedoed the prestige of Australian footballers’ reputations’

The AFL Players Association enlisted high profile QC  David Galbally to investigate the Nixon affair  and he saidsome valuable lessons should come out of the saga.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported Mr Galbally as saying it should help the AFL better understand modern issues affecting sportspeople, such as drug use and the taking of photos with electronic equipment. He could have been speaking for all of the players in the different codes whose behaviour has tripped them up.

The 17 year old whose anti- St Kilda attacks were so devastating, has become a media darling with her provocative remarks, most recently bragging her new claims could "demolish" a different – unnamed AFL club.

“I have so much evidence this time. I have gotten better with my spy skills," the girl reportedly told AAP.

Irrespective of her motivation – she claims her goal is “to show people what the AFL culture is truly about. Sex, drugs and lies” – the fact she is a runaway torpedo among AFL clubs is driven by the fact that incriminating photos and videos seem to exist and be cloned from mobile phones or laptops.

The teenager’s burst of media stardom is an attention-getting sideshow to the real issue - why do our sportsmen feel a need to collect sleazy images of one another and store them in places where they can be copied or stolen by others?

At the same time it is grossly unfair for players charged with offences to be disciplined or even sacked by their clubs, before their matter has been heard by the courts. The presumption of innocence applies to everyone and clubs that regard themselves as courts and penalise players are in breach of a player’s basic rights.

It’s all very well for clubs to go on a witch hunt after an incident but It’s better for everyone if clubs can make sure off-field incidents don’t occur at all.

There is immense public pressure on our young sportsmen. Whether they like it or not, they are role models to young people in the community and this brings sometimes unfair expectations upon them of how they should behave when they are out in public.

We need a culture where clubs regard their players as a 365 day a year responsibility, and not just people you focus on during training or a game.