The ethics of being a footy fan

On Jeremy McGovern, Paul Seedsman, the Selwood twins, and the costs of supporting the game we love.

The crowning moment of Jeremy McGovern’s career was when he soared high above Brody Mihocek to mark with 2.39 remaining in the 2018 Grand Final, instigating the possession chain that culminated in Dom Sheed kicking the winner from the pocket. (McGovern’s laser beam of a kick to Nathan Vardy isn’t as storied, but it was just as important to the result.) The final act of Jeremy McGovern’s career, as we now know, was being bumped into Harrison Petty’s back late in the second quarter of West Coast’s Round 8 game against Melbourne. Even after years of being desensitised to head injuries (itself a minor horror), seeing McGovern slumped over on the hard turf of Optus Stadium like that was difficult to watch.

On the afternoon of Friday, June 20th, McGovern’s AFL career was ended – not by a final siren, but by a panel of medical professionals who ruled that the cumulative impact of the concussions he suffered over his career posed too great a risk to his health. McGovern was a remarkable player: All-Australian in five of the six seasons he played 15 or more games (and in the extended squad of 40 in the sixth). Not bad for Pick #44 in the 2010 Rookie Draft. He was also a paradox: a player so modern that his anticipation, aerial prowess and skill by foot accelerated the tactical progress of the game – in the body of a throwback country footy star. I always thought his physical ordinariness accentuated his greatness: a guy who looked plausibly similar to people watching on TV (although was, of course, unfathomably fitter and stronger), performing such remarkable feats of skill and courage. Could he have been even better if he had the body of Alex Rance? Or could we only ever have had the version of McGovern that we did? We’ll never know.

McGovern joins a lengthening list of players who’ve been forced to retire due to concussion. Although his playing story ended a few pages early, it was still a hell of a story. Angus Brayshaw’s was, too – although one suspects he desperately wanted to add many more pages. Aiden O’Driscoll was forced to retire before his story truly began. Paul Seedsman had just played the best season of his career before a seemingly innocuous head knock – we now know there is no such thing – sustained during the 2022 pre-season ended his career. The symptoms that ended those careers, and will undoubtedly end more in the future, don’t just magically go away once the boots have been hung up. In the article on West Coast’s official website announcing his retirement, McGovern reiterated his gratitude to the club and supporters, and thanked his family for their love and support. Understandably absent was any reference to his current physiological wellbeing or susceptibility to concussion. For an insight into that, one would need to listen to Seedsman. The former Collingwood and Adelaide player, who has taken on a role as assistant coach with the Walkerville Football Club, gave a brief interview to ABC Sport a few weeks ago, where he painted a picture of a life severely impacted by concussion: “Every day, I’m symptomatic… Some mornings, I wake up and I can’t get out of bed, and I’m sort of gone for the whole day… I haven’t been able to work for three years… I get headaches, nausea, dizziness… in December, I was bedridden for about two or three weeks.” They are bracing words. Seedsman compared his symptoms to a stroke.

We cross our fingers and hope that Seedsman, McGovern and every footy player – at every level of the game – can live well after footy. But we know it doesn’t always end that way. In February, the former Brisbane Lions player, Troy Selwood, took his own life. Three months later, his twin brother Adam suffered the same fate. Their deaths were like a sudden, hard one-two combo delivered right to the solar plexus of the entire footy community. Without wading into waters too deep for me, I find it hard to believe that concussion (or, more specifically, CTE – Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) played no role in their deaths. Before the Selwood twins, there was Danny Frawley and Shane Tuck.

Players owe each other a duty of care. But the claim that there is an ethical dimension to consuming the game as a bystander would probably strike most as absurd. I get it. Many of us believe the footy oval is beyond the purview of ethics. The oval, or court, or wicket, is where legends are forged and hero’s journeys conclude. The arena is the site of extreme emotion. But expecting fans to also grapple with the ethics of what they’re part of undermines one of sport’s greatest appeals: its value as an escape from the dullness and moral ambivalence of so-called “real life”. Sport shouldn’t require moral work. It shouldn’t be “work” at all. And yet, it is. Elite sport today is replete with ethical qualms. Footy is exempt from some of them – we don’t need to worry about our club being taken over by a human rights-abusing petrostate – while being deeply implicated in others (coughgamblingcough). But concussion feels like a harder issue, both because of its visceral impact on individuals, and because of the invidious position it puts supporters in. We can register our opposition, at least in token ways, to the gambling companies sinking their neon claws into the game’s soft flesh. We can write to AFL House. We can boycott the shows which feature gambling segments (surely there are actually some footy shows like this?). We can… not gamble. That’s something. What can we do on behalf of the players who, in the heat of battle, endanger their safety to win a hard ball?

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Players don't play for us, per se. They play because they love the the game. They play out of a desire to win. They play for their teammates. But, in an indirect sense, they do play for us. Without fans, there's no show. We pay our money, submit to the emotional caprices of supporting a club, eat the overpriced stadium food, and watch the apparently endless array of different footy panel shows. Players are the gladiators. We're the Romans and the emperor.

The problem as I see it is that, right now, it’s very hard to see how we unpick the actions in a footy game which cause concussion (and, by extension, CTE). Gambling and footy are entwined by choice, and can hypothetically be undone by choice. Concussion and footy are entwined by the form of the game. The AFL has, in recent years, modified some rules to reduce the prevalence of concussion: they’ve introduced the mandatory 12-day post-concussion recovery period, cracked down on dangerous tackles, and instructed umpires to whistle for ball-ups sooner. But the concussions continue, more or less at the same frequency. There are more things the league could do. On a vague spectrum of least to most radical, here are some things they could try: amend the prior opportunity rule, discourage players going to ground, reduce contact training, convene an independent expert panel to suggest additional rule changes. I’m sure there are others. The game has changed a lot over the years. It could change again.

But footy, in its current form, can’t solve the intractable dilemma that meaty men (and women) running into each other at full force will occasionally cause each other lots of damage. Consider the case of Daniel Venables. The incident that ended the 2018 Premiership player’s career wasn’t innocuous (it was sickening), but it was also an extremely unfortunate outcome of the kind of high-impact contest that happens dozens of times every game. (Spookily, and tangentially, Venables’ career-ending concussion happened on the same ground and against the same opponent as McGovern’s.) Learning that the cumulative impacts of thousands of events like rugby scrums and moderate-intensity tackles (in other words, the types of situations that happen constantly in footy games, in other other words – footy acts) are an important, perhaps the most important, contributor to CTE was a clarifying moment for me. It marked the beginning of what is now a deep scepticism that we can meaningfully reduce the prevalence of concussion without altering the essential character of the game.

This isn't a common mode of thinking. Not because I’m unusually morally alert – I'm not – but because the game has never been more popular or in ruder financial health. The league and all the sundry associated concerns (like the gambling companies) are raking in the dollars. Clearly, whatever misgivings might exist on the margins about the culpability we supporters bear to player concussion aren’t borne out at the macro level. To the extent most people think about it, one usually hears three different kinds of rationalisations. The most common is that footy players understand the risks they’re incurring and willingly play despite them. The second is that regular people also work different jobs that endanger their physical safety. This leads neatly into the third, the claim that because AFL players are paid a lot, it somehow lessens the importance of their wellbeing.

These arguments are flawed. Firstly, they overstate the extent to which kids who desperately want to play in the AFL or AFLW are rationally weighing up the risks. They imagine themselves taking a hanger and kicking the Grand Final-winning goal after the siren, not how they’ll feel after repeated blows to the head. Secondly (important caveat here: not a lawyer), I don’t think the claim that players willingly accept the risks they incur would survive legal scrutiny. The footy field is a coliseum, but it's also an office. Professional players, like all employees, are protected by statutory workplace health and safety laws, and their employers (clubs and the AFL itself) have a non-delegable duty of care to provide a safe working environment. An employer can’t waive their duty of care, nor can they legally require an employee to sign any document to that effect. The salary point is just bizarre. Earning good money doesn't make AFL players less deserving of sympathy or less valid moral subjects. And besides, AFLW players still suffer from concussions despite not being paid especially well.

Lastly, and I think most importantly: I don’t believe players do properly understand the risks. I don’t believe any of us do. The science is moving too quickly. Patrick Dangerfield was 15 – already well down the path to becoming an AFL player – when the paper widely recognised as the first high-profile, peer-reviewed study to explicitly use the term “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy" in the context of a football code (in this case, American football) was published. Two decades on, as Danger recovers from his 350th game, our understanding of CTE – which, unfortunately, expands only when a sufferer’s brain is examined post-mortem – has evolved. More knowledge means fewer excuses.

I’ve expressed my position that we should ponder the ethics of pumping up the AFL industrial complex at a time when more current and former players than ever before are visibly suffering from the short- and long-term effects of concussion and CTE. So what? Do we apply the utilitarian’s scale and calculate how much “good” the game brings (the community it fosters, the joy a win brings, the satisfaction of yelling “BALLLL” in a thousands-strong chorus) versus the misery it inflicts (the concussions, the gambling, fans of Team X being happy)? I don’t think that’s the answer. Do we ignore it? That’s easy, but I don’t think it’s right. Do we boycott footy? That’s not practical, and I don’t think it’s right, either. Society would be poorer without footy. I know what the AFL would like to happen: reform the game in such a way as to ameliorate concussion risk while also a) retaining its fundamental character; and b) shielding the AFL from legal risk.

The legal risks are material: a class action lawsuit brought by former two-time Geelong Premiership player, Max Rooke, is currently (slowly) winding its way through the courts. I often think about former players like Rooke, whose lives were enriched and then, eventually, cruelled by footy. But ex-footy players don’t really interest us, do they? Unless they're still involved in the game, they've served their purpose. The show must go on, even if some of the actors can’t. The player I think about most when I reflect on the hidden ethical costs of the game is Darren Jarman. One of my formative footy memories is watching him kick five goals in the final quarter of the 1997 Grand Final, and slightly over half of my new home city erupting in delight. Six year-old me was staggered that someone could make footy, this engrossing, alien game, look so simple. But 34 year-old me hasn’t seen Jarman on TV for close to 20 years. I don't know how he is. But, given he was party to a concussion lawsuit against the AFL (that’s now been discontinued and merged with the larger one) one can guess. I think about him in 1997, and then I think about him now, suffering quietly in a darkened room, unable to access even the simple pleasures of life. I don’t really know what we should do. The answer is probably some combination of further rule changes to reduce concussion, a fund for former players struggling in silence, and the AFL donating some of its many millions to concussion and CTE research. As for what fans can do; perhaps just the occasional recognition of the human costs of footy is enough. But I know what I ask myself when I think about Seedsman, and Jarman, and, in future, Jeremy McGovern: was my enjoyment worth their pain?