The Essendon Football Club was formed in 1871 as a junior rugby club and has since won 16 premierships. In 2012, Essendon, the AFL, and ASADA conducted a joint investigation into allegations that Essendon used illegal performance-enhancing drugs, finding the club guilty and resulting in player suspensions, fines, and other penalties. While the club, players, and fans responded actively to the investigation and sanctions, seeking to cooperate and continue playing, media coverage and public perception were more mixed.
5.
Verbal response
› Very active in the investigation
› Made a section on their website
Nonverbal response
› Continued practicing and playing
› Becoming active members of the
investigation
This presentation is over the Essendon Football Club. They are a popular rugby team in Australia that is also known as The Bombers.
The Essendon Football Club was formed as a junior rugby club in 1871 and officially became a senior club in 1873. It is not a part of the Australian Football League, or the AFL. It was founded in the house of a local brewing family, Robert McCracken who became the first president of the Essendon Club and his son Alex later become president of the VFLThey are a very successful team that has won 16 AFL and VFL premierships which is a tie for the most ever won by one team.
This scandal all began in February of this year and although the final rulings were made in August, the football club is still suffering the consequences and probably will for a while. They were accused of letting the players use performance enhancing drugs during the 2012 season. The Australian Football League, the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority and the Essendon Football Club all teamed up to conduct a joint investigation after the allegations were made.
After the investigations were over, it was decided that even though the team’s sports scientist, Stephen Dank was responsible for the team’s nutrition, the head coach James Hird, the assistant coach Mark Thompson, and the operations manager Danny Corcoran were at fault and were all three suspended. Head coach James Hird has been suspended for a year, but the team has already confirmed they will be offering him a coaching job when his suspension is over. The club as a whole was fined two million dollars and they will lose two draft selections in the 2013 national draft, as well as the second round pick in 2014.
The Essendon Football Club was very vocal during the entire investigation. They were constantly making statements and trying to be as transparent as possible. They were also very active on social media such as twitter, often times tweeting official responses after news stories would air or official responses to articles published. They also created an entire section on their website under they News & Media tab that is dedicated to the scandal called ASADA Investigation. Under that you can find links to videos of official statements by the chairman and articles and club statements and more. One of the biggest nonverbals the team made was that they continued to play and practice as if nothing was wrong. By doing this, they showed that they have no intentions of letting this scandal permanently damage them. Also, by deciding to become an active member of the investigation, they showed that they are truly dedicated to being ethically sound and figuring out the truth in the situation to make it right.
As a whole, the media did a good job reporting the facts and being transparent and unbiased. The Herald Sun was extremely active in publishing articles throughout the entire scandal and remained unbaised throughout most of it, but they did post one article saying 10 things that bomber fans could do since their team isn’t allowed to be in the finals. One of them was to “quote” buy a giant straw and suck it up. And the rest were about as insensitive as that, but that was pretty much the only example I found of an official news source being biased about the scandal.
As far as the stakeholders go, in sports the fans are obviously going to be huge stakeholders and according to their twitter responses and other social media outlets like message boards, the fans stayed pretty loyal to the team which is good. The AFL is obviously a huge stakeholder and their response was that they were active in the investigation and firm in the punishments and rulings. This isn’t really a surprise. We’ve seen this happen a lot in sports, for example Lance Armstrong was caught using performance enhancing drugs and he was punished, as well as famous third baseman Alex Rodriguez and countless other sports figures. In most cases, the athletes just have to take the punishment with as much grace as possible and move on when their suspension is over.
I recommend that the organization get a trusted nutrition specialist so this doesn’t happen again. Although they might have trusted Stephen Dank, they might want to look into creating a contract making him liable for any illegal use by players. Also, having outside parties administer weekly drug tests and creating a system of checks and balances to make sure all of these things are actually getting done the way they should be will ensure that this kind of scandal doesn’t happen in the future, and if it does, the blame won’t go back to the leadership, it will go to the outside parties like the nutritionist and the drug test administrators and players.
