Jackson was speaking at a press conference where it was announced that Kevin Sheedy would remain senior coach of the Bombers for a further two years following the completion of this season. It was also revealed that Sheedy and the club have reached an in principle agreement to jointly market the club with both parties benefiting from the success of such an arrangement. This is an agreement that clubs are able to enter into with coaches but something that is largely unworkable with players. Jackson believes that clubs and players could benefit from a change in the rules.
""What you get is new sponsors. At the moment you can only give naming rights to sponsors by having logos on guernseys, shorts and fence signing, after that you are very limited to what you can give them, which is real value to them. Players and coaches are the next asset you can market as a club - not to get more out of existing sponsors, but to get additional sponsors that you can't get at the moment because you have no property to market to them. Yet a player can go out and market his own property to that same sponsor, so that sponsor sits outside the club. You have this situation where clubs are financially struggling - it doesn't make sense to me.
""Up until about three or four years ago, you couldn't pay a player for anything except playing football. Any payments you made to them were deemed to be match payment and therefore were included in your salary cap. This club, along with Ian Collins at the time, pushed for what now is the additional services agreement - Marketing contracts outside the salary cap. There was a lot of frustration at that time that it would lead to breaching the salary cap. But really what it was designed to do, was to use your key players to do work for you so they could leverage your additional sponsorship income.
""Each of those players earn very small amounts from additional services contracts compared to what they can earn on the open market in terms of contracting out their image to endorse products and make appearances. When you have got Victorian football clubs struggling to survive financially, it just seems silly to me. Your greatest asset is going out earning money in their own right, outside the football club and the football club can't get into that action and maybe sign-up new sponsors so maybe the football club can get the deals as well. It seems incomprehensible to me but those are the rules. I think one day the AFL will change them but everytime we talk about it, they say - yes, you are right but we fear people taking advantage of the salary cap. To me, that is just a governance issue that they should get on top of. What we are going here with Kevin is exactly that. I would love to be able to do it with James Hird and Matthew Lloyd.
""When you consider the marketing of a football club - I guess it is fair to say that your coaches and your senior players are about the only real asset your club has got and I don't think clubs necessarily use those assets as well as they could.
""Certainly in the players case we are restricted to how we can use them because of AFL rules, which is a pity because it forces some of your champions out into the market place to work on their own. In the case of Kevin, over the last 20 years, his brand and the Essendon Football Club brand have become linked - there is not much of a difference between the two. We just felt that it was time we entered into a joint venture arrangement with Kevin so we could work jointly to market Kevin's image and services alongside the Essendon brand in a formal way to the financial benefit of both parties.
""I think when I first got here (1997), there was some question marks on Kevin Sheedy because there was a view around the club that perhaps Kevin Sheedy should be a coach - that first and foremost and only. That probably meant to some people that he sat in an office and did nothing but coach - but that is not Kevin. The reason the club is where it is today is largely because of the sort of marketing efforts Kevin has undertaken over the last 15-20 years. Some people found that a little bit difficult to come to terms with. Being the pioneer and having the forethought that he does, Kevin was actually doing something that all head coaches now need to do. They are the highest profile person in the club and they carry the most responsibility and greatest accountability and they need to develop their club. Kevin has been doing it for 15 years before people were ready for head coaches to do it. Now they are ready for it and they understand it.
Kevin is the biggest name in footy and he has a lot of demands placed on him and a lot of personal time taken up outside of his coaching contract - so in that sense it doesn't impact on the coaching contract and he obviously gets rewarded for that. We just think, as I would love to do with Hird and Lloyd - I would love to bring them into the football club and have a similar arrangement but we can't under the AFL rules as they now stand. Which I think is crazy because they are our greatest assets. What we are saying is, rather than these guys going out earn money in your own right marketing their own image, come back to the club and let the club and yourself earn money in a joint venture arrangement. There are a lot of people out there that do value Kevin's image and his services. We are just bringing it back under the fold of the club.
