What the Sydney Swans Scandal Should Tell British Sport About Standing Players Down

Policy Wire Editorial Board

Twelve hours. That is roughly how long it took Sydney’s AFL club to go from securing a home finals berth to fronting a police investigation. On Sunday night the Swans had just beaten Essendon to lock in second place on the ladder, guaranteeing two home finals. By Monday, Victoria Police confirmed they were investigating a report of sexual assault at a hotel in East Melbourne, and five of the club’s players, Isaac Heeney, Chad Warner, Nick Blakey, James Jordon and Riley Bice, had spoken with officers as part of the inquiry. None of the men has been arrested or charged, and police themselves stressed that the exact circumstances were still being established. Sydney’s chief executive, Matthew Pavlich, described the club as shocked and disappointed, took only limited questions, and repeatedly declined to say more while the matter remained a live police investigation.

The public response so far has been cautious rather than conclusive, which is itself notable given the stakes. The AFL confirmed it had been made aware of the matter and that Victoria Police was investigating, but otherwise offered nothing beyond that acknowledgement; its integrity unit is expected to become involved but has not announced any findings. Sydney has not stood any of the five players down, though reporting suggests the club faces exactly that decision within days, since it must name an extended squad this week before trimming it ahead of finals. There is no indication yet that sponsors have commented publicly, and no charges had been laid against any player as the story continued to develop. What has followed instead is intense media speculation and public scrutiny around five recognisable names attached to a club sitting second on the ladder, precisely the kind of pressure that tends to produce hurried decisions rather than considered ones.

For Australian football, the episode has reopened a question the league has never fully answered: what happens to a player’s on field career the moment he becomes entangled in a serious police investigation, long before any charge, let alone any conviction, is on the table? The AFL, unlike its rugby league counterpart the NRL, has no standing rule for this. The NRL introduced an automatic stand down policy in 2019 for players formally charged with offences carrying possible sentences of eleven years or more; the AFL prefers to weigh each case on its own facts as they arise. That flexibility has cut both ways. Geelong’s Tanner Bruhn spent the entire 2025 season out of both the VFL and AFL while facing sexual assault charges that were later dropped, a reasonable precaution in the moment that looked, in hindsight, like a serious cost imposed on a player who always maintained his innocence and has since returned to the game.

British sport should not watch this unfold from a comfortable distance, because it has faced versions of the same dilemma and answered it no more decisively.

Football’s governing rulebook does contain a mechanism for exactly this scenario: an interim suspension order under FA Rule E16, which allows the FA to sideline a participant who has been charged, by the FA itself, a league, or with a criminal offence, while the matter is resolved. But the power is neither automatic nor unilateral. It requires the FA, the relevant league and, where applicable, the Professional Footballers’ Association all to agree before it can be imposed, and it only applies once a charge exists. Before that point, clubs have generally been left to make their own calls, with wildly different outcomes depending on the individual employer’s appetite for reputational risk.

English cricket offers perhaps the clearest precedent, and it did not come from a written policy at all. In 2017, Ben Stokes was arrested after a brawl outside a Bristol nightclub, and his England teammate Alex Hales was interviewed as a witness. Neither man had been charged with anything. Both were nonetheless withdrawn from selection while the Avon and Somerset force investigated, with the England and Wales Cricket Board holding its own disciplinary process on hold until the police had finished theirs. Hales was cleared and recalled once no charges followed; Stokes eventually faced trial and was acquitted, having missed an Ashes tour in the meantime. It worked, in the sense that nobody played through a live criminal case, but it worked through improvisation and discretion, not through any rule a player, a governing body or a sponsor could point to in advance.

That is the pattern across British sport more broadly: discretion dressed up as principle. Rugby union’s disciplinary framework deals fluently with on field offences and doping but has no equivalent, codified answer for a player under police investigation for an off field allegation. The instinct, understandably, is to avoid writing rules that might presume guilt before any court has tested the evidence. But the absence of a rule does not avoid the problem, it just relocates the decision to the worst possible moment: a press conference called in a hurry, under competitive pressure, with lawyers, sponsors, complainants and the accused all owed different duties at once.

A workable policy does not need to mean automatic bans. What it needs is a published, proportionate framework agreed before a crisis rather than during one: clear triggers (the seriousness of the alleged offence, whether a formal charge has been laid, the stage of any competition), a defined process with a fixed time limit rather than an open ended limbo, and, crucially, a mechanism to compensate a player swiftly and visibly if an investigation clears him, so that the Tanner Bruhn outcome becomes the exception rather than an accepted cost of doing business. Presumption of innocence and protection of a sport’s integrity are not actually in tension if the rule is built to honour both: it can remove a player from the spotlight without pronouncing on his guilt, provided everyone signed up to the rule in advance and it is applied the same way regardless of who the player is or what the fixture means.

What Sydney is living through this week is not really an Australian problem. It is what happens to any sport that treats deciding when it happens as a policy in itself. British football, rugby and cricket have all, at one time or another, chosen improvisation over a written standard, and have mostly gotten away with it because the cases were spaced out enough to be handled one at a time, out of the glare of a finals series. The AFL no longer has that luxury, and nor, eventually, will English sport. Writing the rule now, while it is still hypothetical, is considerably fairer to everyone involved, players, complainants and clubs alike, than writing it for the first time under the lights of a semi final week.