Peter V'landys - New NRL/ARLC Chairman

[Maximus]

SCG holds 45k well 35k once you take the members seating,

Swans ave 29k- They'd all snap up the freebies

leaves 6k tickets left for the day Swans play, Leaving lots of people without tickets.. So no most will go to QLD like normal and watch it on TV.

Do you think the members has 0 people turn up to Swans games?

 

[Steel Saints]

Both get 40k

But in recent times, the Eels- Tigers Easter Monday game was held at Commbank, including this year. I like to think that the Good Friday game is booked.

 

[Babyface O'reilly]

Copied & pasted for you PR.
This is a very pro Swans article written in the middle of GF hype here but there is truth in it with problems facing the game. Interesting that Swans have a big following in Nth Sydney and the inner west where both districts lost their footy clubs.

How the Swans became Sydney’s biggest footy team - and why they’ll only get bigger

Rugby league will always be the biggest game in town, but the Swans are easily the city’s biggest sporting team. If you peel back the layers, there are some powerful dynamics at play.

www.smh.com.au

How the Swans became Sydney’s biggest footy team - and why they’ll only get bigger

Dane Rampe grew up in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, and so has watched the slow and steady rise of the Swans unfold from close quarters. But even he is occasionally shocked at the extent to which certain parts of the city have come to embrace them.

“You have people kind of recognise you, looking at you a little bit more ... I’m thinking, ‘f---, have I double-parked you in or something? What are you looking at me for?’” the Swans key defender said, laughing.

“And they’re like, ‘Oh mate, just wanted to say good luck this year’, or, ‘Well done on the weekend

“It’s still foreign, but I reckon after COVID it’s probably galvanised the city. Everyone’s tuned in a little bit more. It’s probably that cherry on top, for the work that’s been done over the last five to 10 years, because the game is in a really healthy spot up here.”

Most Swans players have similar stories. Callum Mills was cheered out of a cafe when he dropped in for a pre-game coffee last weekend. “I couldn’t stop laughing. I was like, what is going on? This isn’t Sydney,” he told the ABC. “You go to the beach and there’s Swans hats everywhere. It’s awesome to see the city behind us.”

Their former teammate, Kieren Jack, can feel that a new generation in and around the club’s Paddington base has latched onto the red and white. One ex-Swans employee described this well-heeled cohort of young professionals as the “Merivale set” – the sort of people who regularly populate hospitality baron Justin Hemmes’ flashy pubs, bars and restaurants, and for whom the SCG is not just a place to see the Swans play, but a place to be seen.

With respect to Rampe and Mills – two of the Swans three co-captains this season, both born-and-bred Sydneysiders – footy’s really not so foreign any more. This is Sydney. At least in the east, the north, and the inner west, and probably other pockets soon.
https://www.smh.com.au/sport/afl/a-...-on-merch-spending-spree-20220922-p5bk6u.html
Rugby league will always be the biggest game in town, but the Swans are easily the city’s biggest sporting team. If you peel back the layers, as the club readies for its fourth AFL grand final in 10 years, and look at the reasons why, there are some powerful dynamics at play.

Sydney’s current membership base is a whopping 55,394, again outstripping their nearest NRL rival. Roy Morgan’s annual AFL fan survey, despite how rubbery the science behind its figures might be, estimates the full size of the broader Bloods bandwagon is more than 1 million – making them the most-supported club in the AFL, which they have been every year since their drought-breaking 2005 flag.

“One thing that really hit home to me was in round 22 against Collingwood,” said former Swans chairman Richard Colless, who served between 1993 and 2014 – the start of their golden era on and off the field.

“For the first time it dawned on me that a lot of people weren’t just sports lovers coming to a big game. There were actually rusted-on Swans fans everywhere you looked. People had caps, scarves, jumpers – and this is kids and women and men and older people, and so on and so forth.
https://www.smh.com.au/sport/afl/gr...l-fair-weather-swans-fan-20220921-p5bk0u.html
“It was a lightbulb moment, that people have progressed from being more genteel, distant supporters, to being the real McCoy. The standard joke out of Victoria used to be that [Swans fans] cheer in the wrong places, and it was really quite condescending.

“I’m not saying it’s dangerous to go to some venues, but we’re probably the least ‘feral’ – but that shouldn’t in any way infer that the people watching the game are any less passionate.”

The Swans are a model organisation in every way. Colless is just one of two chairmen, along with incumbent Andrew Pridham, they’ve had in almost 30 years. They’ve had only two chief executives in the past 13 years, and their current one, Tom Harley, is so widely respected he is being considered to replace Gillon McLachlan at the helm of the AFL.

They’ve had three coaches in the past 26 years, perfecting the art of succession planning in a way few other clubs have managed. Their major corporate backer, QBE, renewed its deal this year for a further five years, which will take one of the longest-running partnerships in Australian sport to four full decades.

They have missed finals football just five times since 1996. And the club’s academy program – much to the chagrin of those south of the border, who see it as an unfair advantage instead of a scheme designed to combat the go-home factor with interstate draftees – is pumping out not only homegrown talents like Mills, Isaac Heeney and Errol Gulden, but hundreds of others who don’t make the top level, yet still go on to strengthen grassroots leagues with their superior skills, understanding and stronger bond with the game.

They are now reaping what Dr Hunter Fujak, a lecturer in sports management at Deakin University and the author of Code Wars: The Battle for Fans, Dollars and Survival, describes as the “generational dividends” of the strategic investments the club and the AFL have made in NSW.

For example, imagine an eight-year-old boy was enrolled into Auskick the year after “Plugger’s Point” in the 1996 preliminary final – widely considered the moment when the city truly accepted the Swans, who were transplanted here as struggling VFL club South Melbourne in 1982. That boy would now be a man in his mid-30s, to whom Aussie rules is not a foreign code at all, but the one he was raised on, and who sees the Swans as an intrinsically Sydney team, not a relocated franchise. He’d probably have a high level of disposable income, and perhaps a young family to indoctrinate as well. While the Swans generally don’t rate anywhere near as well as NRL games on television in Sydney, almost every match they’ve played in recent memory has been on free-to-air.

“Every single week, the Swans are getting [a broadcast reach of] 90,000 people tuning in for some component of the game, times 22 games a year, times 20 years,” Fujak said. “You’re basically investing into that fundamental exposure in this club in Sydney ... that is only possible because the AFL, as a central organisation, have always been so strategic about wanting to promote northern expansion in a way that other codes haven’t been anywhere near.”

Fujak contends Sydney’s territorial gains are also the product of good timing and misfortune from other codes, which helps explain why the Swans and the sport are so popular in the northern and eastern suburbs. All but five of the past 22 premierships won in the local Sydney AFL competition were claimed by clubs from those regions – and the others by the Pennant Hills Demons, a unique footy oasis on the fringe of the western suburbs and north shore.
One part is rugby union’s loss of primacy within Australian sport and in particular the private school system, where AFL has grown rapidly. Another is the Super League war, which fractured rugby league as the Swans began their period of sustained on-field success – offering any jilted fans a tempting alternative, backed by what Colless said was a “clarity of purpose” provided by the club’s stability and the AFL’s foresight.

For his book, Fujak caught up with journalist Peter Lewis, who in 1997 wrote The Convert, an account of how the Super League fiasco pushed him from being a North Sydney Bears tragic to following the Swans, to see if his sporting habits had shifted. They hadn’t.

“Twenty-five years later, he still has been a Swans member every year, he’s only been to three or four NRL games,” he said. “Every one of his kids plays AFL and none of them support an NRL team. When you look at the Super League war, yes, that’s well in the rearview mirror – but there’s this generational scarring or baggage, which the Swans have probably been able to capitalise from in terms of clawing over some disenfranchised people from that period, right as they started to strengthen.”

Anecdotally, many Bears fans appear to have made the same switch after they were squeezed from rugby league’s top table after 1999. Fujak argues that repeated off-field scandals involving NRL players have also turned off some followers, particularly women and white-collar workers.

 

[Babyface O'reilly]

How the Swans became Sydney’s biggest footy team - and why they’ll only get bigger

Rugby league will always be the biggest game in town, but the Swans are easily the city’s biggest sporting team. If you peel back the layers, there are some powerful dynamics at play.

www.smh.com.au

Fujak argues that repeated off-field scandals involving NRL players have also turned off some followers, particularly women and white-collar workers.
“At a macro level, in Sydney, there are basically two types of football fans,” he said. “There’s rusted-on rugby league fans, the working-class, male-based, western suburbs fans of the NRL who have been quite resilient to those scandals ... and then there are those who probably, if they’re not okay with some of the behavioural scandals that happened, they’re looking for an alternative.

“Historically, that’s been rugby union, but past their peak of 2003 [when the defending champion Wallabies hosted the World Cup and lost to England in extra time in the final], the Swans then win their grand final in 2005 and they really start eroding and crossing over those rugby union people and making AFL almost the upper-class sport of choice in Sydney.

“I don’t have the data myself, but I’ve had these conversations with the guys at the SCG Trust – you get given a ticket when you’re a member, and you use your barcode to get in and out. They can look at the ticket scanning to see how people’s behaviours have changed over time. And the growth of the Swans was very much the people who had previously been scanning in to watch rugby union.”

The values of the Swans and their cosmopolitan support base are also closely aligned. They were the first AFL team to institute a “pride game” to celebrate the LGBTQ community, although some have noted this conflicts with their ongoing sponsorship arrangement with Qatar Airways.

Two decades ago, they set up the first “Marn Grook” match honouring Indigenous contribution to the sport. This is now an annual event, which inspired Richmond and Essendon’s Dreamtime at the ‘G’ clash and the AFL’s Sir Doug Nicholls Round.

Any fan who makes the trek from Central Station to the SCG will walk past a mural of club legend Adam Goodes – and during the racism saga that saw him booed into retirement, supporting the Swans, or at the very least wearing a guernsey with the number 37 on it, became a sort of political statement of its own.

This has made the Swans so far immune to the sort of brand damage that many of their rivals, like Collingwood, Adelaide and now Hawthorn, have sustained on the Indigenous front.

Colless notes that the Moore Park precinct and eastern suburbs is covered by the federal electorate of Wentworth. “It’s a very, very progressive seat and it used to be a conservative seat,” he said. “But it’s now got a teal candidate who talks about these sorts of issues – sexual diversity, racial diversity. These are issues that get you elected in this part of the world, which didn’t apply maybe a decade ago.” Warringah, North Sydney and Mackellar went teal, too.
The Swans, perhaps to a rare fault, were late to the party when it comes to AFLW, and were finally granted a women’s team this season, six years after the competition started. But while they’re struggling on the field, yet to win a game, the almost 9000-strong crowd at their debut match at North Sydney Oval would put many attendances in major men’s leagues to shame.

None of these trends look like ceasing any time soon. In fact, there is every reason to think that, from here, the Swans will only get bigger – limited, in some ways, by the 48,000-capacity of the SCG, which they generally go close to filling for big games, although that doesn’t mean their broader support base cannot also grow.

The Swans are about to complete construction of their new $70 million headquarters at the Royal Hall of Industries in Moore Park, adjacent to the SCG. Remarkably, the club has enjoyed such consistent success without a state-of-the-art training facility. Now, together with a young, rejuvenated playing list that has reached a grand final at least 12 months before most pundits would have expected, their premiership window could be wide open for years to come.

 

[Babyface O'reilly]

How the Swans became Sydney’s biggest footy team - and why they’ll only get bigger

Rugby league will always be the biggest game in town, but the Swans are easily the city’s biggest sporting team. If you peel back the layers, there are some powerful dynamics at play.

www.smh.com.au

We’re just so lucky that we’ve got a genuine home base in the heart of where we are and what we’re doing,” Rampe said. “And that’s really special – a lot of clubs can’t say that is the case. We train and play it the SCG, which is our own, so that’s important.”

And then there’s the AFL’s new broadcast rights deal. Worth $642 million per season over seven years from 2025, it will make the AFL approximately $100 to $170 million better off annually in comparison to the NRL. While footy has struggled to penetrate Sydney’s sprawling western suburbs in the same way as it has in other parts of the city, this extra money will give them the ammunition to keep firing shots at rival codes – as well as cement their supremacy across the Swans’ existing heartland.

“The sheer gap in that revenue and the opportunities that it’s going to create in terms of funding game development officers in NSW and Queensland, funding the professionalisation of women’s sport ... I really see this being a moment in time where there becomes this break in the pack, where the AFL now is so far ahead commercially that probably no one will ever come close to them again,” Dr Fujak said.

 

[Cumberland Throw]

Positive article for NRL that one

 

[Cumberland Throw]

Be interesting if the swans run 13th for 6-7 years straight.. see what happens then

Amazing that they have been basically in the finals for 25 years..

Almost strategically organised one may think

 

[Colk]

Positive article for NRL that one

In saying that though there have been plenty of off field scandals in fumbleball. Better marketing and more compliant media I suppose

Secondly, this is just shows the error in our game’s administration and the strength of theirs. We have had ample opportunity, even post Super League, to push our game into fumbleball markets yet we have sat on our heads and done nothing due to a combined myopia and self interest.

 

[Iamback]

Those articles, match would Sydney siders on here have said for years

 

[AlwaysGreen]

Positive article for NRL that one

I'm sure you would have got an erection if you weren't a softcock.

 

[Colk]

Those articles, match would Sydney siders on here have said for years

Yet you and many others on here are saying that their money was a waste and that their expansion hasn’t worked.

I’m worried about their game infesting our state, yet people on here seem to like putting their heads in the sand and doing nothing

 

[T-Boon]

I say good for the Swans. It use to twist me out of shape the idea of AFL gradually taking over. But in all honesty both codes get what they deserve. The NRL clubs are like cockroaches, and they will do enough to survive.

 

[Babyface O'reilly]

Hey guys, a question regarding our digital rights.
Did V’landys sell them or just put them on ice for the current TV deal, or is it still shrouded in mystery?

The reason I ask is I was pondering scenarios in which we get it up and running. While I like the autonomy the DR provides us in how we showcase our game, I saw as much value in it as a strong hand to bargain with and it seems V’landys didn’t fully appreciate what a good hand he was playing with.

Anyway, let’s say we go it alone, given current form, do we trust the NRL to promote it sufficiently? Also, with RL now out of the equation, the networks will be more desperate for content and bid even hire to capture the AFL rights, would they not? Suddenly that leaves the AFL lying back, eyes closed while the networks take turns in pleasuring them. The AFL might not even have to worry about marketing and could spend more on development because the network would take care of it. Imagine if nine win the rights, watch them promote their game in a way they never did for ours. Puff pieces on players while still promoting damaging stories on our players. I thought not setting up digi was an oversight by the AFL but maybe there wasn’t a need after all.

I don’t think we can win the pissing contest and would rather place our destiny in our own hands. What do you guys think? if we haven’t sold the digital rights that is, should we not bother with TV and go it alone ASAP?

 

[Colk]

Hey guys, a question regarding our digital rights.
Did V’landys sell them or just put them on ice for the current TV deal, or is it still shrouded in mystery?

The reason I ask is I was pondering scenarios in which we get it up and running. While I like the autonomy the DR provides us in how we showcase our game, I saw as much value in it as a strong hand to bargain with and it seems V’landys didn’t fully appreciate what a good hand he was playing with.

Anyway, let’s say we go it alone, given current form, do we trust the NRL to promote it sufficiently? Also, with RL now out of the equation, the networks will be more desperate for content and bid even hire to capture the AFL rights, would they not? Suddenly that leaves the AFL lying back, eyes closed while the networks take turns in pleasuring them. The AFL might not even have to worry about marketing and could spend more on development because the network would take care of it. Imagine if nine win the rights, watch them promote their game in a way they never did for ours. Puff pieces on players while still promoting damaging stories on our players. I thought not setting up digi was an oversight by the AFL but maybe there wasn’t a need after all.

I don’t think we can win the pissing contest and would rather place our destiny in our own hands. What do you guys think? if we haven’t sold the digital rights that is, should we not bother with TV and go it alone ASAP?

I think V’Landys essentially cut spending on our digital platform because Channel Nine and Foxtel were pissing and moaning about NRL having the digital platform and thus taking traffic away from their sites

 

[Perth Red]

Hey guys, a question regarding our digital rights.
Did V’landys sell them or just put them on ice for the current TV deal, or is it still shrouded in mystery?

The reason I ask is I was pondering scenarios in which we get it up and running. While I like the autonomy the DR provides us in how we showcase our game, I saw as much value in it as a strong hand to bargain with and it seems V’landys didn’t fully appreciate what a good hand he was playing with.

Anyway, let’s say we go it alone, given current form, do we trust the NRL to promote it sufficiently? Also, with RL now out of the equation, the networks will be more desperate for content and bid even hire to capture the AFL rights, would they not? Suddenly that leaves the AFL lying back, eyes closed while the networks take turns in pleasuring them. The AFL might not even have to worry about marketing and could spend more on development because the network would take care of it. Imagine if nine win the rights, watch them promote their game in a way they never did for ours. Puff pieces on players while still promoting damaging stories on our players. I thought not setting up digi was an oversight by the AFL but maybe there wasn’t a need after all.

I don’t think we can win the pissing contest and would rather place our destiny in our own hands. What do you guys think? if we haven’t sold the digital rights that is, should we not bother with TV and go it alone ASAP?

Got to be mindful what you mean by “digital rights”. These can be interpreted two ways. 1. The right to stream games online
2. The digital platforms the nrl has that generate revenue through advertising.

in the case of 1. They are tied up into the tv rights deal. Nrl is not an innovative organisation and the idea we’d be the first sports in the world to produce and sell our own content solely online is laughable.

in regards to the nrls digital platforms, this is where grant saw a big opportunity for nrl revenue growth. He’s in that sector and knows advertisers pay big for high traffic platforms. He convinced the arlc to invest $100mill of the games money to take this back from Telstra and own it going forward. AFL continue to have telstra manage theirs (a big part of the $60mill telstra pay afl). This saw digital revenue go from $2mill to $26mill in a few years (Vlandys has now buried the figures so we no longer have an visibility on how it’s performing)

now this is where the problems start. Nrl.com had its own media Dept with ten journos and production team producing content that drove traffic to the platforms. This is a key part of selling advertising on the site.
For reasons known only to himself fox and nine asked him to close down the media arm so that nrl got less traffic and Foxsports and 9’s world of sport platforms picked up that traffic
And he agreed!
He’s basically closed down the vehicle that drives the traffic to our platforms and damaged our revenue raising ability. Why you would do that you’d have to ask Vlandys and Abdo!

the kicker is the review leading to the decision was led by nrls Alexi Baker who was employed by Vlandys and previously a ch9 exec manager for 10 years!

NRL scales back digital arm following broadcaster pressure

The National Rugby League’s online website NRL.com will move way from publishing breaking news.

www.smh.com.au

 

[T-Boon]

now this is where the problems start. Nrl.com had its own media Dept with ten journos and production team producing content that drove traffic to the platforms. This is a key part of selling advertising on the site.
For reasons known only to himself fox and nine asked him to close down the media arm so that nrl got less traffic and Foxsports and 9’s world of sport platforms picked up that traffic
And he agreed!
He’s basically closed down the vehicle that drives the traffic to our platforms and damaged our revenue raising ability. Why you would do that you’d have to ask Vlandys and Abdo!

NRL scales back digital arm following broadcaster pressure

The National Rugby League’s online website NRL.com will move way from publishing breaking news.

www.smh.com.au

I think you will find it wasn’t for reasons known only to himself. The idiotic decision to abandon the Nrl digital was on club ceos/bosses and gould etc who see money invested rather than divided up between the clubs for their survival as a waste of money.

 

[Perth Red]

I think you will find it wasn’t for reasons known only to himself. The idiotic decision to abandon the Nrl digital was on club ceos/bosses and gould etc who see money invested rather than divided up between the clubs for their survival as a waste of money.

but but but ….record grants to clubs, record payments to players. Vlandys buying a more time in the job is more important than the long term financial stability of the organisation lol

 

[Iamback]

Hey guys, a question regarding our digital rights.
Did V’landys sell them or just put them on ice for the current TV deal, or is it still shrouded in mystery?

The reason I ask is I was pondering scenarios in which we get it up and running. While I like the autonomy the DR provides us in how we showcase our game, I saw as much value in it as a strong hand to bargain with and it seems V’landys didn’t fully appreciate what a good hand he was playing with.

Anyway, let’s say we go it alone, given current form, do we trust the NRL to promote it sufficiently? Also, with RL now out of the equation, the networks will be more desperate for content and bid even hire to capture the AFL rights, would they not? Suddenly that leaves the AFL lying back, eyes closed while the networks take turns in pleasuring them. The AFL might not even have to worry about marketing and could spend more on development because the network would take care of it. Imagine if nine win the rights, watch them promote their game in a way they never did for ours. Puff pieces on players while still promoting damaging stories on our players. I thought not setting up digi was an oversight by the AFL but maybe there wasn’t a need after all.

I don’t think we can win the pissing contest and would rather place our destiny in our own hands. What do you guys think? if we haven’t sold the digital rights that is, should we not bother with TV and go it alone ASAP?

If it costs Fox $100k a game, It would cost more then that because you can't use the camera crew for other stuff

 

[mongoose]

How the Swans became Sydney’s biggest footy team - and why they’ll only get bigger

Rugby league will always be the biggest game in town, but the Swans are easily the city’s biggest sporting team. If you peel back the layers, there are some powerful dynamics at play.

www.smh.com.au

Fujak argues that repeated off-field scandals involving NRL players have also turned off some followers, particularly women and white-collar workers.
“At a macro level, in Sydney, there are basically two types of football fans,” he said. “There’s rusted-on rugby league fans, the working-class, male-based, western suburbs fans of the NRL who have been quite resilient to those scandals ... and then there are those who probably, if they’re not okay with some of the behavioural scandals that happened, they’re looking for an alternative.

“Historically, that’s been rugby union, but past their peak of 2003 [when the defending champion Wallabies hosted the World Cup and lost to England in extra time in the final], the Swans then win their grand final in 2005 and they really start eroding and crossing over those rugby union people and making AFL almost the upper-class sport of choice in Sydney.

“I don’t have the data myself, but I’ve had these conversations with the guys at the SCG Trust – you get given a ticket when you’re a member, and you use your barcode to get in and out. They can look at the ticket scanning to see how people’s behaviours have changed over time. And the growth of the Swans was very much the people who had previously been scanning in to watch rugby union.”

The values of the Swans and their cosmopolitan support base are also closely aligned. They were the first AFL team to institute a “pride game” to celebrate the LGBTQ community, although some have noted this conflicts with their ongoing sponsorship arrangement with Qatar Airways.

Two decades ago, they set up the first “Marn Grook” match honouring Indigenous contribution to the sport. This is now an annual event, which inspired Richmond and Essendon’s Dreamtime at the ‘G’ clash and the AFL’s Sir Doug Nicholls Round.

Any fan who makes the trek from Central Station to the SCG will walk past a mural of club legend Adam Goodes – and during the racism saga that saw him booed into retirement, supporting the Swans, or at the very least wearing a guernsey with the number 37 on it, became a sort of political statement of its own.

This has made the Swans so far immune to the sort of brand damage that many of their rivals, like Collingwood, Adelaide and now Hawthorn, have sustained on the Indigenous front.

Colless notes that the Moore Park precinct and eastern suburbs is covered by the federal electorate of Wentworth. “It’s a very, very progressive seat and it used to be a conservative seat,” he said. “But it’s now got a teal candidate who talks about these sorts of issues – sexual diversity, racial diversity. These are issues that get you elected in this part of the world, which didn’t apply maybe a decade ago.” Warringah, North Sydney and Mackellar went teal, too.
The Swans, perhaps to a rare fault, were late to the party when it comes to AFLW, and were finally granted a women’s team this season, six years after the competition started. But while they’re struggling on the field, yet to win a game, the almost 9000-strong crowd at their debut match at North Sydney Oval would put many attendances in major men’s leagues to shame.

None of these trends look like ceasing any time soon. In fact, there is every reason to think that, from here, the Swans will only get bigger – limited, in some ways, by the 48,000-capacity of the SCG, which they generally go close to filling for big games, although that doesn’t mean their broader support base cannot also grow.

The Swans are about to complete construction of their new $70 million headquarters at the Royal Hall of Industries in Moore Park, adjacent to the SCG. Remarkably, the club has enjoyed such consistent success without a state-of-the-art training facility. Now, together with a young, rejuvenated playing list that has reached a grand final at least 12 months before most pundits would have expected, their premiership window could be wide open for years to come.

flicked the Racistball GF on for about 30 seconds, Swans are getting gaped lol

Not a single non-anglo player to be seen for Geelong and that's the way their fans like it.

 

[Get Rid of The Donkeys]

Those articles, match would Sydney siders on here have said for years

Using your logic, Brisbane should be an AwFuL city like Adelaide and Perth by now because it lost all nine of its BRL clubs at the end of 1987.

Losing North Sydney and Balmain had stuff all to do with the Swans' rise on the North Shore and inner-west. Changing demographics over the last 40 years is the key. Look at how progressive the electorates in these areas have become to see it's down to demographic change.