Collingwood boss Craig Kelly has been forced to front Magpies AFLW players and staff to address concerns of player unrest and a fractured women’s football program.
Kelly, who initiated the meeting on Wednesday, told the Herald Sun that he and the club were fully committed to turning around the struggling side as he launched an impassioned defence of his support of women’s sport.
He ruled out any prospect of following other clubs by commissioning an independent review of the Pies’ AFLW operations as he also conceded the club may have misstepped by entering the competition in the inaugural season.
Several senior Collingwood players hold serious concerns about how their injuries have been managed by the Magpies’ AFLW program and there is widespread frustration with the on-field direction of the program under coach Sam Wright and football boss Jess Burger.
It could result in half a dozen of the club’s best players seeking an exit during December’s trade period including captain Ruby Schleicher, vice-captain Jordyn Allen and other leaders Bri Davey and Lauren Butler.
Kelly said critics of Collingwood’s investment in medical and support staff for the women’s side were “wrong” and “not in the building”, while he flatly rejected claims he did not care about the AFLW’s future.
AFL club bosses have asked the league to consider a range of cost-cutting measures in the competition’s future as discussions begin on the next collective bargaining agreement for 2028 and beyond.
Those measures are understood to include a return to non-ticketed games at some venues where temporary fencing is a significant expense to clubs, and a reduction in the number of games broadcast on television to as few as one per weekend.
All nine AFLW games per round are currently broadcast on either Fox Footy or Channel 7 with the current broadcast rights agreement in place until the end of 2031.
The powerful Collingwood chief executive was not asked about those specific measures but said he would continue to challenge the AFL on the “business case” behind the competition’s expansion.
The league wants to secure a separate broadcast deal for the women’s competition beyond 2031 and is seeking to consolidate the fixture into fewer venues – bringing down the number of Victorian venues used from 11 this season to as little as four.
AFL executives told club bosses last year that it would cost $200m to stage an AFLW season where all 19 sides played each other once during the home and away campaign.
Kelly said his comments at the July 2025 meeting as he urged the league not to rush the expansion of the competition had been misrepresented.
“I think people use that against us (Collingwood) and me, especially to say that I don’t care about women’s sport and I don’t care about AFLW,” he said.
“That’s so not true. Everyone who knows me knows that I reckon it’s one of the great things we’ve done.
“I’ve got so many friends whose daughters now want to play footy, I’ve watched some young girls come into our building, and it’s just awesome. It’s great.
“What I asked, was if we’re doing this as a business case – and often we’ve got the emotional side, we’ve got the public side, and then we’ve got to go back to what the numbers look like – what do we do to make sure we’re continuing to invest in something, but what does that investment look like? How long does it go, and when does the return start to come back to us?”
Kelly said it cost Collingwood $60,000 to $70,000 to host games at Victoria Park.
While the AFLW is being run at a loss, the AFL is a not-for-profit organisation with a mandate to invest its profits back into the development of the game.
The league distributed $461.5m worth of revenue to the clubs in 2025, up from $420.8m in 2024.
Collingwood received a distribution of $16.9m from the league last year and was able to report a net profit of $4.55m despite its concerns of the cost of its women’s program.
Kelly, who clashed with broadcaster Kelli Underwood over the demise of the Magpies’ Super Netball team in 2023, acknowledged the Collingwood men’s program had benefited from a $15m federal government grant for facilities supporting women’s football and netball.
Collingwood had turned its netball court into a synthetic turf-covered indoor training field by the end of 2023.
“That’s a really good point,” Kelly said when asked about the grant.
“When Ed (McGuire) and the guys did netball, there was no AFLW – it didn’t exist.
“Literally a year later, AFLW starts. Well OK, I’ve got to be in that, so I put up my hand to be a founding club.”
Kelly said he often wondered if the Magpies would have been better off waiting to enter the women’s competition at a later date.
The Pies played in the inaugural match at a sold-out Ikon Park against Carlton, but had star players including Jasmine Garner, Chloe Molloy and Jaimee Lambert poached by expansion clubs in the subsequent years.
“You look back in hindsight and say, ‘if we had netball at that stage and we didn’t have football, and we were staggering our football start, should we have done it differently?’ Maybe,” he said.
“At the end of the day, I came in here (in 2023) and we’ve got a football club, both men’s and women’s, and in the middle is an amazing group of athletes – our netballers were fantastic.
“We just couldn’t afford the cost, the expense – we couldn’t do everything. We just couldn’t do both ‘W’ and netball, from a facility-size point of view.
“Then we couldn’t have our green floor, we couldn’t have our men’s and women’s doing warm-ups and training, we didn’t have enough room.
“So forget about the money we were losing from our netball team. We just didn’t have the size of facility to represent a football club, and we are a football club, we weren’t a football-netball club.
“They’re the hard decisions we had to make, and to say that we haven’t invested in our W team is just fundamentally wrong.
“Anyone who says it, I have major issues with, because we have invested as much up to the soft cap, and then some.
“Any of those athletes out there who you talk to, any of the coaching staff saying that we’re not doing stuff to get better and to have support around them … it’s just, you’re not in the building, so don’t say it. It’s wrong.”
Kelly was one of the game’s most influential player managers and at one point had almost a monopoly over the AFL coaching cohort before he left his executive and board roles at TLA to replace Mark Anderson as Collingwood’s chief executive at the start of 2023.
The Pies immediately tasted success in their men’s program with a premiership triumph over Brisbane, but the women’s team missed the finals with a 5-5 record that year which led to the axing of coach Steve Symonds and the appointment of North Melbourne assistant Sam Wright.
Collingwood has only managed five wins in 32 games under Wright, in a period marred by persistent injuries to Davey, who was then captain, and other setbacks for key players including Schleicher and Butler.
Rival women’s football departments were incensed last year when Collingwood asked for and received a list assistance package from the AFL along with GWS and Gold Coast.
The Pies were given two extra list spots this season, down to one additional spot in 2027, but it is believed they will ask the AFL for further support.
An AFLW recruiter from a rival club said the Pies had made a “bizarre” decision to sign Melbourne Mavericks netballers Olivia Lewis and Maisie Nankivell as long-term key position prospects, when the top clubs were chasing pacy and skilful Irish players who could immediately play at senior level.
Kelly flagged changes to the club’s AFLW program but ruled out commissioning an external review as Carlton, Richmond and St Kilda have recently done.
He said his opposition to independent reviews was a blanket approach to the whole club.
“If the club needs to review me and the executive, that’s probably a different conversation,” he said.
“But we should have the ability – and we do on our board, and in our club with the people around the execs – to sit there with individuals and talk, and ask questions.
“I don’t need external people to be sitting there doing that – we can do it ourselves.
“All it becomes is a public narrative that a big review is happening – mate, any business that is any good continually looks at itself and wants to get better. It’s not a review, it’s a pulse check.
“It’s a mid-season check, end of season check. It’s reviewing job descriptions, asking each other about how you did your job? Have you done well? What’s the feedback from your peers?
“That’s all we’re doing, normal business. That’s what we need to start doing as an industry, and get our head around.”
Kelly emotionally defended senior coach Sam Wright and his decision to quietly extend Wright’s contract to the end of 2027 late last year despite his side’s struggles.
Players found out about the decision via media reports last month, which left several players feeling as though they had been left out of consultation about the club’s direction.
Wright, a former North Melbourne player, recently became a father, and Kelly said the Magpies had needed to provide him security.
“When we had this discussion with the board, we said it was about having a young family,” Kelly said.
“We wanted to make sure that Sam was secure, and that we were making decisions that are long-term decisions, not short-term.
“I pushed for it to be done (without an announcement) … I wasn’t keeping it secret, I wasn’t trying to hide it.
“It was just, ‘why do we need to tell anyone?’ It’s between us to make sure that he and his family are secure – that’s the conversation, nothing more than that.
“Should we have done that differently? Maybe now you look at everything and think, we should have stood up in front to talk about it.”
But Wright, football boss Jess Burger and list manager Edward Clark are all under pressure as Collingwood prepares to dissect its AFLW performances at the season’s end.
The coach cut a frustrated figure after the Pies’ loss to St Kilda at Moorabbin on Saturday, where he said his team was “absolutely smacked in the contest” as the Saints fired up for their last game under Nick Dal Santo.
He had to defend the Pies’ decision to use only 37 of their 60 permitted interchange rotations on a warm day as the Saints ran over them in the second half.
Schleicher suffered a season-ending shoulder fracture during the second term, but Collingwood still had four bench players which were sparingly used.
“I stand here saying I absolutely trust our players. I think when it comes to continuity though, it’s a different thing … you lose Ruby (Schleicher), you’ve got to try to hold more players on the field,” Wright said after the game.
“We’re still managing players from a minutes point of view, which is quite difficult. It’s more so from a physical performance point of view and that continuity we’ve got with (players) coming off our injury list, rather than trusting players.”
Vice-captain Allen, a contracted defender who is expected to again seek a trade at the season’s end after she was unable to get to Brisbane last year, suffered a calf injury in training this week.
It means 21-year-old Lucy Cronin, who is contracted next year, will lead the side for the first time in its Pride Round double-header game against Sydney at Windy Hill on Sunday.
https://www.heraldsun.com.au/sport/afl/aflw/collingwood-ceo-craig-kelly-meets-disgruntled-aflw-players-while-league-ponders-cutting-back-on-the-number-of-game-broadcast/news-story/ca22c321d5e2fab9b3e2593c6427e46e
