Essendon and Manly now provide case studies in how not to do things. ICYMI:Essendon’s previous CEO and chairhad fallen on their sword afterit was used to decapitate the head coach,Ben Rutten,during yet another disastrous season. The Bombers appointed a CEO recruitment panel that included Thorburn,whose exit from banking – when the Hayne Royal Commission exposed a litany of dishonest practices – was of no concern to the Essendon board. Nor did his chairmanship of the City on a Hill Church,asocially conservative evangelical breakaway from the Anglicans,raise any alarm.

In due course,the search panel failed to locate a CEO better qualified than Thorburn himself. The board had a brainwave and asked Thorburn to step aside from the panel but not to walk so far out of the room that they couldn’t ask him back in and offer him the job.

The embarrassments will continue while codes and clubs,hoping to buy good karma at a bargain price,remain so haplessly out of their depth.

The farce,which seemed over,had barely begun. Once Thorburn accepted the job,some bright spark on social media found out that members of his church had said some things that were not a million miles from what was proclaimed from the terraces of CommBank Stadium,this time not in the name of football or Croatia,but in the name of God. (Same thing,really.) Thorburn,who had helped inauguratethe AFL’s pride round when his bank was the code’s major sponsor,did not endorse these extreme views personally,but the club figured it might be awkward for him to have to reconcile some of this uncontrollable holy-rolling with the football league’s strictly policed commitment to diversity and inclusion.

Essendon couldn’t ask Thorburn to choose between his god and his football club –that would be discrimination! – but it could ask him to reconsider whether he could,as chairman of the church,continue taking responsibility for statements that had become as palatable as a fascist salute. Thorburn chose his god,accepted the situation,and a day later – such a long time in football – said he didn’t accept the situation at all. In piled the politicians and the free speech debating clubs. How the hell did all of this get onto the sports pages?

The matter of banning a Nazi from a football ground is straightforward and easy to digest. The Sydney United creep even had his privacy protected,so now he can do his Hitler salute as much as he likes as he watches games from the privacy of whatever cave he crawled out of.

On the other hand,the intersection (call it a five-way pile-up) of religion,free speech,minority rights,virtue signalling and sportswashing are repeatedly coming together in the ugliest public collisions,benefiting precisely no one.

Was any vulnerable life saved by Manly’s rainbow? Has the Thorburn matter left anyone feeling more included,more safe,at Essendon? As has become the pattern,the residue these incidents leave is the hard fact that professional clubs’ commitment to diversity is still wanting for proof. Gay male footballers are no keener to come out now than they were in the 1980s (when Essendon and Manly were great).Indigenous footballers are still mistreated. Religion divides organisations that have little understanding of practical tolerance. Free expression of individual difference? In football? Don’t make me cry.

The embarrassments will continue while codes and clubs remain so haplessly out of their depth. When they try something nice and virtuous by dipping their toe into identity politics,hoping to buy good karma at a bargain price,they find their foot caught up in a live electrical cable sucking them down into the sporting hell where clubs like Essendon and Manly find themselves. The embarrassments recur because,in their arrogance,the codes still classify “inclusion” as a branding opportunity and keep buying into deep serious human issues without thinking through the consequences.

At the end of their season,football premiers are accused of hubris when they toss out some derisory words about their defeated opponents. But really,what can be more arrogant,what can betray more hubris,than institutions who believe that with little more than a jersey,a logo and a slogan,a themed week and a religious incantation of the word “commitment”,they are so powerful that they can lead the real world to a better place?

What other regimes had such delusions as to think that their symbols could remake the world in their image? Surely nothing is more arrogant than a gesture;the more empty it is,the more harm it inflicts.

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