Luke Sayers’ calculated journey back into public life since the January lewd photograph scandal that ended his Carlton presidency has been hesitant, but he made his biggest statement yet late last month when he threw a private lunch at South Yarra’s Parisian bistro France-Soir.
Sayers booked out the almost four-decades-old restaurant and hosted friends from politics, business, media and sport. Some who attended framed it as an unofficial acknowledgement of thanks to those who had supported him over his public humiliation.
Ross Lyon withdrew from the Carlton process.Credit: AFL Photos via Getty Images
His sporting guests included former AFL boss-turned-Tabcorp chief Gillon McLachlan and the Carlton chief executive he lured to the club in late 2021, Brian Cook. And the St Kilda president, with whom Sayers has been involved in business, Andrew Bassat.
The guest list was mostly men although the former ALP media guru-turned corporate advisor Sharon McCrohan attended. Sayers hired McCrohan, who played a pivotal role in former premier Steve Bracks’ electoral victories, in 2023 during the PwC tax scandal and she has been his media advisor during these past turbulent months.
Bassat and Sayers share strong friendships and business connections with the Fox family but the cross-pollination between St Kilda and Carlton dates back years and involves some of the game’s biggest names including Alex Jesaulenko and more recently Stephen Silvagni, who returned to the Saints in 2023 as their list boss after a bitter falling out with the Blues.
Aside from Jesaulenko, Carlton premiership players Ken Sheldon and more recently former skipper Brett Ratten have also coached St Kilda.
Former Carlton president Luke Sayers, with Michael Voss.Credit: AFL Photos via Getty Images
But the connection that Sayers was not prepared to discuss publicly with this masthead ahead of Friday night’s clash between the two clubs was Ross Lyon, and the circumstances that led to Lyon returning to the Saints one year after being virtually assured of the Carlton coaching job. Sayers did not return calls from this masthead, and Bassat said he had no deep knowledge of what occurred at Carlton.
He added that he is deeply grateful that Lyon ultimately returned to St Kilda.
It was at another significantly smaller lunch in August 2021 where Sayers hosted Lyon at his Hawthorn home. A visiting chef served steak and the two men talked football and Carlton over a period of four hours. Lyon left with the strong impression he was the Blues’ first choice. Several days later club great and football director Greg Williams called Lyon and told him the Blues wanted him and no one else to coach the club.
But by the end of August the tide had turned. No one at Carlton will detail what took place. The commentary at the time was that some Carlton directors including women’s advocate and Our Watch chief Patty Kinnersly intervened due to concerns over an alleged sexual harassment incident during Lyon’s tenure as Fremantle coach.
Kinnersly would not comment this week but one club director who spoke on the condition of anonymity said Kinnersly never raised specific objections regarding Lyon and insisted the decision to run a process was a collective one. What is known is that after the Sayers lunch and the Greg Williams conversation, speculation regarding Lyon heightened. News Corp resurrected its coverage of the Fremantle incident and the club received a number of calls from the public regarding Lyon.
Sayers contacted Lyon and told him he would have to enter a process which would include a number of assistant coaches without senior experience. Lyon, with whom I worked as a panellist at the time on Footy Classified on Nine (owner of this masthead), had been willing to make a run for the job against Alastair Clarkson but chose to withdraw his candidacy in the belief Sayers and Carlton had suffered cold feet.
Clarkson, who had just undergone an acrimonious departure from Hawthorn, was approached about a month later by incoming CEO Cook but rejected the offer in favour of stepping away from coaching for a year. Michael Voss ultimately won the role in a process which saw him finish ahead of runner-up Adam Kingsley.
Lyon, who coached Fremantle from 2012 until 2019, allegedly made an inappropriate comment to a junior staff member at a club Christmas function. The issue became public in 2018 when it was reported Fremantle had reached a confidential settlement with the woman. The incident was investigated by the AFL’s integrity unit and no sanction was handed down, but friends of the woman later criticised the AFL probe and Fremantle’s handling of the case.
The incident had been reported to the Australian Human Rights Commission where former Carlton director Kate Jenkins was then the sex discrimination commissioner. Jenkins’ appointment to the Carlton board by Mark LoGiudice in 2015 had been seen as a cultural advancement for the club, which was then looking to win an AFLW licence. Jenkins, now chair of the Australian Sports Commission, has always described her three years as a Carlton director as a positive experience.
But in the three full seasons that followed the Blues’ change of heart over Lyon the club has not managed to completely shake its cultural issues with the club acutely aware that the Sayers scandal had damaged its image.
Lyon was reappointed by St Kilda, the club he coached for five years from 2007, during which time he steered the club to three grand finals (two in 2010) and missed the finals just once. Bassat and his board’s view of the Fremantle incident was that they remained comfortable that neither the Dockers nor the AFL sanctioned Lyon for the incident and that his behavioural history at St Kilda was impeccable.
On the surface Carlton’s change of heart about Lyon was striking in its similarity to the sudden case of cold feet it contracted in late 2017 when LoGiudice came close to hiring Simon Lethlean as club CEO to replace Steven Trigg.
Lethlean, who had departed the top football job at the AFL following an in-house affair, came heavily recommended to the Blues by his former boss, Gillon McLachlan, who believed Lethlean had won the job when Carlton directors and the search panel changed direction. They ultimately appointed Richmond membership boss Cain Liddle. The Blues who were part of that corporate search insist that Liddle was the superior candidate and that Lethlean had never been promised the job.
In a series of clubland twists and turns Lethlean, too, ended up at St Kilda as head of football. Bassat’s board promoted him to chief executive at the end of 2022 where he served for two years before departing the club largely due to a difficult working relationship with coach Lyon.
Carlton are no stranger to abrupt departures and workplace incidents. Former player and NRL players union boss Ian Prendergast joined the Blues as the club’s chief commercial officer and general counsel in late 2019 but his tenure was short-lived. This masthead contacted Prendergast – now executive director of Sports Advisory Partners – this week but he did not respond.
Incoming CEO Brian Cook’s attempt to install his former Geelong commercial boss Braith Cox at the start of 2022 forced a last-minute intervention by Sayers’ Carlton board. The move to employ Cox was halted after it emerged that he was being investigated for workplace issues at Geelong.
The Blues leave the field after the shock loss to Richmond.Credit: AFL Photos via Getty Images
Then came the recent departure of membership boss Daniel Giese. Giese quit last month midway through an in-house investigation following a workplace complaint.
Chief executive Cook, who has announced he will retire at the end of 2025, making way for Graham Wright, confirmed that Giese resigned after Cook launched the investigation along with four of his executive team: Wright, people and culture boss Donna Price, Vanessa Gigliotti (strategy and growth) and COO Thomas Crookes.
Donna Price has become interim membership boss overseeing a department which became a source of some controversy for the club after it emerged that the Blues had tentatively booked a promotional membership day on radio station SEN the day after its season-opener against Richmond.
The membership day did not go ahead after Richmond’s shock victory and Carlton’s membership – sitting at 97,000 before the season-opener – now sits at 99,600 in comparison with last year’s 106,000. Cook conceded that some cultural issues had emerged in the membership department. Giese did not respond to an approach from this masthead.
The Blues’ 2025 season had opened scandalously when Sayers’ Twitter/X account posted a photograph of a penis. A senior female BUPA staffer who had helped manage the insurer’s sponsorship agreement with the Blues was tagged in the post. Sayers was cleared of wrongdoing by an AFL investigation, which found his account had been compromised, but later in January he quit the Carlton board to spare the club and his family further embarrassment.
His marriage to Cate Sayers, the mother of his four children, has since broken up.
Vice presidents Kinnersly and Rob Priestly and their board appeared to have overseen an orderly succession plan with Priestly taking over the presidency in February. Then it emerged that director Tim Lincoln approached former AFL chairman and club great Mike Fitzpatrick in a bid to persuade Fitzpatrick to chair the board.
Priestly prevailed and Lincoln resigned. Said Priestly in a club statement announcing his new leadership role: “We are united, inclusive and values-led and I firmly believe the strength of our community, unified by a Stronger Together mindset and a common goal, is how we reach the level we aspire.”
Lyon said in April that Carlton shouldn’t be judged too harshly for the manner in which they handled the coaching process from which he said ultimately chose to walk away towards the end of the 2021 season. Sayers and Lyon have spoken since but not in any meaningful fashion. “You make your bed and you lie in it,” he told Seven’s The Agenda Setters, in an apparent reference to the incident. “And I had to lie in mine and now they’re lying in theirs.”
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