Personal matters should remain personal. Lachie Neale cheated on his wife, that was a terrible thing to do. It would have caused enormous hurt to his wife, his family and the other people involved. There is no need to excuse that behaviour.
But it was also, fundamentally, a private matter between the people involved. Being a professional footballer doesn't mean surrendering your right to have a private life.
We seem to have developed this strange expectation that because somebody is paid enormous amounts of money to play football, we are somehow entitled to know everything about them, who they sleep with, who they argue with, what happens in their marriage and what happens behind the doors of their home.
I'm not convinced we are.
Footballers are employed to play football. That's their professional responsibility. They aren't employed to be role models 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
We need to separate the footballer from the person, this isn't unique to Lachie Neale.
The AFL has a long history of players whose professional careers have become intertwined with their personal behaviour. Perhaps the most infamous example remains Wayne Carey and the affair with Kelli Stevens, the wife of his North Melbourne teammate and close friend Anthony Stevens. The scandal in 2002 effectively destroyed Carey's position at North Melbourne and became one of the defining controversies of his career.
And here we are, more than two decades later, still talking about essentially the same thing. Will we ever learn? Not necessarily the players, although you'd hope they would. I'm talking about us, the public. Why do we continually turn the private failings of footballers into public spectacles?
If a plumber cheats on his wife, we don't spend the next six months analysing his marriage on television.
If an accountant has an affair with a friend's partner, nobody puts together a panel of experts to discuss his character.
But if the person happens to kick a football for a living, suddenly their personal life becomes everyone's business. That doesn't seem particularly healthy.
And then there is the other side of the equation.
The recent Sydney Swans situation is considerably more serious and, importantly, different. Five Swans players, Riley Bice, Nick Blakey, Isaac Heeney, James Jordon and Chad Warner, were suspended by the club for the remainder of the 2026 season following breaches of club rules connected to an incident at a Melbourne hotel. The incident is also the subject of a Victoria Police investigation into an alleged sexual assault.
Those allegations need to be treated seriously, and we should allow the investigation to take its course rather than deciding guilt through social media.
But it does raise another question about professional sport.
Are we paying these players too much and giving them too much freedom? I'm not suggesting that earning a lot of money causes bad behaviour.
Clearly it doesn't.
Most highly paid professional athletes conduct themselves perfectly well.
But there is an undeniable culture surrounding elite sport where young men can be given extraordinary amounts of money, status, attention, free time and access to people who constantly tell them how important they are. At some point, perhaps we need to ask whether some of these "stars" simply become too big for their boots.
And the timing of the Sydney situation makes it particularly disappointing. The Swans were still in the hunt for the AFL premiership and heading towards the most important part of their season. Instead of the focus being on football and preparing for finals, the club has found itself dealing with an extremely serious off-field matter.
That's not just disappointing for the players. It's disappointing for their teammates, coaches, staff and supporters who have spent an entire season working towards the same goal.
Or are footballers simply a reflection of Australia? Maybe professional footballers aren't actually behaving any worse than everybody else.
Maybe we're just seeing it more.
People cheat.
People drink too much.
People make stupid decisions.
People betray friends.
People have affairs.
People behave badly.
People make enormous mistakes.
This happens in ordinary Australian households every single day. The difference is that when an ordinary person screws up, it might be known by a handful of family members, friends and colleagues.
When an AFL player screws up, millions of people can know about it within hours. Their mistakes become newspaper headlines. Their relationships become content. Their friends and family become part of the story.
And suddenly something that would normally be deeply personal becomes entertainment.
Perhaps we need to remember what football actually is, a sport.
There are circumstances where a player's behaviour absolutely does matter professionally, particularly where it involves criminal conduct, violence, serious misconduct, corruption, performance-enhancing drugs, gambling or behaviour that directly affects their ability to perform their job.
But an ordinary relationship breakdown? An affair? A marriage falling apart?
Perhaps we should leave that where it belongs, In private.
Lachie Neale's football career should ultimately be judged on what he does on a football field. If he made terrible personal decisions, he has to live with those decisions and, more importantly, so do the people closest to him.
But perhaps the rest of us don't need to.
Because maybe the real lesson from all of these scandals isn't that AFL footballers are uniquely bad people. Maybe it's that they're just ordinary people who happen to live extraordinarily public lives and we see a how lot more about their personal lives than we really need to.
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