The deep reaction among Swans fans is the disgust at having been sold a lie. Can they fix it?

This was the year we went all-in on the Sydney Swans, buying the membership package and attending as many games as possible. A Swans game – usually a Swans win – became part of the weekend routine.

It’s a very Sydney occasion, drawing nearly 40,000 people on average, bigger than any rugby league game in the city, festive and feminised, with a roughly 50/50 gender split that is unique among male spectator sports.

Most of the Swans fanatics I know are women, and it is my wife’s enthusiasm that drew us to Swans membership.

When we met, she didn’t want to become a complete sports-watcher’s widow, so she picked out one sport and one team. She saw AFL as the most female-friendly code. She’s been a Swans tragic since. Her latest favourite? Isaac Heeney, of course.

The Sydney Swans are a jewel in the AFL crown, and Heeney is its most sparkling facet.

Before every game, when the players are announced individually, the cheers for Heeney are the loudest and the highest-pitched.

Two weeks ago, against Port Adelaide, the players’ names were read out by children, a cute touch to enhance the bond between innocents and their idols.

Do fans project too much idealism onto their stars? Sure, but the Swans have squeezed and monetised every last drop out of it.

As the resident grizzled male, it was my duty to issue warnings that heroes have feet of clay.

Only rarely are they who we want them to be. I’d read Brandon Jack’s exposés of a Swans “culture” that, behind the no-dickheads rhetoric, had barely evolved from David Williamson’s The Club.

But the Swannies kept sucking you in, women and children first. The Bloods’ incredible on-field consistency, their embrace of Sydney’s queer community: this was a brand engineered to appeal outside the traditional male box.

The AFL has found that there’s money in virtuousness. The Swans’ success in commodifying their virtue was what made them so unpopular elsewhere within the AFL, much of which is choking, as we speak, on its schadenfreude.

When “culture” is turned into a commodity that is successfully financialised, it soon ceases to be a culture in any real sense; it’s a product, and its weak point is that its saleable goods, humans, are not widgets or soup tins. The manufacturing processes of the “football industry” haven’t got these products; it’s family, school, friends, inherited and learnt attitudes, sudden celebrity, the hot mess of life that makes young men.

What if the “culture” becomes just a role they are taught to play and a formula of words that they are taught to speak, with shallower roots than the complex brew to make a young male in Australia in 2026?

In the gap between commodity and human, what you get is a scandal waiting to happen.

Based on the settled facts from last weekend – without going to the as-yet-uncharged allegations of sexual assault – the distance between image and reality was too wide for some of the Swans to continue to straddle. They threw themselves into the abyss.

All those women Swans fans I know are disgusted.

Sure, there’s disappointment at what those players have done to a season in which the community invested so much.

But the deeper reaction, the one that will take longer to repair, is the disgust at having been taken for a ride and sold a lie. The Swans club has acknowledged a breach of trust. They can’t guess whether they can regain it.

So the Swans turn out to be a football club like any other, the reason so many grow up hating football clubs. There’s a clique within that club whose status has crowded out their respect for others: their teammates, their club, certainly their fans, who are just a revenue source that they have to keep onside.

Embedded in that disrespect is a contempt for women that runs deeper than deep. Football clubs like the Swans have spent decades trying to educate that contempt out of their players, or, if that fails, just cover it up or hope it doesn’t show in public.

This is what it all boils down to, isn’t it? Why would you go out, on a Sunday night during your six-month working year, allegedly to drink and take cocaine and invite adult entertainers to your hotel room at 4am when you have a 7.30 flight home, unless you think you’re bulletproof?

“So the Swans turn out to be a football club like any other, the reason so many grow up hating football clubs.”

If you’re a superstar, you can recover from your blow-out in time for your next training day, when your responsibilities to the “culture” restart, and you become a commodity again.

You are taking a big risk, but your success and self-belief as a footballer and as a person are based on your ability to take big gambles and win.

Have a little holiday before the finals.

Retired West Coast Eagles star Ben Cousins didn’t invent it, but he made it an art form: have a blowout before putting yourself back together and being best on ground next time you play. If anything, it enhances your status that you can be so unprofessional in your private time and still outshine everyone on the field.

While the specific contours vary, these scandals are repetitive. Many famous sportsmen lead double lives. Administrators live on tenterhooks, fearing the truth will come out and the “culture” thing will be exposed as the sham it is.

“Brand damage” is such a weasel phrase, I thought I’d try to articulate what brand damage feels like for the person who buys the tickets and pays the seven-figure salaries that fund the drinks, the coke, the hotel room, the adult entertainers.

It feels like you’re being laughed at. It feels like you were the sucker walking down the footpath who got lured into the shell game. It feels like your childlike faith was being mocked and exploited.

It feels like whenever a football league puts on a show of virtue – a women’s round, an Indigenous round, a multicultural round – its primary aim has been to loosen your grip on your wallet.

Swans fans feel like they’ve been made fools of. Penance can be paid and redemption earned, but you could never look the same at Tiger Woods or Ben Stokes or Wayne Carey or Michael Slater once you saw behind the veil.

The Sydney Swans were meant to be an exception, but over time, the culture established by people like Paul Kelly and Brett Kirk and Adam Goodes has turned into a product, and the standards the club wanted to set, and sell, became too much for some of its players to live up to.

The power in this relationship has swung back to the Swans’ fans, particularly those thousands of women who made the club so unique and profitable. How much forgiveness do they have? When will they trust the Swans again?

My wife is too revolted even to consider another membership. Was she naive, is she overreacting?

That’s hardly the point: it was the naivete of the supporters who bought the product and funded those Swans’ lifestyle choices.

Those once-invulnerable alpha males, who were laughing at us from behind their smiles, have put themselves in the unfamiliar situation where their destiny is no longer in their hands.

The prouder the facade, the harder the crash.