The comparison is compelling because there have been stages when these clubs' supporter bases were comparable. There were even periods – if you go back to the '90s and arguably even 2004-5 – when the Saints might have owned the larger base (in 2005-06, the Saints' membership was larger). In terms of historic support over the past few decades, these clubs have largely been in the middleweight division, alongside Geelong. Hawthorn, in fact, probably started behind the geographically concentrated Cats and Saints. But the Hawks, by dint of a few key decisions, have pumped themselves up to the ranks of financial heavyweights and their support has mushroomed to the point that they have a membership of 60,000-plus , with an average MCG crowd of 52,000 last season. The Saints, conversely, are in a similar boat – or deep water - to the Bulldogs, Demons, North and Port Adelaide, despite clearly superior support to those small teams. How did the Hawks put on so much fiscal muscle, while the Saints – in spite of winning games lately – withered or remained skinny? There's a number of factors and explanations for the chasm, but the upshot is a small number of decisions made by the clubs. Like all clubs, Hawthorn and St Kilda have made blunders over the past 15-16 years. St Kilda did quite a bit right – they hired Ross Lyon, for instance, when he was an untried assistant coach. They ran a lean, low-cost operation that produced profits in the mid-2000s. The difference is that the Hawks got a few big ones right. In a couple of instances, they gained strength from grasping opportunities that the Saints didn't pursue. Mostly, it's about venues – where you play, train and put poker machines.

“You're not going to get all the decisions right all the time,” said Hawthorn president Andrew Newbold, who joined the club board in 2003. “But you want to get more right than you get wrong and you want to get the big decisions right every time. “And I think over the years we've got the big ones right and that goes to the quality of your decision-making process and the quality of the people sitting around the table.” You want to get the big decisions right every time. While Newbold didn't nominate one big-money shot Hawthorn nailed, he made plain that the choice of venues for home games was significant. “I don't think you can point to any one decision, I think it's a combination of investment in certain commercial enterprises, I think it's an investment in Tasmania and I think it's obviously playing our games at the MCG when other clubs went to Etihad,” he said. “It's a combination of all those factors. It's also reflective of the hard work of successive administrations in the footy club.”

1. Tasmania A goldmine for Hawthorn, while St Kilda turned its back on Launceston. St Kilda and the Hawks both began their Launceston experiments in 2001; each played home games – predominantly against the non-Victorian clubs – at Aurora Stadium. The Saints left Launceston in 2006, shortly after the notorious “Sirengate” game in which the AFL handed the premiership points to Fremantle days after the game. St Kilda didn't enjoy Launceston, believing that it didn't perform well at the ground, and vacated. St Kilda was then making healthy profits with a lean business operation and had been close to the flag in 2004-05.

Then St Kilda president Rod Butterss acknowledges that “as a club we probably didn't embrace the move”. The decision to leave was largely football-based, not financially driven. “The football department struggled to embrace it,” said Butterss, whose once-fraternal relationship with senior coach Grant Thomas had soured by this stage. No sooner had the Saints left Launceston, than the Hawks pounced. They would turn the stadium into a gold mine, worth several hundred thousand dollars a game, receiving a hefty sponsorship from the Tasmanian government. Jeff Kennett renegotiated the deal, in defiance of the AFL's wish to make Tassie the second (seven-game) home of North Melbourne, in late 2010. Today, the Hawks have four home games in Launceston, in an arrangement that earns them close to $3.5 million. Moreover, the impact is far greater when considering the spin-offs, and the fact that they've had the market to themselves (until North landed two games in Hobart). 2. MCG/Etihad The Hawks play almost exclusively profitable games, while the Saints have struggled with their deal at Etihad.



By playing predominantly lower-drawing games – what Butterss called “less attractive” matches – in Tasmania, the Hawks were able to turn potential loss-makers into hefty profits. To compensate for giving up three (and now four) games to Tassie, they devised an arrangement in which regular (11-game) members were given three (and now four) “away” games on their membership. Almost invariably, these away games were blockbuster-type matches – principally Geelong and Collingwood, sometimes Carlton and Essendon or Richmond – at the 'G. Far from hurting Hawthorn's Victorian base, the Tasmanian deal has enabled it to grow dramatically. In the modern AFL, there are two types of high-earning games: blockbusters that draw large crowds to the MCG, and the boutique games at smaller venues, in which the home team – with a “clean stadium” – reaps massive returns from relatively small crowds. Geelong is the Victorian apotheosis of the boutique money machine (West Coast, with a higher-capacity home ground, does even better), while Collingwood is almost entirely reliant on a blockbuster model.

Hawthorn is perhaps the only club that has the luxury of both models – combining blockbusters at the G, with high-yielding boutique-busters in Launceston. St Kilda has had neither. Butterss said there was a “double whammy” for the Saints in leaving Tasmania – they gave up profitable games in Tassie that don't make money in Melbourne. The Saints have been a major agitant for an improved deal at Etihad Stadium – which has bettered its returns to tenants, but remains a long way from what MCG teams receive, much less the astonishing deals at Geelong and Tassie. In 2011, the Saints estimated they were more than $2?million the worse for playing at Etihad compared to the MCG. Hawthorn, under Ian Dicker's leadership, had fought the AFL to remain at Waverley. The Saints, having endured the tumult of shifting their home games from Moorabbin to Waverley, were less inclined to fight head office. Butterss' long-serving and popular predecessor Andrew Plympton suggested that the AFL gave the Saints little choice about where they would play games once Waverley was slated to be sold off as housing and replaced by a Docklands stadium. Plympton said St Kilda's arrangement at Docklands (now Etihad) was then considered favourable – second only to Essendon's – when it moved there in 2000. “The deals have obviously changed in many ways.” And, as some Saints insiders noted, football department costs subsequently escalated dramatically. One could add that clubs such as Geelong and Collingwood also redefined what a club could earn on game days.

3. Waverley/Seaford Hawthorn received the deal of a lifetime at Waverley, while the Saints' move to Seaford hasn't brought commercial or on-field benefits. While St Kilda shifted from Moorabbin to Seaford – a highly contentious move that has not yet brought commercial or on-field benefits – the Hawks had already moved from their home base at Glenferrie. But they didn't travel quite as far – to the old Waverley Park, which was being carved into lucrative real estate by Mirvac. Under the terms of the deal, the oval and immediate surrounds were to remain for sporting purposes. Mirvac needed a club to occupy the oval. The Hawks, under the board of president Dicker, struck a deal that could be football's answer to Kerry Packer selling Channel Nine to Alan Bond – ie, it happens only once in a lifetime.