To our Purple Army 

Following the suspension of the 2020 Toyota AFL Premiership Season, and cancellation of the 2020 NAB AFL Women’s season, all players have now ceased club commitments and we are officially in survival mode as a football club.

This club generates its revenue from games of football. It is as simple as that. 

Sponsors, corporate partners, members and spectators make up 73 per cent of total revenue. 

If you can’t watch your beloved team battle it out on the football field, then naturally these revenue streams are in jeopardy.

As a result, yesterday was the darkest day in our club’s history as we moved to significantly and drastically cut operating costs to help save the club. 

More than 75 per cent of our staff, across every operational area of the club, were stood down until further notice.

A skeleton crew of staff will now work on severely reduced hours to ensure the club remains operational during the suspension period, which is due to run until at least 31 May.

These extremely tough decisions were made with one hope in mind… that we will rebound at some point in the future and have these people, who mean so much to us, come back in to our Freo family.

These people deliver your game day experiences, they deliver programs to our local schools, they answer your membership calls, they sell you your purple merchandise. 

They look after our facility, they manage our accounts. They look after our players mindsets, health sets, heart sets… and boots. 

They look after valuable, long-standing partnerships. They make sure our fans know the how, what, when and why via regular and informative communications.

They are wonderful people who, for the time being, cannot do what they love doing most… which is working hard for this football club. 

This is why yesterday was such a tough day.

We feel, and hope, that by addressing our expenditure immediately, we can minimise the future toll the COVID-19 crisis will have on our football club.

But more work will need to be done.

We will now shift our focus to our revenue streams and establish a framework to enable our key stakeholders – members, corporate partners and sponsors - to support their club if they are in a position to do so. 

We understand and respect that everyone’s personal circumstances are different, and we will work through such frameworks with this in mind.

We are hurting, but we know these hardships are widespread. It’s much bigger than us. 

So please know our purple hearts are with you all.

Take care of yourselves and we will get through this together. 

Simon Garlick