Across Australia, plenty of sports clubs generate funding from poker machines at their venues. Recently, several clubs have decided to depend less on pokie profits, and the latest team to take this step is the Geelong Football Club. This week, the Geelong Football Club announced that it is going to get rid of its poker machines.
Currently, the club owns 100 pokies at their home ground in Kardinia Park – which generated $3 million in 2014. Now, the stadium is being renovated and developed, and Chief Executive Brian Cook stated that this project would include the removal of the pokies. According to ABC News, the club wants to take the games off-site, and would eventually get rid of them altogether.
"Gaming is basically insurance for a club," Mr Cook says. "We are trying to become less reliant on gaming and our vision is not to rely on gaming to add to our profit in the longer term." The Geelong Football Club would be following in the footsteps of the North Melbourne Kangaroos – the only other AFL club in Victoria that does not operate poker machines.
The Kangaroos did not want to raise its funding through pokies and wanted to rely on other services to generate profits for the club. Unfortunately, the issue of eliminating pokies at the Geelong Football Club is complicated by the fact that the club employs 45 people through its gaming operations.
By eliminating poker machines, Geelong would have to eliminate the accompanying jobs in the gaming industry. There is no word yet on how the club plans to deal with this issue.
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