Barto wrote:This has been proven time and time again to be spin by the Power to claim the "1870" history. There's no legal way that a club can leave the SANFL and play in the AFL, the court injunction back in 1990 saw to that. The Power had to be a brand new club.
PAMFC Inc, have the association number A1764, which was issued in 1951. All they did was change their name from PAFC to PAMFC at the end of 1996. They still have this association number, how can an incorporated club take someone elses licence if they are new?
PAFC (AFL) Ltd, ACN 068 839 547 was registered in 1995 and changed their name to PAFC Ltd after the Magpies changed theirs.
The Magpies were not miraculously "born" in 1997 when the "original club moved to the AFL", they're still the same old club from legal standpoint. If their supporters want to see it as that because they wanted into the AFL and out of the SANFL that's their business, but it's not the truth.
We're any of the Port players who didn't get an AFL call up at the end 1996 playing for a completely different club the following year?
Barto, as many times as this argument gets raised it gets proven to be as much spin as you claim the other version to be.
Organisations in sport and business are more than an entity number. Business structures can change all the time and with it entities that organisations trade though. None of it can take away the heritage of where an organisation came from.
Obviously the AFL club needed a new, modern entity to handle the technicalities and complexities of the license agreement, ownership by the SANFL, etc. It's completely understandable that a brand new entity got created. I have been involved with similar sort of restructures and you don't try to change the structure of a 45 year old legal entity, you start a new one.
To try to say that the only way the PAFC could take their SANFL tradition with them is to use the old 1951 entity is pedantics. That's what the ACN argument is .. pedantics. Have you traced the ACN / ARBN / ABN of every football club in the country to make sure no club is claiming heritage beyond the life of it's current ABN? Course not. Collingwood did not start in 1982ish just like PAFC did not start in 1951.
There's a buzz term in the legal world called "substance over form". That's what this is. There's probably actually no 'new' club it's just that some people get too hung up on trying to find one.
I know this has been done to death many times before but there it is.
In between signatures .....