At the end of the 2002 AFL season, shortly before the 2002 AFL Draft was to take place, the Australian Football League announced that it had found the Carlton Football Club guilty of "deliberate, elaborate and sophisticated" breaches of the salary cap during 2000 and 2001.
On-field, the club had fallen from playing finals in 2001 to winning its first ever wooden spoon in 2002, after the retirements of many champion players from the 1990s.
[4] Off the field, the club had already posted an operating loss of $500,000 in 2002, and its decision to invest in the upgrade of Princes Park was inopportune and ultimately extremely unprofitable, as the AFL increasingly moved games away from the stadium.
After the penalties, the club's was not only forced to pay the $930,000 fine, but also (and, ironically) settle the under-the-table contracts it still had with Silvagni and Bradley.
[7] Carlton struggled to maintain off-field stability, with Ian Collins and Graham Smorgon both serving unstable tenures as president over the next few years, before Richard Pratt took over in 2007.