A professional football club was fined $200,000 because the way it injected supplements into its own players breached workplace health and safety laws, even though no player was actually harmed. That is the surprising core of the Essendon supplements saga: the club did not fail because a worker got sick, but because of how it went about giving players a substance it could not properly account for. It is the most useful workplace safety lesson an ordinary employer could take from the AFL.
For most business owners, workplace health and safety feels like a physical issue about machinery, forklifts and manual handling. The Essendon case is a reminder that it is broader than that, that it covers the health of anyone who works for you, and that the law does not wait for an injury before it treats you as having done something wrong. The club was convicted of an offence and fined for the risks its conduct created, not for an injury that occurred.
What happened at Essendon
The story starts in 2012, when the Essendon Football Club ran a controversial supplements program for its players. The program was led by a sports scientist, Stephen Dank, and involved the administration of a range of injections to players over the course of the season. The club later said it believed the supplements were within the rules. Two separate investigations followed from that program: a doping investigation into whether players had taken a banned substance, and a separate workplace safety investigation by WorkSafe Victoria into how the program had been run.
The doping matter dominated the headlines. The World Anti-Doping Agency successfully appealed against an earlier tribunal decision, and in January 2016 the Court of Arbitration for Sport upheld bans for 34 past and present Essendon players. That is the part most people remember. What is less well known is that WorkSafe Victoria had run its own investigation in parallel, and it was not concerned about doping rules at all. It was concerned about workplace health and safety.
In November 2015, WorkSafe Victoria charged the Essendon Football Club with two offences under the Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004 (Vic) (the OHS Act). The charge was that the club had failed to provide and maintain a working environment that was safe and without risks to health for its players. The club pleaded guilty to both charges.
The duty the club breached
For a business owner, the striking thing is that the charges were brought under ordinary workplace safety law, not under any football-specific rule. In Victoria, the core duty is in s 21 of the OHS Act. It requires an employer to provide and maintain for employees a working environment that is safe and without risks to health, so far as is reasonably practicable. That includes providing safe systems of work, making sure substances are handled without risk, and giving employees the information, instruction and supervision they need to work safely.
Three points in the judgment matter for any employer. First, the players were treated as employees, and the club as their employer, even though they were professional athletes. Being a workplace does not depend on churning out goods or sitting at a desk; it depends on people working for you. Second, the duty is about risks, not about harm. The sentencing magistrate, Peter Reardon, noted that no players had shown adverse side effects, but he still found the club in breach. The offence is complete when the employer fails to take reasonably practicable steps to keep workers safe, regardless of whether anyone is injured.
Third, the club's real failure was a failure of process. The magistrate found the supplements program had been conducted in a shroud of secrecy, with a disregard for player safety. There were no medical doctors involved, no prescriptions, no controls over the side effects players might face, and it was impossible to tell how many injections each player received or from whom. Players were told to keep quiet about the program and, being young and vulnerable, would have felt pressured not to question it. Those are precisely the kinds of gaps in systems, oversight and record-keeping that the law is directed at.
The club was fined $200,000. It had faced up to $600,000, but the magistrate took into account its unblemished safety record and the heavy penalties it had already paid, including a $2 million fine from the AFL. WorkSafe Victoria said the fine was a warning to every Victorian employer that they must provide a healthy and safe workplace, and that professional sports organisations must protect their players, many of whom are young and vulnerable workers.
How your state applies the law depends on where you operate, and this matters because the Essendon case is a Victorian one. Victoria is now the only Australian jurisdiction that still runs on its own framework, the OHS Act. Every other state and territory, along with the Commonwealth, has adopted the model work health and safety laws, and Western Australia has its own version of the model Work Health and Safety Act 2020 (WA), which came into operation in 2022. The labels differ in those states, and the detail of duties and penalties is not identical, but the underlying idea is the same as s 21 of the Victorian OHS Act: a person conducting a business or undertaking must ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety of workers. If you run a business across state lines, you should be aware that the precise wording of your obligations can change the moment your workers cross a border.
What the Essendon case means for your business
The Essendon case is a dramatic example, but the conduct it punished is not exotic. The same process failures show up, in smaller ways, in ordinary businesses every day. Here is why this could matter to you:
- The duty is not limited to physical injuries: The OHS duty covers risks to health, which can include the effects of substances, fatigue, stress, or poorly designed work systems, not just a broken leg on a factory floor.
- The law cares about how you run things, not just what goes wrong: You can be in breach even when nobody gets hurt, if you have not taken reasonably practicable steps to manage the risk.
- The duty extends to people you might not think of as employees: In Victoria it also reaches independent contractors you engage and their employees, in relation to matters over which you have control.
- Senior people can be personally exposed: Under the OHS Act, an officer of a company can be individually liable if a contravention is attributable to their failure to take reasonable care, not just the business itself.
- A fine is not a business expense you can simply absorb: The penalties scale with the seriousness of the offence, and the cost, along with the damage to reputation and to relationships with staff, falls on the business and its people.
The transferable lesson is about the word "reasonably practicable". Employers are not required to eliminate every risk regardless of cost. They are required to take steps that are reasonable in the circumstances, weighing the likelihood and severity of the risk against what it would cost to control it. What the Essendon club did was the opposite of that. It created a risk, then removed the very controls that would have managed it: no medical oversight, no prescriptions, no monitoring, no proper records, and a culture of secrecy that discouraged players from raising concerns.
That reads like a case study in how not to manage workplace safety, and it is. The conduct the regulator and the court found so serious was the absence of basic process. The most practical takeaway is that the employer who can show a documented, followed system for managing a known risk is in a far stronger position than the employer who simply hopes nothing goes wrong.
If you are an employer in Victoria or any other Australian jurisdiction, there are things you can change this week to put yourself on the right side of this lesson:
- Write down how you manage your key workplace risks: A short, current risk assessment for the real hazards in your business is the foundation of a defensible safety system, and its absence is exactly the kind of gap that gets punished.
- Make sure the right people have oversight: Appoint someone with the authority and knowledge to review how risky tasks are actually performed, so safety decisions are not made by people without the training to make them.
- Document what you do: Keep records of training, supervision, assessments, and any incident or near miss. In the Essendon case, the club could not even account for how many injections were given or by whom; records that poor undermined any claim it had things under control.
- Give workers a genuine way to raise concerns: A workplace where employees fear questioning a practice is a workplace where risks go unmanaged. Make it clear that raising a safety concern will not have consequences.
- Check that your current duty holders are identified: If you are a director or senior manager, understand that responsibility for safety can attach to you personally, so make sure the obligations for your business are clear and resourced.
How a lawyer can help you build a defensible safety system
Workplace health and safety is an area where the cost of getting it wrong is high and the detail is easy to miss, which is why most businesses benefit from professional help before there is a problem. A lawyer who works on WHS can review the actual arrangements you have in place and tell you honestly where the gaps are, rather than leaving you to guess what "reasonably practicable" means for your particular operation.
That review typically covers three things. The first is whether your safety policies and risk assessments are current and tailored to what your business actually does, not a generic document copied from somewhere else. The second is whether the people who supervise risky work have the authority, training and resources to do it properly, and whether your record-keeping would stand up if a regulator or court asked to see it. The third is whether the roles and responsibilities of officers and managers are clear enough that nobody can claim safety was somebody else's job. On each of these, a lawyer can help you identify the risk before a regulator does, and can also advise on your obligations if an incident has already happened and you need to respond.
The lesson worth keeping from the Essendon case
The Essendon fine is a useful reminder that workplace safety law in Australia does not wait for someone to get hurt. The club was convicted not because a player was injured, but because of the way it ran a program that exposed players to risk: no medical oversight, no controls, no records, and a culture that discouraged questions. Whenever you are tempted to treat safety as a matter of luck, or to skip the paperwork that proves you thought about a risk, remember that the regulator judged Essendon on the absence of exactly that system and process.
In short, the key points are: an employer must provide a working environment that is safe and without risks to health, so far as is reasonably practicable; the duty extends beyond physical injury and covers anyone who works for you; a breach can be proved even where no worker is harmed if the employer has not taken reasonably practicable steps; process failures such as missing oversight, poor records and a culture that discourages concerns are what regulators and courts punish; and responsibility may attach to individual officers, not just the business. If you are unsure whether your safety arrangements meet those requirements, advice from a lawyer who works in this area is a worthwhile step before a regulator takes an interest in your workplace.