Eddie McGuire

You probably hate the club and you may hate the man, but you can't deny that Collingwood president and all-round media loudmouth Eddie McGuire is a power machine.

Just check his list of bona fides: he runs the country's biggest sporting club (check). He's so ubiquitous everyone knows him by his first name (check). His brother is a state politician (Frank, the Member for Broadmeadows). And one of his best mates is James Packer, who owns a major stake in Foxtel.

But it's not his media work or political connections that leads to Eddie making our sport top 10 (although it doesn't hurt fronting a TV show, hosting a radio show and seeing your name mentioned 17,015 times in the press in the past year). It's his role as chieftain of the Collingwood Football Club, the country's strongest, which gets him over the line.

Together the two form a nexus of influence in AFL-mad Melbourne that is unlike any other sporting powerbroker. And for all those in the northern states complaining that his power is limited outside the AFL. Well, sorry, but you just don't have anyone like McGuire.

"We run basically 11 Rolling Stones concerts a year, we're the biggest restaurant in Australia with 2500 or 3500 plates per week at our games," McGuire bragged to the Sun-Herald recently.

"From a humble little footy club that started off in the worst socio-economic area of Melbourne, it's been fantastic. On a world scale, it's big-time."

Big time is right. Even the almighty News Limited is well aware of Collingwood's power, particularly in footy-mad Melbourne.

Last year, when News was in the middle of its fight with former Herald Sun editor-in-chief Bruce Guthrie over an unfair dismissal claim, CEO John Hartigan claimed that putting the Magpies on the front page could lift circulation by as much as 30,000 copies.

"It's certainly the industry view that Collingwood Football Club, when you put them on the front page, you sell a lot of extra copies," Hartigan told the courtroom at the time.

It's hard to overstate the enormity of the Collingwood Football Club. It has got 71,000 paid members, nearly double the ALP, and probably another million more who support it. And at the centre of it all is McGuire, who rose to the president's job 13 years ago.

Since McGuire took charge, the club has been turned around on the field and off it. It won a much-awaited premiership and its finances are the envy of the industry, with a recent profit announcement of $5.4 million and annual turnover of $75.5 million.

According to a recent study by trademark expert Wayne Covell, from legal practice Worthy of the Name, the Magpies are valued at a tidy $344 million -- nearly $100 million more than their nearest rival. People such as AFL CEO Andrew Demetriou have publicly put Collingwood's transformation down to McGuire.

It has also got a string of high-profile sponsors lining up to back it, from McDonald's to Emirates to Westpac. And despite enduring its fair share of scandals -- including the recent banning of defender Heath Shaw for breaking the league's gambling rules -- McGuire's managed to keep most of them onside.

And he's still making power plays. Somehow, Eddie has managed to turf out a recent premiership-winning coach, a certified Magpie legend in Mick Malthouse, to replace him with former champion Nathan Buckley. At any other club, the members would be chasing him with pitchforks.

By now everyone's aware of the Eddie McGuire back story. But for those who came in late, he's the "Broady boy made good" who started work as a sports journalist, before heading to Nine to host a string of TV shows and ultimately become CEO.

It was not Eddie's finest hour. First he lost The Block, whose makers sued the network; then there was the infamous Jessica Rowe "boning", followed by the disastrous legal fight with current affairs boss Mark Llewellyn and, finally, his own departure from Nine.

Perhaps that chastening experience explains McGuire's more mild-mannered performance since leaving Nine's mahogany row, which has won him praise, even from the hard-bitten journos who, he reckons, want to see Collingwood fail.

"Gone is the loud, feisty, street fighter who had an amazing knack of placing himself at the centre of every Collingwood story," wrote The Age's Caroline Wilson recently. "In his place is something approaching a football statesman."

But don't think he hasn't got plenty of enemies. His workaholic style and often brusque approach to dealing with the media hasn't won over everyone as friends.

He's also got opinions (a recent example: branding western Sydney the "land of felafel") and a way of broadcasting them that can make him an easy person to dislike.

And he's also not afraid to get political. Earlier this month, Eddie threw his two cents worth into the poker-machine war currently being waged between independent MP Andrew Wilkie and Clubs Australia.

McGuire branded Wilkie's pre-commitment reforms as a "footy tax". His comments, unsurprisingly, got a huge run in the media.

But why wouldn't he get involved? Collingwood brought in more than $20 million last year through its five poker machine venues in Melbourne, which hold 292 gaming machines.

Last year it spent more than $6.5 million on new licences from the state government to operate 191 more machines, something media reports say will help gaming revenue climb by as much as 33%.

Some say without Eddie there would be no Collingwood (at least not in its current state) and without Collingwood there would be no Eddie. But we're not sure that's true, at least the latter statement.

He's one of the few people in the sport Top Ten who will retain a significant level of influence after leaving his current gig (if he ever does).

But regardless of what comes next, as McGuire recently told the Australian Financial Review, he just wants to be remembered.

"When I'm driving everyone mad in a nursing home one day, I want to be able to say, hey, I did that and I hosted that, worked for Nine, Ten, and so on."