IT'S not far from Coburg to AFL House on the map. Half an hour on the No. 55 tram, less by car or bicycle. When Andrew Demetriou was playing league football, he could have run the distance in good time. He was lean and quick back then.

But 20 years and 20 kilograms later, the man who now heads the AFL might not make the distance on foot. He doesn't have to: these days he drives a pair of late-model BMWs and hasn't lived in Coburg for a long time. His home is now a double-storey house in the best street in East Hawthorn. Along with the luxury cars and the sleek, modern office at Docklands, it's a world away from his hardscrabble childhood in a migrant family in the northern suburbs.

In that sense, the man at the helm of Australia's home-grown sport — the world's oldest football code — has achieved the migrant dream. Or at least the material dreams of his parents' generation: cars, houses and high-paying jobs, symbols not just of status but of the security that refugees from war-torn Europe hungered for.

But maybe Andrew Demetriou has bigger dreams. To see him only in terms of an inventory of acquisitions and balance sheets sells him short, some say.

Off the field, he transcends football in a way he never did on it.

The journey from the streets of Coburg to the AFL's plush headquarters at Docklands has taken Demetriou 46 years.

In the 1960s and '70s, boys didn't have much choice when it came to filling their weekends. In summer it was cricket, and winter Saturdays meant football.

Supermarkets would close at 1pm on weekends, and the Safeway car park behind the Demetriou fish and chip shop in Bell Street was as good a place as any for a game.

Mates would gather religiously for long afternoons kicking a footy or hitting a taped-up tennis ball with a scarred bat.

But if those sessions instilled in the young Demetriou his passion for the staple Australian games, rainy days spent indoors also had an influence.

"We used to play a lot of Monopoly," recalls Tom Boukogiannis, a close friend from those days. "He was very good. I think he learned his negotiating skills around the Monopoly table."

As a footballer, he made a good businessman: the highlight of his 106-game career was being picked as a reserve in a state-of-origin match against Western Australia. At the elite level, he was never a star. He always had more flair for negotiating deals than negotiating a pack.

That point was proven when, as the AFL's chief executive, he helped mastermind the record $850 million broadcast rights deal, something he rates as the high point of his time at the AFL. Striking a monster deal like that explains why he was able to arrange his $1 million-a-year salary. Not that anyone who knows Demetriou well would be surprised.

He is, says historian and writer Don Watson (who part-owns a racehorse with Demetriou), one of the most confident, capable people he knows — "and funny, and a brilliant natural swearer". This from a man who wrote Paul Keating's speeches and lived inside the Canberra bubble for years.

The first time the public got to see Demetriou's talent for deal-making was when he took over as head of the AFL players association and won a raft of concessions widely seen as having permanently altered the power balance between players and clubs. This boardroom nous, well-known in the football world, has brought him considerable wealth outside football.

He bought the house in East Hawthorn, where he lives with his second wife Symone and their three young daughters, for about $1.5 million in 2002; a shrewd investment given that it now has a value of about $2.5 million.

There is a holiday house at Mount Martha, a St Kilda Road apartment and a significant share of a Portsea property near the foreshore. Not a bad portfolio for someone who started working as a school teacher after leaving university in the early '80s.

Demetriou got his first big break in 1987, the year before he retired from playing, when he bought into an acrylic teeth business — Ruthinium — with three partners.

He soon became the firm's CEO and over the next decade increased sales by 500 per cent, pushing its turnover up to $12 million. In 2002, Demetriou joined waste management company Baxter Group as its non-executive chairman for an annual salary of $60,000.

Four years before leaving the company early this year, he was issued with shares and options that he sold for a $1.25 million profit. He remains a director of several companies, including the false teeth business — which exports to 75 countries — and an organic baby clothes store in Richmond.

A keen punter, he dabbles in horse ownership with friends and colleagues, and is regularly spotted at the Emirates marquee during the spring carnival.

Fellow punter and player Grant Thomas, who played with Demetriou at North Melbourne in 1984 and had several clashes with him when Thomas coached St Kilda, remembers him as ambitious and shrewd.

"He was a guy who was always very keen to be financially successful," he says. "If there was an idea or a money-making venture, Andrew was always at the forefront of it and the guy organising it.

"He was always going to be successful because he spoke to the right people, positioned himself with the right people and in his playing days was aligning himself with key successful business people."

Peter "Crackers" Keenan, who played against Demetriou and regularly interviews him on radio, says he stood out more for his manner than his playing ability.

Although Demetriou is "into the football culture", he "wasn't a football meat-head like a lot of blokes were", Keenan says. "It wasn't the be-and-end-all of his life."

The Andrew Demetriou story begins with his parents Tony and Chrysi, who migrated from Cyprus in the early 1950s in search of opportunity and found it in the fish and chip shop in Coburg. For 16 years, the couple worked from 5am to late at night, an example not lost on Demetriou and his three older brothers.

"I remember how selfless they were," he says. "You couldn't help but form an impression and learn from the sacrifices they were making."

The boys, who shared a room behind the shop, would all became professionals — but none quite as successful as the youngest.

First at Coburg North Primary, then at nearby Newlands High School, Demetriou stood out for his good grades and sporting prowess.

He played junior football at Pascoe Vale and was soon vying for selection at Essendon under-19s, the team he'd supported as a child and for which his older brother Jimmy had played a few games.

Ray "Slug" Jordon is a legendary junior coach who, in the late 1970s, was in charge of the under-19s and reserves at North Melbourne. He recalls a phone call from Demetriou asking for a clearance to North. The young wingman was ready to control his own destiny.

"He rang me to whinge about not getting a go at Essendon," Jordon says. "He didn't have a great kicking action but he was very quick and skinny. I was surprised Essendon let him go and had no problem giving him a game."

Jordon, celebrated almost as much for his colourful language as his coaching, noticed that young Demetriou was also a fluent swearer: "Andrew says I taught him some new words, but I think he bloody well knew them well before I met him."

In 1981, Demetriou broke into the seniors at North, where he was nicknamed "Gomez" and stayed for six years before finishing with a season at Hawthorn.

He is variously described as "good average", "an honest go-getter" and "reliable"; a wingman good enough to play more than 100 games but no stand-out.

John Kennedy snr, who coached him for three years at North, says Demetriou was one of the lads, but shrewder than most. He recalls a hot day in the United States, travelling by bus after an exhibition match, stopping at a river for a swim. The players started jumping in the water to cool off.

"We were at the water and, as young blokes do, they just bang straight in," Kennedy recalls. "But Andrew would pause and make sure there weren't any sharks there or any snags or anything like that. He was a very astute sort of bloke."

He was also the life of the party. Former teammates remember him throwing great parties at the house he shared with Kangaroos wingman Bruce Abernathy but none will talk on the record about what the AFL's most powerful man used to get up to after the final siren.

Kevin Maguire, a half-back flanker at the Kangaroos from 1979 to 1985, was one of Demetriou's best mates then. He remembers the two being plied with free wine and stumbling out of city nightclubs. But if there are any stories to be told, he won't say.

"I can't say any nitty-gritty sort of thing," he says. "Andy never got into trouble as far as getting into fights. He was one of those players that could see a situation arising and wouldn't put himself in that place. He was too smart for that."

Demetriou has been outspoken in his criticism of unruly footballers such as Alan Didak and Ben Cousins yet says he has sympathy for those who find themselves splashed in the media from Melbourne to Perth.

BUT he can't understand why they continue putting themselves in those situations. "There's no doubt that those sort of things were going on back when we played, just as often if not more. (But) the scrutiny and coverage of the game is nowhere near where it is today … and community values have changed. I just say to people that anyone in this game has to know they have to modify their lifestyle."

His acerbic wit made him popular at North Melbourne. Tim Harrington, who played a few seasons with the Kangaroos in the mid-1980s and is now their list manager, recalls a game at Waverley when Geelong star Gary Ablett clashed with Kangaroos backman David Ackerley.

The incident left Ackerley unconscious on the field while North players swarmed around Ablett.

"Ablett had apparently just turned to religion and was in Bible classes and all that stuff," Harrington says. "We all ran in and Andrew said something along the lines of 'what are you doing king-hitting people — you're supposed to have f---ing found God'. When the time was called for, he could fire up and get passionate."

But there were two sides to Demetriou: the knockabout who held his own on a footy trip was also a keen humanities student with liberal attitudes and intellectual interests uncommon in football circles. It's a point made by the highly political former football coach and broadcaster Phil Cleary, who says Demetriou's "urbane" approach to his position is the result of a humanities education.

Contemporaries say Demetriou's social attitudes were influenced by his history tutor, Jan Bassett, who became his first wife. They married after the feminist academic was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1995. She died in 1999, the year after he was persuaded to join the players' association.

Tom Boukogiannis says her death left a gaping hole that the grieving Demetriou filled by throwing himself into his job with the association. "It was a very difficult period of his life," he says. "How he ran the players' association and looked after Jan was incredible," he says. "It says a lot about him."

After two years running the association, Demetriou was poached by the AFL to fill the role of football operations manager, effectively second-in-charge of the competition. Just over three years later, he became chief executive when Wayne Jackson stepped down. He also found a new love and started a family.

His time at the top is widely viewed as successful. The revamped tribunal and the television rights deal — which secured the future of the 10 Victorian clubs — are cited among his biggest achievements.

But he has also lobbied hard for his "Respect and Responsibility" policy, to make the competition better for minorities and women.

And to date, he has stood firm in the face of Federal Government pressure to toughen the "three-strikes" drug policy, though there are signs his stance may be changing.

Demetriou is non-party political but widely seen to be left-leaning, particularly since his Australia Day speech in 2005, in which he suggested Australia was increasingly intolerant of immigrants.

In recent years, says one close observer of AFL operations, the Federal Government has come to view the AFL as "culturally out of step with (the Government)". "There is a vision of it as an organisation that has a small-l liberal bent". And, he notes, you don't lose votes giving the AFL a whack: "As Jack Elliott once said, no one barracks for the AFL."

Three of the nine AFL commissioners are seen as Labor-linked. Bill Kelty was head of the ACTU; former Carlton captain and merchant banker Mike Fitzpatrick was asked to run for a safe Labor seat; and female commissioner, Sydney lawyer Sam Mostyn, was a staffer for Paul Keating.

There have been no equivalents from the conservative side since Graeme Samuel, now head of the ACCC, former Fraser minister Peter Nixon and former Patricks chairman Peter Scanlan, who was an Elders director with former Carlton president John Elliott.

DEMETRIOU has declared he has no interest in a career in Parliament but, given his fondness for a political stoush, speculation lingers.

Red Symons, rock musician-turned-ABC broadcaster and a close friend, says Demetriou plays his politics close to his chest. "I don't think that in all the time I've known him Andrew has ever spoken about his political leanings.

"My presumption would be, given his working-class background, that he would tend towards the left rather than the right. On the other hand, in my experience of the Greek community, there's nobody more right wing and in favour of the Liberal Government than those who have in some stage of their life operated a fish and chip shop. So anything's possible."

Politics aside, Demetriou is known as a loyal friend but also a "good hater" of those he thinks have wronged him. One reason, perhaps, that in AFL circles even his perceived enemies are reluctant to talk.

Brian Cook, the Geelong CEO Demetriou beat to the AFL general manager role, then the top job three years later, says they have a "professional" relationship and that Demetriou has been good for the game. "I think he's so determined at times that he lacks a touch of flexibility," he says. "At times he's like all of us and his determination gets in the way of probably timing and patience.

"I think he can be confrontational … but I also believe out of that he has earnt respect of people because of his independence."

Another sharp football observer suggests that Demetriou has attracted old friends from his playing days at North to the AFL. Examples include medical commissioner Harry Unglik, NSW AFL chief Dale Holmes and former AFL executive (now Football Federation Australia chief) Ben Buckley.

"There's no doubt that Andrew remembers his enemies and looks after his friends," Buckley says.

But Demetriou says his reputation for having a long memory is ill-founded. "I'm not vindictive … I honestly don't go home and think about who I'm going to have a grudge against, I'm thinking more about which nappy to change."

Diverse interests and a golden touch

ANDREW Demetriou is paid $1 million a year for running the AFL, but his business interests extend beyond football. As chairman and part-owner of baby clothing designer Purebaby, he presides over a company whose products are stocked in more than 200 stores worldwide.

He is a director and partner of Ruthinium, which he bought with three others in 1987 from a man who ran it out of his home. It is now one of the world's leading acrylic teeth manufacturers.

Demetriou's golden touch extends to waste management company Baxter Group, where he made a $1.25 million profit after selling shares collected over four years.

His assets include his East Hawthorn home, valued at about $2.5 million, and a St Kilda Road apartment worth about $800,000. His Mount Martha property could fetch more than $400,000 while his Portsea house, of which he owns a third, is worth closer to $500,000.

"I'm probably not as ambitious as people might think," Demetriou says. "If you had told me when I was at university that I was going to be involved in false teeth then baby wear, I would have said you were mad.

"If you had told me I'd then be working in football, I would have said you were even madder."