Sydney's previously little-known new boss, Andrew Pridham, might have announced himself with a bang to the wider AFL community through a string of colourful, and biting, barbs he aimed at Eddie McGuire last week. But the effort of his predecessor, who once looked deep into a television camera and flipped the bird when talking about the same Collingwood boss, will take some matching.

Even so, in a matter of days - five months after he took over from Richard Colless - Pridham has shown he's not going to be anyone's doormat.

In giving as good as he got to McGuire, he also revealed just how sick and tired the Swans are with the mud that's been slung their way in recent times.

By describing as "petty" the decision of John Longmire to decline an invitation to join the international rules team, McGuire started the latest fire. A slanging match ensued. About the Swans recent recruiting bonanzas and their (now scrapped) cost of living allowances. About McGuire being the Clive Palmer of football, about his roles as a broadcaster, club president and general AFL powerbroker. And about Sydney's motivation for protecting its player development academy.

By the time Pridham caught his breath and agreed to sit down with Fairfax, he says he's done with talking about McGuire. In a ground floor cafe of a skyscraper in Sydney's CBD, the accomplished businessman orders coffee and drinks it at an enthusiastic pace. His closing comments on his very public spat with the Magpies honcho include the observation that he was the "retaliator", not the "instigator".

Pridham adds that he does not regret a word he said - "I think it needed to be said". The pair haven't spoken since.

Pridham told Gillon McLachlan as much when the new AFL CEO phoned him last week in something of a peacekeeping move. But none of this means Pridham will be any less inclined to speak his mind in future.

"If another situation arises where I think somebody is speaking inappropriately about the Sydney Swans, I will speak up," he says.

Immediately true to his word, Pridham expands on Sydney's dismay about suggestions this season that the club has somehow cheated by assembling the spectacular forward line it boasts.

The arrows, in the view of the Swans, have flown from many quarters. From McGuire, obviously, but also from the Western Bulldogs' president Peter Gordon, Hawthorn president Andrew Newbold, and even Carlton coach Mick Malthouse who - in what some at Sydney considered a backhanded compliment - recently declared the Swans' 2014 list the deepest he'd seen in his time in football.

A father of three who grew up in Adelaide as a one-eyed Norwood fan, Pridham says he has no problem with the AFL revising the compensation rules for father-son selections. He flatly dismisses, however, a vision for a "pure draft" recently outlined by Newbold. That, Pridham says, is simply "not possible".

Even more stridently, he gives the impression he'd go to the grave fighting any rewriting of the bidding process for young players developed through the Swans' academy. Just four years young, the academy has hardly been a source of riches for Sydney yet - or the other three NSW and Queensland-based clubs that have similar set-ups - as rival club bosses seem to fear.

"The reality with the academies is that Brandon Jack is the only player to have played a [senior AFL] game," Pridham says.

"The AFL puts in $250,000 a year into our academy. We spend a million dollars. So we've spent $3 million for 16 games. People have to put it into perspective."

While in the verbal jousting last week McGuire portrayed Pridham as an AFL newcomer, he has been a Sydney director for 13 years and was groomed as a future club chairman by Colless from day one.

The pair met in a corporate setting, independent of football. As it happened, Colless never forgot the young punk who brashly declared that a business idea he was interested in pursuing would never work.

In his 20s and a junior in his workplace at the time, Pridham was chided by his colleagues for daring to be so brash with a client. Years later, however, Colless tracked him down. He wanted to tell Pridham that his forecast was right.

In 2002, when Pridham was living and working in Singapore but planning to resettle in Australia, Colless contacted him again. Also in Asia for business, the then Sydney chairman asked Pridham to dinner. It was there that he asked if he'd join the football club's board.

More than a decade later, and having recently filled Colless' shoes, Pridham describes football as "a relatively small part of what I do".

Now 47, Pridham is CEO of Moelis & Company in Australia - an arm of the New York headquartered and stock exchange listed investment banking business - and busier than ever. He came to the position from JP Morgan, where he was executive chairman. Before that, he ran UBS in Australia.

"Andrew Ireland runs the football club, without question; 99 per cent of what happens, happens without me," Pridham says.

"And I do take advice. I'm not a lunatic that just goes and flies off the handle, doing things without thinking."

Business and football aside, Pridham is a keen art collector with a penchant for paintings. He has a farm that retired Swans legend Paul Kelly helps run, and while he once played Australian football regularly, his personal sporting pursuits have moved from the oval to tennis court. Something that also becomes clear is that while Pridham's CV boasts some very serious positions, he's a character more inclined to see the humorous side of life.

"I'm not a very serious person," he declares at one point.

But when it comes to the serious side of the AFL, Pridham has clearly learnt from Colless that there are times when unwritten rules about hierarchy and diplomacy need not be followed.

"But I'm not Richard," he says. "I do things differently to him. I'm probably more private than Richard."

Perhaps so, although Pridham is on Twitter and in fact used the platform to rebuke a couple of McGuire's claims last week. There's clearly no regrets on that front either.

"@Pridhamhq. Get on," he says, advertising his account ID with another chuckle.

While Pridham thinks the AFL remains the most professionally run code in Australia, from his vantage point he senses the NRL is fast closing the gap. For this reason Pridham says that the AFL Commission, and transforming executive, need to think very carefully about focuses.

"The NRL has got Graeme Samuel on their commission. They're now professionally run. Look out, because they're not mugs.

"I think they're catching up very, very quickly. Far more quickly than people in Victoria probably understand."

As a boss in the non-dominant football code in Sydney, Colless had 20 years as chair of the Swans. Could Pridham?

"No," he replies in a nanosecond. "And I think after last week I've got one year!"

That's seriously doubtful.