According to one conspiracy theory circulating on Monday, the timing of Karmichael Hunt's revelations about the Gold Coast Suns' binges was a rugby league plot, meant to discredit the club on the occasion of their 100th AFL appearance. Exhibit A was the byline of a rugby league reporter on the News Corp story. Exhibit B was, well, um, can't you just tell by looking at him?

But why stop there? Hunt was league-born and bred, a superstar of that game, who five years ago suddenly became available to the rival AFL, at the knock-down price of a million a year, and was only too happy to front up to Andrew Demetriou's place to sign the deal, and not deterred even when Demetriou spilt the coffee that day. Deal done. Not even the Trojans moved with such alacrity to get their hands on that stiff-legged horse.

Four years were enough for this plant to fill out his dossier. His 44 games were irrelevant, not to mention invisible. It was all about the culture. Suddenly, all over front and back pages, thanks to Hunt, the seedy underbelly of the Suns was laid bare and left squinting and wriggling in the glare. Why bother with a club with a bit of extra lift when in your golf bag is something that will keep you high for three days?

It fooled no-one that half a dozen rugby league names were cited amid the general decadence. AFL people have always been sceptical of the idea of league culture anyway. Just last week, NSW coach Laurie Daley announced a feathery sanction on State of Origin II man-of-the-match Michael Jennings. Yes, he had been arrested for "hindering police and offence behaviour", said Daley, but it wasn't as if he had been "kicked out of any nightclubs or restaurants". Such immaculately high standards, so scrupulously observed.

Seen through that moral framework, it was nothing for Hunt to blow the cover of a few ex-Suns teammates for the gain of a lesser charge for himself, leaving him free to head off to gouge and undermine a third code. Spilt coffee to begin, split beans to end; it is almost poetic.

Sadly, as ever, the more plausible explanation is not conspiracy, but stuff-up. As in stuff up your nose. Hunt took the AFL's money and ran, but not very far, often or quickly, about as fast as a wooden horse, in fact. At the Suns, he found a familiar environment, because professional football clubs zealously mind each other's businesses and so don't differ greatly from one to another, nor from code to code. Young, fit men, wealthy beyond their years, but constrained and supervised in an almost unnatural way for most of their working week and year, predictably overdo it when they are let loose. All that changes from time to time is the answer to the question: "What's your poison?"

The stereotype holds true down to the detail of the pair of Ned Flanders who disapprove and take no part, but come for the camraderie.

But there is something different about the Suns, something fragile and vulnerable. They are a rootless club in a landscape infamously infertile for professional sports clubs. AFL, league basketball and soccer all have tried and failed there, repeatedly. The populace, though fast-growing, is not interested, not when they have all those beaches and boats and malls and fairgrounds. The owners, though not all felons, were or are boys with toys. The players, until recently, were hirelings or chancers. The motif was that all were there for a good time, not a long time. The original league incarnation, the Seagulls, was better known and more successful as a nightclub than a team. The Bears were fly-by-nighters; even their corporate lunches were flown in from Melbourne.

The Suns at their formation told and sold a good story. They banned their starlets from the nightclubs, instead compulsorily signing them up to surf clubs. They bought in not just the best player in the game, but the most upstanding. They built a glittering new stadium. They acknowledged that they lived in a "land of circuses", as one administrator put it, where the people expect tricks, but worked to create something less ephemeral, more substantial.

Mid-way through last season, Gold Coast appeared to be building something other than another 30-storey apartment tower. Then Gary Ablett went down, so did the Suns, and they sacked their coach, and a rash of injuries struck, and the new season started disastrously, and tales of unrest began to emerge, and they lost to Carlton, and now they have been "exposed" as another party club, a child of its hedonistic environment, from the long Gold Coast tradition ...

Truth be told, the Suns probably party only as much as any club, especially now Hunt has moved on, and are no more or less indisciplined. But they least of any club could afford this loss of face. This is the market that Leigh Matthews warned from the start would be tougher for the the AFL to crack even than western Sydney. However tough it was last week, it is tougher this week.

No double agent could have done a better job of sabotage than Karmichael Hunt.