Garbage concept or worth the wait: Does rebuilding an AFL club take longer than ever?

Ross Lyon scoffed at a line of questioning in his post-match press conference last week as he walked down a corridor afterwards in the bowels of Marvel Stadium with St Kilda football boss David Misson.

Lyon, whose Saints had just beaten lowly North Melbourne, had been quizzed on how hard a rebuild is. In his eyes, the question did not need to be asked because a rebuild is obviously really hard.

Adelaide started this round on top of the ladder, but have not played a final since losing the 2017 season decider to Richmond. They had, in Lyon’s estimation, been building for six of those years, during which their placings ranged from 10th to 18th.

Lyon also highlighted the praise being directed towards his old club Fremantle’s list, while adding the caveat that they played finals only once in the past nine seasons.

This begs the question: has the current AFL environment, from compromised drafts to free agency and two extra clubs, with Tasmania’s introduction also only three years away, made the rebuilding process – whether it is called a reset, a transition, or something else – tougher and longer?

It is challenging to answer, and not even Champion Data can quantify it, but Lyon thinks it has. He wants the league to rid the first round of the draft of any compromise, from father-sons to academy picks.

Ex-Hawthorn, Port Adelaide and St Kilda list boss Chris Pelchen believes that proposal goes too far, but would like the AFL to further increase the draft points that clubs require to match opposition bids in the first round.

“It is more difficult to rebuild now, firstly, because of the expansion of teams … which has continually diluted the talent pool available,” Pelchen told this masthead.

“The AFL then added more mechanisms and systems that essentially offer greater freedom of [player] movement, which can help a club rebuild, but also can make it harder because someone integral to your rebuild might move.”

The Roo-build

The Crows’ and Dockers’ rise is not the sole reason this topic is hot. There is also North Melbourne’s run of five-straight bottom-two finishes, which could stretch to six this year, including wooden spoons in 2021-22.

They avoided a third in a row the next season with a last-round win over Gold Coast – but that meant they drafted second, and missed out on Harley Reid.

Colby McKercher is proving a decent consolation prize, and crucially re-signed until the end of 2028, the first AFL season for his home-state team Tasmania.

But everything North have done has been scrutinised, from their deep list cuts in 2020, to their handling of Jason Horne-Francis and drafting Will Phillips over Logan McDonald, trading the No.1 pick to prioritise Harry Sheezel and George Wardlaw over Aaron Cadman and even picking Zane Duursma instead of Daniel Curtin.

The Roos are not the only ones kicking themselves for not selecting key forward Logan Morris before the Lions at No.31 in the 2023 draft, but they had a glaring need and no one else had three picks in the 20s.

North Melbourne did use one of those selections in the 20s to draft 200-centimetre defender Wil Dawson, but, perhaps, took too long into their rebuild to start properly addressing their key-position holes.

The Kangaroos’ call to trade their future first-rounder last year to Richmond for the last pick of the opening round in 2024 – No.27, used on Matt Whitlock – and the Tigers’ 2025 second-rounder also raised eyebrows, particularly now it could be the No.2 selection.

That followed a month after they traded what was then the No.25 pick, eventually pushed back four spots by academy and father-son selections, to the Western Bulldogs for 28-year-old Caleb Daniel.

Would Whitlock still have been there if they kept that pick? Maybe.

“We’ve got enough kids in now, and we’ve hit the trade period and got some mature boys in, so it’s time to get moving,” North’s recruiting manager Will Thursfield said at the time.

“You’d hope we’d improve quite a bit, given the cattle we’ve brought in, and another year in these young kids – but it’s hard to say. At the end of the day, we’ve got to back ourselves in a bit.”

North Melbourne last played finals in 2016, and are onto their fourth senior coach in that time, Alastair Clarkson, behind Brad Scott, Rhyce Shaw and David Noble.

Clarkson, who combined with Pelchen, Graham Wright and others to lift Hawthorn from also-rans to premiers in 2008, lashed out last weekend at criticism of how long the Roos’ rebuild was taking, labelling it “hysteria of expectation”.

How the Lions did it

Brisbane Lions are the reigning premiers, contested the past two grand finals and made a preliminary final in 2022, so they are well established under coach Chris Fagan as competition powerhouses.

It is easy to forget that the Lions spent nine seasons holidaying in September, from 2010-18, after the triumphant Leigh Matthews era ended and premiership stars Michael Voss and Justin Leppitsch could not resurrect the club’s fortunes.

Brisbane won a combined 10 games across Fagan’s first two seasons in charge – displaying huge improvement in the second half of 2018 – before they finished second at the end of the 2019 home-and-away season. They suffered a straight-sets finals exit that year, but have steadily gone deeper since.

Fagan inherited a so-so list, but there were building blocks, such as Dayne Zorko, Harris Andrews, Hugh McCluggage, Eric Hipwood, Jarrod Berry and Oscar McInerney. Hawthorn champion Luke Hodge arrived for the 2018 season to help set standards.

Brisbane made 35 changes across the next three off-seasons, while their gun recruiter Steve Conole delivered a strong group from the 2017 draft: No.1 pick Cam Rayner, Zac Bailey, Brandon Starcevich and Jack Payne.

“It was a terrific one for the footy club,” Conole told this masthead previously. “We walked out of the draft that year pretty pleased and content with how it unfolded.”

Dom Ambrogio became one of the game’s best list managers with his recruiting of Lachie Neale, Charlie Cameron, Joe Daniher and Josh Dunkley. It was easier to do that once Brisbane were thriving, but they overcame difficult times, including the infamous “go-home five”.

Peaking in the middle

Where many rebuilds fail is when they peter out barely inside the top eight, sometimes because of an impatience to see the process through.

Pelchen pitched an eight-year plan to St Kilda’s board in 2013, based on the Saints contending for a premiership in 2020-21.

There were tweaks by the time St Kilda unveiled the plan in March the next year, with the idea to be in the top four by 2018 and winning a flag before 2020. Pelchen resigned as head of football that October after a lengthy review found the Saints needed to focus less on list management and more on high performance.

“I had board members question why we had to wait so long,” Pelchen said of his original plan.

“I didn’t think that was too long at all. We had a compromised salary cap in 2012-13, from a lot of back-ended contracts, so 2014 was the first clean air the club had from that position. It’s what Brisbane went through from 2004-06 [after their premiership three-peat].

“St Kilda, collectively, wanted to be competitive, and have the opportunity to play finals. The belief at the time was, ‘We can’t afford to be at the bottom’, which was something I was critical of.”

Pelchen said most clubs preferred to be in one of two situations – contending for a premiership, or finishing in the bottom four to gain higher draft picks – but would never admit that publicly.

Essendon missed finals in 2015-16, and since then, have never qualified for back-to-back finals series. They placed no higher than seventh at the end of home-and-away seasons in 2017, 2019 and 2021.

The Bombers have not won a final since 2004.

The Saints missed the finals from 2012-19, won a final in 2020 – after trading for Bradley Hill, Dan Butler, Zak Jones, Paddy Ryder and Dougal Howard – finished 10th the next two years, then exited the finals in the opening week a season later.

Neither Essendon nor St Kilda played finals in the past two years, but under coaches Scott and Lyon, they belatedly appear to be embracing a proper rebuild that values the draft.

That said, Sydney premiership coach Paul Roos once described rebuilding as a “garbage concept” that creates a negative culture and can lead to a cycle of disappointment.

The Swans, much like Geelong, have largely defied the AFL’s equalisation measures with strong development, a sturdy culture, and savvy drafting and recruiting – albeit both experienced fortune, with academy and father-son stars, respectively.

Pelchen said clubs needed to place themselves in a position to contend across several seasons, like what the Lions did, to maximise their chances.

“That’s why I still believe North Melbourne are on the right path,” he said.

“It’s funny to say because it’s unprecedented to finish in the bottom two six years in a row, and they made some mistakes – everyone has – but what they’ve done in the last two or three years is start selecting the right players.

“You can’t fix every problem immediately, particularly with a compromised draft. But this period [down the bottom] will be worth it if they are ultimately successful in the next four or five years.”

Keep up to date with the best AFL coverage in the country. Sign up for the Real Footy newsletter.