The three clubs that could entice John Longmire back to coaching

John Longmire became a football coach again late last year. He spent six weeks coaching Sydney’s under-18 academy players, filling a hole left by the departing Colin O’Riordan, who had taken over as the Swans’ AFLW coach. He loved every minute of it.

Having sensationally quit as the Swans’ senior coach 12 months earlier with one year remaining on his contract, saying he needed to “stop and rest, and reset,” Longmire was back in his element; leading the development of talented teenagers at the academy that has been an enduring passion.

It has now become a key part of an overarching corporate role well away from the senior Sydney team he coached for 14 years.

Ask anyone at Sydney, or the multitude of friends and acquaintances at all levels of the game that Longmire has accumulated during close to four decades in the VFL/AFL, and all agree that he has been revitalised by his departure from senior coaching. He looks younger and healthier, and seems more relaxed and self-reflective. People are constantly saying he’s “a new man”.

Senior coaching takes its toll on the best of them, and Longmire’s last two seasons in the job became increasingly challenging for him and those around him. Even though no one at the club has said that those stress levels were linked to the disastrous 2024 grand final, which proved his last game as Sydney coach, it was an unfitting end to an extraordinarily successful 14 years.

Longmire, 55, won’t say publicly whether he wants to coach again, but clearly he hasn’t ruled it out and equally clearly he looms as a leading candidate across a number of clubs. Notably Carlton, where Michael Voss is in the final year of his contract and North Melbourne, where Alastair Clarkson has two years remaining but might not coach beyond this season.

And then there’s Tasmania, where Nathan Buckley remains the frontrunner but is still not over the line. Although, it is telling that Cats boss Steve Hocking contacted Devils chief Brendon Gale before employing Buckley as senior assistant to Chris Scott. The prevailing view is that the job is Buckley’s to lose.

Quite simply, Longmire’s record is too compelling – his 63 per cent win-loss ratio sits second only to Scott among AFL-era coaches to have overseen more than 150 games – for him not to return to the role that remains the most demanding but, significantly, the most financially rewarding in the off-field game.

Bearing in mind, too, that his youngest child finished school last year, making a move from Sydney potentially more palatable.

Asked recently what he had learnt from his time away from senior coaching, and would he do anything differently, Longmire said recently: “Where do I start?” To quote Leigh Matthews: “You coach better the second time around.”

The coaching question is posed to him most weeks, and notably by his new Swans chief executive Matthew Pavlich. The Sydney CEO remains an interested party not only because Longmire has forged a successful new career on the club’s executive, but also because Pavlich – like most senior Sydney people – believes Longmire’s future holds a multitude of choices.

Sydney’s head of football Leon Cameron has watched Longmire oversee the creation of a significant new revenue stream for the club and believes both corporate and football options remain open to him in the long term.

The club’s new academy boss Wayne Campbell, who reports directly to Longmire and loved watching him pick up the whistle again over summer, said he hopes for his (Campbell’s) sake that Longmire remains in his current role because he has found working under him so rewarding.

It is a rare thing in AFL to see a senior coach hand over the reins to his No.2 (Dean Cox) and remain in the building long term. “It’s a very Sydney thing to do,” observed Campbell. “They tend to keep their good people.”

Gale met Longmire in the middle of last year and, while no job was officially offered, Gale discussed more than one potential role with the 2012 premiership coach, and primarily one as head of football. Those close to Longmire believe it was the Devils’ senior coaching role that remains of far more interest to him.

Although Paul Roos remained at the Swans overseeing their football academy after he had handed the reins to Longmire, that role was significantly smaller and came to an end when the academy sponsorship funds were reduced and Roos’ pay packet along with it.

Any suggestion that Longmire’s new role was linked with the final year of his coaching contract has been laid to rest as he moves into 2026 overseeing the Sydney Swans Institute, established 12 months ago as an off-field “shock absorber” to the club’s heavy reliance on on-field wins and losses (the Swans missed finals only twice over Longmire’s 14 seasons for five grand finals, six top four finishes and a premiership).

Even though part of his wage last year was included in the soft cap in an agreement reached with the AFL, and Sydney have significantly bolstered Cox’s assistant coaching team this year, Longmire stayed away from the football department, bringing 300 companies into the club’s new Royal Hall of Industries headquarters as part of the new leadership and development program.

Longmire is also building programs with the University of NSW’s business arm and works closely with the AFL’s development boss Rob Auld.

Like all the best coaches, observed Longmire’s old boss Tom Harley recently, he is endlessly curious.

Next month over Gather Round the Swans Institute will unveil its first “Adelaide edition” where Longmire heads a day of leadership and development sessions alongside a number of Sydney bosses, AFL No. 2 Harley, Adam Goodes and Michael O’Loughlin.

To make sense of Longmire’s potential as a future senior coach with a new lease of life is to understand his past. Alongside his 200 games for North Melbourne, a premiership and a Coleman Medal, Longmire flirted briefly with a career in player management alongside his enduring, deep involvement with the AFL Players’ Association.

He once said he walked away from his management role at IMG because he felt bad about a player contract he had struck with a club that he believed deep down was too generous.

After 332 games coaching Sydney – he lost only 122 of those with a finals win-loss record of 14-14 – he had enough of football, and it seemed that football had enough of him. But Longmire always indicated the termination of the relationship was temporary.

While Buckley moved into the media and seems headed back towards a senior role via job working alongside a man widely regarded the game’s best, both Adam Simpson and Ken Hinkley have chosen to work in the media, with Simpson also adopting a part-time mentoring job at Carlton.

And Longmire? Not only has he taken on a whole new full-time role, but it says plenty about him, and the Swans, that he was able to do so within their walls.

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