‘We needed to stand up for ourselves’: Inside St Kilda’s ruthless rebrand and the great player raid

St Kilda’s decision to deliver a one-fingered salute to the entire AFL competition was formed towards the end of last season when the club’s leaders brought in a strategist they described as a high-level consultant who told them the Saints needed to change the narrative.

The so-called narrative had been one of a club that had achieved one premiership in 150 years. An organisation that had celebrated individual brilliance but rarely team success. Other clubs might have regarded the Saints over the years as a club of bunglers but what resonated with St Kilda bosses was that they were now seen by supporter groups as meek.

Led by chairman Andrew Bassat, CEO Carl Dilena and Ross Lyon and signed off by the board, the club decreed the narrative would move beyond the Saints’ motto of Strength Through Loyalty to a more progressive agenda deliberately setting out to ruffle feathers.

As Dilena described it to this columnist earlier in the season: “We needed to stand up for ourselves and be more unapologetic about that.”

It was a strategy that came naturally to coach Ross Lyon and his backroom list management team of Graeme Allan – who had unashamedly held a meeting with Tarryn Thomas towards the end of last season – and Stephen Silvagni. From early in the season it became known that the club had targeted Carlton free agent Tom De Koning offering him a reported seven-year $12.5 million contract – an offer that drew criticism from head office down.

And Bassat set the ball rolling 12 months ago at the Saints best and fairest dinner where he not only unloaded on the inequities of the draft and the unfairness of the northern academies and father-son rule but took aim at Brisbane two days after its premiership win.

Lyon, in his half-joking, half-biting style, happily took aim at his opponents. Of the struggling Carlton Football Club’s decision to change course on appointing him coach he told Channel Seven: “You make your bed and you lie in it. And I had to lie in mine and now they’re lying in theirs.” In May, he drew a sharp rebuke from Damien Hardwick and his former Fremantle charge Sam Collins when he described the Gold Coast Suns as the AFL’s “nepo baby”.

The coach told Josh Battle to empty his locker and leave Moorabbin when he broke the news he was joining Hawthorn and that he would not be welcome at the best and fairest.

Chairman Bassat later acknowledged he had overstepped the mark in singling out newly crowned premier Brisbane at the Trevor Barker Awards night, but continued to publicly double down on his fight for a cleaner draft. He stood defiant against his opponents from commissioners down and one club president who accused the Saints of attempting to “whinge their way to the top”.

And he and Dilena now seem to have achieved a significant breakthrough with a rule change removing father-sons and academy picks from at least the top 10 of next year’s draft and beyond to be put to the commission later this month.

In March, Bassat unsuccessfully tried to get AFL chairman Richard Goyder to remove himself as the head of the nominations committee searching for Goyder’s replacement.

Bassat, Dilena and Lyon would say that what seemed earlier this season as something of a half-baked game plan to take pot shots at everyone else was accompanied by genuine attempts to clean up their own backyard. In a largely symbolic but significant gesture, the Saints paid out a total $300,000 to 35 past players and officials who had entered a scheme of arrangement with the cash-strapped club half a century ago.

They attempted to improve match day conditions for wives and partners and – with six Indigenous players on their list – sought the regular counsel of the game’s most influential off-field Indigenous leader Paul Vandenbergh, who became a regular visitor to Moorabbin.

Lyon had rejected the prospect of Jack Silvagni back in early August, but changed his tune by the end of the home and away season and urged Allan to secure the deal. On Saturday, the coach will be in the stands at Engie Stadium watching another defender, the Giants’ Leek Aleer, before making a final call on whether to pursue him. Having secured De Koning and Silvagni, and closing in on Liam Ryan from West Coast, the club has also targeted the Suns’ Sam Flanders. Reports persist, despite the club’s denials, that they are chasing Hawthorn’s Cam Mackenzie as well.

St Kilda detractors say the club has overspent on a group that are hardly world beaters. The club retorts that all will fill significant roles in a side that should welcome back Max King next year alongside an improving group of young draft picks with more to come from their respected recruiting boss Simon Dalrymple.

At last week’s AFL Awards function in Melbourne, club bosses and coaches were collectively slamming St Kilda for inflating the market, but the club itself was unapologetic in persistently paying above market rates to attract talent to an unsuccessful club – a club with which Harley Reid had refused to negotiate and which one of his family members disparaged to his management.

Lyon himself has labelled it “the St Kilda tax”. But he did outline the club’s strategy at the start of this season to a small group of players over dinner in Melbourne’s CBD. In a gesture of goodwill three of those players – Callum Wilkie, Jack Sinclair and Rowan Marshall – were each paid a $50,000 bonus in 2025.

Given that St Kilda – who finished 12th, six wins out of the top eight – spent just 83 per cent of its salary cap this season with some of that money still going to Jack Billings (now at Melbourne) and Brad Crouch, the Saints were poised to win most chequebook wars.

But it all hinged on one player. Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera was the key domino. Had that domino fallen and the player chosen to leave, every strategic plan from back office to front to on-field would have fallen, too.

St Kilda bosses say the significance of Wanganeen-Milera’s decision to remain a Saint and become the highest-paid player in the game cannot be understated. As Saints supporter Gillon McLachlan told one club leader as the negotiations dragged on: “No price is too high.”

Lyon had been rattled by Battle’s departure given the player’s previously stated allegiance to the coach. Had Wanganeen-Milera walked out, the coach would have seriously considered his own longer-term future and worth to the club. De Koning probably would have knocked back his eye-watering contract offer. Wilkie, whose frustrations with the club became public in August, seemed largely centred around the club’s struggles to do a deal with the young star.

The newly blazered All-Australian Wanganeen-Milera changed the course of the season with his explosive last quarter against Melbourne at the end of July. Demons premiership coach Simon Goodwin was sacked a week later. But two weeks into August, Port Adelaide and Adelaide both remained steadfast in the belief they could lure Wanganeen-Milera.

It was at a Saturday night club function on August 16 that the player indicated to his close friend Brad Hill that he would be staying at Moorabbin. Two days later, with Hill by his side, Wanganeen-Milera told Lyon and his senior assistant Corey Enright that he would be accepting the Saints’ two-year deal.

Again the Saints drew criticism for paying so much more for a player they had been unable to secure one year earlier, but as the jubilant Lyon admitted to Channel Seven on the night of the decision, it would have been “catastrophic” had Wanganeen-Milera departed. As the season rolled to an end Lyon, Dilena, Bassat and football boss Dave Misson had all spoken confidently about the prospects he would re-sign, all the while becoming more and more agitated.

The coach even suggested that the situation could have become nasty, hinting that the Saints would not have traded Wanganeen-Milera under any circumstances. Could he have ended up at West Coast? Lyon intimated as much. Certainly, the 22-year-old’s departure would have made a mockery of so much of what Team Bassat and Lyon have said and done in 2025.

The new St Kilda playbook declaring the club would take on the competition and ruffle feathers might have been put in place through focus groups and fan polls slammed as idiotic by some influential supporters and signed off by the board, but it was tailor-made for the Saints coach.

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