The Rebirth of the Fremantle Football Club
The Fremantle Football Club is being reborn. The current team and leadership represent not a diversion from a history of failure, but a reckoning with an institutionalised tendency towards instability
The Fremantle Football Club has represented organisational mediocrity for 31 years. Often told through parables of Andrew McLeod, Trent Croad, Levi’s Jeans, and prodigal son Jesse Hogan, the term “Dockery” has hovered like a spectre over the ill-fated club since inception. Often rationalised as simply the innate loser, the calcium-deficient brother of King Midas down the road, this propensity to football poverty is not the result of isolated, incidental poor decision making, but a structural and organisational plague that has prevented the club from being anything other than very bad. Instability was institutionalised off-field first and informed playing performance second, soaking the limestone walls at South Fremantle Park and seeping onto the training field like a contaminant in the water supply.
As the current team seeks to venture where no purple has ventured before, it does so with the backing of the first environment conducive to sustainable football success ever actualised in Fremantle. In 31 years, Fremantle have had only one run of consecutive finals. While this team is evidently different to any other assembled in the anchor, behind the team, equally significant change is afoot in the commercial, competitive and cultural context of the Fremantle Football Club.
Birth Defects (1994-2002)
If you know any 60-year-old West Australians that are yet to go insane, they may be able to tell you something about the creation of the Fremantle Football Club in 1995. Most recollections will invoke the overlooking of Andrew McLeod or the drafting of Clive Waterhouse. Often ignored in this retelling are how decisions like these came to be, the context they were made in, and the raft of institutional deficiencies woven into the fabric of the club.
As the club was conceived, the West Australian Football Commission implemented guardrails to protect the viability of the already hugely successful West Coast Eagles. The incumbent had been pivotal in the growth of WA football and was to be protected. In 1995, Fremantle was forced to sell corporate partnerships at the same price as the Eagles to ensure the golden goose remained fully feathered. Fremantle had marketed itself as a working-class club, based in a town with comparatively low disposable income and established relationships to local WAFL clubs. Priced the same, purple partnerships provided narrow commercial viability against the established blue and gold product in WA. 35% of commercial boxes for Fremantle games went unsold and the club entered the competition without an opportunity to build a stable commercial footing.
Commercial fragility written in red ink dried and calcified in football terms through under-resourcing and subsequent recruiting mistakes. Fremantle hired their inaugural head coach, Gerard Neesham, in May of 1994. The club was unable to hire any recruiting staff until September, meaning the footballing ability of non-WA players like Andrew McLeod was known to Neesham only through hearsay. The infamous decision to trade McLeod was not an incidental, individual blunder, but the result of inadequate resourcing due to organisational immaturity.
The drafting of Clive Waterhouse at pick one in 1995 was a similar consequence of the concessions given to other AFL clubs when Fremantle entered the competition. To fill its squad, Fremantle was allowed to recruit 14 uncontracted senior players from existing teams across the AFL. As compensation, the affected clubs were given rights to contract draft-age players ahead of the national draft. Fremantle took Todd Ridley and Tony Delaney from Essendon. The Bombers were given the rights to select future hall of famer players Matthew Lloyd and Scott Lucas. Waterhouse was drafted at pick number one as the 15th best draft-age player of 1995.
And so, in this environment, a new football club was thrust upon the earth. Not exactly organic, never fully formed; the first birth of the Fremantle Football Club was somewhere between immaculate conception and organisational caesura.
The wide-eyed Wharfie in 1995 would yet to have known the fate of Andrew McLeod or Clive Waterhouse, and in this blissful ignorance could not conceive of the purple-hued cloud forming above their new club. Fremantle took its first, infantile steps, stumbling along like a moron-Odysseus on its path to becoming “Dockery”.
Arrested Development (2002-2010)
Fremantle remained encumbered by underresourcing and organisational mismanagement as the new millennium settled in. Chris Connolly begins as coach in 2002 with the club on the bottom of the ladder and $8m in debt. The year prior, Fremantle had managed to win two games and breach the salary cap in the same season, setting an early standard for innovation in incompetence. Appointed alongside Connolly in 2002, CEO Cameron Schwab believed;
“there were genuine fears for the club. It only existed from 2001 because the owners (the WAFC) funded it for the next little period.”
Corporate leadership had been overhauled after the 2001 disaster and commercial viability slowly recovered. From 2001 to 2006, the front of the jersey graduated from Hard Yakka to BankWest, corporate revenue improved, home crowds at Subiaco Oval improved from 22,000 to 37,000 to solidify a consumer revenue base, and the club’s overall trading environment recovered from a $2.5m loss position to $26m of revenue.
For a moment, there seemed to be alignment in the club’s on-field performance and the environment supporting it off-field. Importantly, an identity had formed among the fans and Fremantle community, with home crowds revelling in ‘Purple Haze’ games and the club actively prioritising performance at Subiaco Oval ahead of interstate ventures to improve fan experience. A mood of optimism grew as Fremantle seemingly broke the shackles that bound the club in the early years and found surer footing both in its commercial environment and playing performance.
Connolly oversaw the most successful on-field period in the club’s fledgling history, taking Fremantle to a preliminary final in 2006 led by stars that were for the first time comprehensively Fremantle stars, no longer relying on mercenaries from the east. After ten years, the club seemed to be growing up.
Connolly was fired the next year after five seasons. At his exit press conference, Connolly reflected on his dismissal;
“It was the right thing to do… It will take away the dark storm clouds that are hanging over the club.’‘
Connolly was a better coach than he was an oracle. He was an average coach. He was however, to that point the best coach Fremantle had seen, and most likely the best available at that time. The decision to fire him in 2007, mid season, was indicative of a false dawn in organisational maturity. Fremantle remained an organisation that despite momentary elevation, lacked the confidence to weather a poor season with a proven, committed coach. The clouds remained and Fremantle’s failures began to develop an innate farcical nature;
“Fremantle star forward Chris Tarrant has been accused of punching a Darwin politician and baring his backside to a woman at a nightclub during the Dockers’ weekend AFL trip to the Northern Territory… In a separate incident… Mark Harvey was knocked unconscious by an unidentified man at the same venue.”
Harvey regained consciousness and a month later gained a head coaching role. In 2008, the tenure of CEO Cameron Schwab came to an end also mid season - neatly punctuating an era that flirted with competence and competitiveness, but ultimately never overhauled the structural fragilities at Fremantle. By 2010, the club had cultured a reputation for instability. A brief window in the mid-2000’s was the exception that proved the rule. The Fremantle Dockers were undeniably, ‘Dockery’.
Death (2010-2019)
Taking over from Schwab in 2008, Steve Rosich presided for 8 years at Fremantle and delivered a wide variety of outcomes. The man who decisively executed the heist of Ross Lyon was unceremoniously fired alongside him seven years later, on the same day that Lyon, too was walked out.
Fremantle under the Steve Rosich and Ross Lyon era of the 2010’s was marked by unprecedented success. The corporate side of the organisation had matured in rhythm with the emergence of a capable football program. Australian sporting organisations are nothing without ethically questionable corporate partners, and Woodside joining in 2010 signalled a turn towards relevance even before the Lyon coup. Purple storm clouds grew thinner each year as Fremantle reached heights never experienced, with 2013 to 2015 providing national relevance among a plethora of club firsts for Fremantle: a grand final, 40,000 members, a Brownlow, and the minor premiership.
Between 2010 and 2016 Rosich and Lyon sketched the outline of a club that could sustain success. Under their leadership, the club had begun identifying innate characteristics that provide the competitive advantages enjoyed by the competition’s dominant clubs. Geelong mixes Victorian-centrism with the only real home ground advantage in that state, Sydney provides relative obscurity for the biggest stars in football, Collingwood the opposite. All remain irrepressibly relevant by combining these advantages with sound management and organisational stability.
Fremantle had never capitalised on the migratory patterns of West Australian footballers returning home in the way West Coast had done, but the allure of life under Ross and a club in vogue could break that trend. Stability had formed at the top of the club, with Fremantle’s newfound consumer and commercial strength allowing it to invest long term in player amenities at Cockburn. The WA government chipped in with a brand-new stadium. Fremantle had ‘the coach’; 2015 should have been the beginning of a watershed.
No club has seen a single season fall in ladder position greater than the Fremantle Football club collapsing from 1st in 2015 to 16th in 2016. Largely an exogenous shock due to injury and age, Fremantle’s newfound stability should have provided the means to restump, replumb, rewire and forge ahead. The need to overturn a playing list should not provide an obstacle over which an entire organisation trips, stumbles and unceremoniously falls on its face.
For Fremantle, organisational memory seemed to guide the hand that held the axe. Terminal decline set in and was again punctuated by farce;
“Michael Johnson… accused of assaulting a man in a kebab shop, who was reportedly filming while the player was in the store with his pants pulled down.”
The next few years are arguably the most ‘Dockery’ in the entire wretched history of the Fremantle Football Club. Attempts to clutch at the mirage of a competent list reeked of desperation. The names Bennell, McCarthy, Matera and Kersten hardly conjure in the mind images of glory. The latter name was nearly paid out to retain Lachie Neale, who rightly sensed the odour emanating from the corpse of a newly deceased era. Record-setting resumed in 2019, with Fremantle experiencing the greatest single season fall in membership recorded. Vultures hovered in the WA media as the hot sun of successive Perth summers baked in a compounding series of off-season errors.
Good clubs do not lose CEO’s and head coaches on the same day, mid-season. Despite cosplaying as one for a number of years under Ross and Rosich, Fremantle proved they were not a good club.
From the early 2010’s, Fremantle had seen alignment between an ascendant playing list and a mature leadership layer. That alignment maintained as the players aged and declined, with leadership experiencing similar decay as they approached the end of the decade. Opposed to an intransigent Lyon, WA football media developed a ferocious appetite for conflict that drifted towards Cockburn and infiltrated a board that had for some time remained harmonious. Leaks to media became rife. An orchestra of ‘private agendas’, corridor confrontations and secret meetings reached a crescendo when Rosich and Lyon were ousted late in the 2019 season.
Like Saturn, Ross Lyon’s revolution ate its children. Between the end of the 2018 season and start of 2021, the following positions were overturned.
An era of stability, vision, investment, and success had been dismantled. Fremantle had dared to lift its head above the trenches it had dug for itself over the previous 20 years and after taking in a 5-year breath of fresh air, a bullet arrived between the eyes. Gleefully, the WA media picked at the carcass. Fremantle returned to dysfunction and instability. Order had been restored.
Rebirth (2019 to 2026)
The benefit of clearing house is that the empty roles can be filled with new people under new leadership. Simon Garlick as CEO, Justin Longmuir as Head Coach and David Walls as Head of Player Personnel were all appointed within a three-month span between season 2019 and 2020.
The collapse of the Rosich/Lyon era provided a near-blank slate for incoming CEO Simon Garlick to preside over. Garlick was identified as a highly talented football executive, finding himself on the board of the Western Bulldogs only three years after his playing career ended. At Fremantle, he would follow an era that at the very least had signalled the possibility of enduring success. Ignoring the football stuff, Fremantle as a commercial vehicle was as well placed as any in the league. Fast forwarding to 2025, the club requires the 7th lowest allocation of AFL revenue thanks to a competition-5th net football income. It draws crowds beaten only by Collingwood (thankyou to @seanHPN, link below), and its corporate partners have grown both more ethically dubious and more lucrative.
Towards the end of Justin Longmuir’s first season in 2020, Longmuir was filling multiple coaching duties in the absence of line coaches, partly thanks to the remaining Lyon salary still taking up the cap on football expenditure. David Walls was tasked with overturning a list burdened by the short-termism of Ross Lyon’s final years, and Garlick confronted a pandemic. Nothing came easy.
At surface level, the early years continued to signal instability and organisational dysfunction. The playing list lost senior players to trade, a young Victorian in Adam Cerra barely unpacked his suitcase, and the WA media had fresh meat to pick at in the scandals of Jesse Hogan. Behind the scenes however, club leadership was already demonstrating uncharacteristic competence.
The club under Garlick navigated COVID deftly, ensuring the crisis provided an opportunity to make a case for schedule revision at the AFL. Garlick joined the AFL’s ‘Competition Committee’ in 2021 as the first Fremantle representative to do so. Cracks had formed in the foundations of the AFL’s fixturing model, and Garlick keenly sensed an opportunity to drive a wedge in. The home and away fixture provides to both WA clubs arguably the greatest natural disadvantage in the competition, yet no confrontation had been forced by leadership at either West Coast or Fremantle to address the possibility of change. COVID provided an opportunity, and in Garlick, a flag bearer for a fairer fixture emerged.
As demonstrated, the Fremantle Football Club had historically only experienced organisational stability during times of on-field success. The breathing space afforded by a team making and winning finals seemed the only antidote to the institutional fragility at the core of the club, rather than on-field success being borne of competent management. For the first time, between 2019 and 2022, Fremantle was being managed well and playing poorly. These years signalled the beginning of the rebirth of the Fremantle Football Club.
David Walls turned the wheel of a list rebuild, compiling pieces of a functioning playing list through the draft and identifying prime prospects for western migration. Intuitively, bringing West Australian talent back home becomes more difficult the better the player identified becomes. Carrying this out effectively requires strong leadership and clear planning, two things Fremantle has historically been anathema to. The three years of trade and draft manoeuvring between 2022 and 2024 boldly signalled a level of managerial competence not before seen at Fremantle. In short; Fremantle borrowed from the future to acquire a highly priced Luke Jackson, reset, stockpiled to originally target Swan Logan McDonald, pivoted and expended that capital on an even more expensive asset in Shai Bolton. The confident execution of an ambitious strategy indicated an assuredness that diverged from 30 years of history.
A finals stint rose and dissipated in 2022, seeming to signal the ascendant talent of Brayshaw, Serong, Young and others were at a level required to vault the team back into contention. This was not the case.
Under a new President in Chris Sutherland, the next two years bore no fruit, with the most “Dockery” finish to a season imaginable occurring in 2024 when the team lost its last four games in a row to slide from top four to bottom ten. Dark, rain-bearing purple clouds returned to Cockburn. The coach was under the microscope not just from a fever-pitch WA media, but nationally too. 2024 had been Fremantle’s 30th year in the competition; fans had seen this play before. The stage was set, the orchestra knew the notes, the crowd anxiously awaited the now ceremonial Shakespearean tragedy in purple. Three decades of organisational history had produced a dynamic of self-actualisation, conditioning fans and onlookers to anticipate implosion at the first challenge faced by each successive administration and imploring club leadership to dutifully provide the ritual bloodshed.
Simon Garlick and the Fremantle board provided no such satisfaction. Without passing judgement on the efficacy of transitioning coach Justin Longmuir onto an employment agreement, the decision stands as something markedly different in the tradition of the club. Like Ross Lyon, Longmuir had a year remaining on his contract, pressure from the media was mounting and the blame of recent failures had been laid squarely at his feet. Garlick would have been applauded by many if he had simply shown Longmuir the door. Instead, the fate of both leaders became intertwined as a tacit commitment was made to give Longmuir more time.
The decision to provide Longmuir a life raft was an unconvincing endorsement. Genuine confidence in Justin Longmuir’s coaching ability would have been illuminated by a standard contract extension, rather than an open-ended quid pro quo arrangement.
Instead, Garlick and Sutherland leant on their belief in the wider football program, electing continuity over change as a means of protecting the environment they had nurtured. This includes the relationship the playing list, particularly its stars, held with the club. Another key difference between the current regime and others gone before is the wholesale commitment of key playing personnel. Between smart management by the football department and strong relationships built by Longmuir and others, Fremantle have entrenched organisational stability through the employment of a strategy of long-term contracting of star players. Thirteen players are currently signed until 2029 or further, a record by some margin in the AFL. From now until 2030, Fremantle have affixed the lowest potential list turnover in the competition (according to some great work here by @EmlynBreese).
The strategy employed by Fremantle carries certain risks: injury, form, flexibility, and others. The benefit it brings to a club that has been plagued by unfaithful marriages is however keenly understood by fans and administrators.
Other crusades led by Garlick on competitive balance in the AFL have delivered. Entering the 2025 season, Fremantle (and by association West Coast) enjoyed a reformed, rather than overhauled, schedule, with a 13th home game and multiple four-week stints in their home state. While incremental, the reform continues into 2027 and represents the most favourable travelling conditions WA teams have ever experienced.
Lastly, the elusiveness of “culture” prohibits a serious inquiry into the current state of such a thing at Fremantle as compared to clubs like Geelong or Sydney. Commentary can however be made on the inability for a club that has experienced such transience in its playing list and impermanence in its leadership to ever develop a truly lasting or meaningful “culture.” The commitment shown by the best players on Fremantle’s list in Andrew Brayshaw, Hayden Young and recently Caleb Serong, as well as the continued leadership of Longmuir and Garlick affirms the central thesis of this piece: Fremantle has been reborn as an organisation that can sustain success.
2026
Football clubs are organisations made up of people that arrive, contribute and leave. In this way they are impermanent and ever-changing. There is, however, an undeniable organisational memory that dyes the fabric with which each flag, each supporter scarf, each guernsey is woven. The efforts of the current administration, led by Simon Garlick, to elude reactiveness and embed stability represent a reckoning with Fremantle’s history and reflect an awareness of the tradition of the club. This generation of Docker is on a path to a kind of success not seen at Fremantle, both in the grandness of its potential and in the context in which it is set. The Fremantle Football Club is being reborn.
We operated more like a bandit camp in the early years. It was fun and had a few bright flashes, but I'm glad to move on. We still have a streak of magical thinking among our supporters but there's a more powerful steady build mentality around these days.