TWO CLUBS, Sydney and Port Adelaide, have used the off-season to announce a change of coach. Two more clubs, the Western Bulldogs and Fremantle, are choosing to allow their coaches to enter the 2025 season without a contracted future beyond it. Then there's Adelaide and its regularly under-performing team under Matty Nicks. And Richmond, which facilitated a mass walkout of star talent just one season into Adem Yze's tenure. Not to mention the new licence, Tasmania, which may be just months away from identifying its coach for its inaugural season in 2028. Damian Barrett looks at season 2025's most intriguing landscape, the coaches.
IT became official on November 26. It was unofficial as early as 3.40pm on September 28.
As Sydney players trudged off the MCG at half-time of the 2024 Grand Final, John Longmire's 14 seasons as Swans coach effectively ended.
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A 46-point deficit against Brisbane was to become a strangely flattering 60-point final margin. It was the fourth Grand Final loss for Longmire and the Swans in 11 seasons, the third by 10 or more goals, the second mauling inside three seasons.
Making five Grand Finals in 14 seasons as a coach should forever be viewed as an extraordinary AFL achievement. But the losses took a massive toll on Longmire.
Renowned for his heart-on-sleeve emotional displays inside the Swans' coaches' box, Longmire had a particularly torrid Grand Final day and aftermath. Some within earshot would later comment that even in the early stages of the 2024 Grand Final, and even after the Swans had kicked the first two goals of the game, that Longmire had worked himself into, understandably given what was at stake for him and his club, an extremely emotive and stressed state.
In the days and weeks which followed, Longmire withdrew from normal communications with Swans officials, and that period of reflection led to him bringing forward his Swans coaching exit, announcing on November 26 that he wouldn't be entering his contracted 2025 season.
In that moment, the fine-tuned coaching succession plan that the Swans had thrashed out with Dean Cox in July – after Cox had been offered the West Coast Eagles job – took effect.
And it immediately placed Longmire, seen regularly these days with a smile on his face and spring in his step, at the head of queues and thoughts for other football clubs bracing for a season which may see them also seeking a new coach.
Like the Swans, Port Adelaide in the off-season ratified a long-held succession plan to replace its coach Ken Hinkley with his assistant Josh Carr.
The Carr arrangement took shape in late 2022, when the Power lured him back from Fremantle, and was effectively formalised the following year – when Hinkley was given a fresh contract for 2024 and 2025, and Carr had removed himself from consideration by Richmond post-Damien Hardwick.
While Hinkley will coach the Power in 2025, he already is on the coaching market, and like Longmire, clearly meets the main criteria, identified by CEO Brendon Gale when he spoke exclusively to AFL.com.au, required to be installed as the inaugural boss of Tasmania Devils. "Resilience" was a key word identified by Gale, so too was a need for a successful track record in working with youth, as well as a preparedness to "spruik the gospel". Tick, tick for Longmire and Hinkley.
Gale is not yet officially a month into his new role, but the decision he is now empowered to make will influence the the decisions of so many others.
As of late February, the Western Bulldogs and Fremantle are choosing to leave Luke Beveridge and Justin Longmuir uncontracted beyond 2025. Beveridge has made two Grand Finals in 10 seasons, but hasn't won a final outside those years. He will back himself in to be coaching beyond this year, somewhere, and the personal link he has with the CEO of the Dockers is a relationship some officials at other clubs have been musing over in the off-season.
Simon Garlick was the Bulldogs CEO in 2014 when that club sacked Brendan McCartney and appointed Beveridge. Garlick has been in the same role at the Dockers since 2020, which takes in the entirety of Longmuir's five seasons as coach.
In March of last year, Garlick and the Fremantle board extended Longmuir's contract by one year, to take in the 2025 season. With four rounds to go in 2024, the Dockers were poised to finish top four. They lost their last four matches and missed finals. Yes, there were injuries to key players in that stretch, but the coach has been around football long enough to know that finals need to be reached this season if he is to be assured of entering a seventh season in charge.
Matthew Nicks is contracted to the end of 2026 at Adelaide, but entering his sixth season and without even one finals appearance, he too knows he is on watch.
At the start of 2024, first-year coach Adem Yze was proudly ordering the taking down of photos of premiership celebrations inside Richmond's Punt Rd headquarters. He was talking up a new era of success. He finished the year with gun players Shai Bolton, Daniel Rioli, Liam Baker and Jack Graham, as well as CEO Gale, all choosing new frontiers.
The conversations which were at play when Yze was appointed as Damien Hardwick's successor are null and void, and while very few people in football expect the Tigers to finish anywhere other than the bottom two rungs of the ladder in 2025, Yze will be under pressure to prove he is the right man for this monumental rebuild.
And then there is the constant intrigue around Nathan Buckley. Currently extremely successfully ensconced in media, he has made it known to enough key people that the Tasmanian role would interest him greatly. He also fits Gale's criteria, having lost a Grand Final by five points and a preliminary final by four the following season in a 10-year stint with Collingwood, which also produced another preliminary final result.
The coaching landscape has been relatively stable in recent seasons. It won't be in 2025.
Gale holds the first domino.
