The Lists Playing Finals This Month Were Built Years Ago

The Best Teams Are Not the Best Players

Footy finals are here, and for the next four weeks we will talk about form, momentum and who peaked at the right time. But premierships are not built in one season, and most of the time we forget it. We credit the coach, the captain, the bloke who kicked six in a preliminary final. We talk about a side that came good at the right moment, as though something clicked in August.

Almost none of it will be about the people who built these squads, which is where September is usually decided.

So here is one small detail about how that work is done.

AFL clubs do not ring the coach.

The coach sees a player at his best: on match day, in front of a crowd, when everyone is watching. He will talk up a good player, because a good player makes his side better. That is his job.

The team manager sees everything else. How the kid speaks to teammates, whether he sticks around to pack up the changerooms when nobody is watching, how they interact with staff in the club etc.

The list manager sits with both accounts and answers a harder question than whether the kid can play. It is whether he will work here: in this club, in this role, under this coach, alongside this group.

"Talent identification is the easy part. Fit is the job."

It is not the hours, it is the questions

Clubs run interviews, home visits, psychological profiles, medicals and character assessments on players they are considering. What strikes me is not the volume of it. It is that almost none of it is about whether the player is any good.

That question is largely settled. They have the footage and the testing. Everything else is aimed at who he is: how he learns, what he does when things go against him, what motivates him, and whether he will hold up in the environment they are about to put him in.

Most hiring processes run the reverse. The bulk of the interview is spent confirming technical capability that the resume, the qualification and a portfolio of projects have already demonstrated. The candidate leaves and nobody in the room can tell you why he left his last role, what he actually wants from the next five years, or whether he does his best work with autonomy or with structure.

Then the decision comes down to who interviewed well, which is a test of confidence, not competence.

The same player, two different clubs

Knowing the person is only half of it. The other half is knowing the environment you are putting them into, and the role you are putting them into once they are there.

Charlie Cameron spent four seasons at Adelaide and never dropped out of their first-choice forward line, kicking 87 goals in 73 games alongside Eddie Betts. Nothing was wrong. He asked to come home to Queensland anyway, and the Lions paid pick 12 for a player still under contract. At Brisbane he stopped being the support act. He became the main forward, kicked a career-best 57 goals in a season, earned All-Australian selection he had never managed at Adelaide, and has led the club's goalkicking four times.

Same player, same job. What changed was where he sat in the structure, and where he was living.

Dayne Zorko makes the point from the other direction. Passed over in the draft four years running, he did not get on a list until he was 23. Then in 2024, at 35, with plenty suggesting he was near the end, an ACL to Keidean Coleman pushed him to half-back after a career as a midfielder and forward. He was named All-Australian in the new role, the oldest of the modern era, and is still playing at 37.

You see the same principle in every side still alive this month. Clubs do not recruit the best available player. They recruit for a hole in a structure. That call cannot be made from a spreadsheet. It takes knowing where a player will get an opportunity rather than get buried.

Fast, but not blind

None of this is an argument for a long process. Long processes lose people. Good candidates are fielding several approaches a week, and a firm running four rounds of interviews over six weeks will lose its first choice somewhere around week three.

But moving quickly and moving blind are not the same thing.

Before I put someone in front of a client, I want to know why they are actually looking, what they want the next role to give them that this one does not, whether they want to lead people or stay technical, and what they are like when a project turns difficult. That is one honest conversation, not five. Most candidates will tell you all of it if you ask properly and give them a reason to be straight with you.

The same applies on the client side. I want to have been in the office. I want to have met the person they would report to, because that relationship decides more about whether the appointment works than the job description does. I want to know what that firm rewards and what it quietly grinds down.

None of that adds weeks. It changes what you do with the time you have.

What is genuinely slow is doing it twice. A shortlist assembled from a keyword search can reach you just as fast as a considered one, and you will not be able to tell the difference until about month six.

The Takeaway

If you are hiring, stop asking whether the shortlist is technically capable. Assume it is, or you have the wrong shortlist. Ask instead why this person, in this team, reporting to this manager.

If whoever is representing you cannot answer that, they have found you candidates rather than a fit.

"Watch the finals this month and keep one thing in mind. Not one of those sides was assembled in September."

Every list out there is the product of quiet, unglamorous work by people whose names will not come up once in the commentary.

Enjoy September. Its finals season. Hopefully the Lions play better than they did against the Swans.