From Finals Heroes To Ladder Strugglers: Can The Suns Fix It By 2027?
Okay I’ll admit it upfront, as a Lions fan watching the Suns stumble this year has been a bit of a rollercoaster because part of you enjoys it and part of you knows footy in this state needs them firing. Gold Coast went from a maiden finals win last year to sliding down the ladder in genuinely rough fashion, and that Canberra result in the cold offered a proper glimpse of what a smarter 2027 could look like.
Let’s not pretend this season was some noble injury-riddled tragedy either, because plenty of it was self inflicted. But there’s also a real path out of it if the club is honest with itself, and I reckon they mostly are.
The finals hangover was real
You see this all the time in the AFL, a club breaks through for their first taste of September and the following year they just can’t replicate the intensity. It happened to GWS a few times, it happened to the Bulldogs post-flag in patches, and it’s happened to the Suns in 2026. Breaking a finals drought is genuinely one of the hardest emotional peaks a young list experiences, and coming down off that high while opposition sides now scout you properly and no longer treat you as an easybeat is a legit challenge.
The margin for error shrinks the moment you’re no longer a surprise packet. Teams game-planned specifically for Gold Coast’s key avenues to goal this year in a way they simply didn’t in the lead-up to that finals win, and the Suns didn’t always have the answers when Plan A got shut down.
Injuries to the wrong positions at the wrong time
No club escapes a season completely unscathed, but Gold Coast copped some brutal timing with key posts going down in clusters rather than spread evenly across the year. When you lose depth in defence and up forward in overlapping windows, the whole structure wobbles because the bench simply isn’t built for two crises at once. That’s not an excuse dressed up as analysis, it’s just how football works when your top eight or nine best players aren’t all fit on the same weekend.
Consistency inside 50 was the recurring issue
Watching from the outside, and yeah I’ll cop that I watch Suns tape mainly to scout for our own midfield battles, the thing that stood out most was how streaky Gold Coast looked forward of centre. Some weeks the ball zipped inside 50 with real purpose and they kicked winning scores, other weeks it was hospital kicks and stoppage after stoppage going nowhere. That inconsistency inside 50 is the single biggest fixable problem on this list, in my view, because it’s not a talent issue, it’s a system and connection issue.
- Entries were too often one-out rather than working the ball to a contest advantage
- Small forwards weren’t getting enough clean supply from the midfield brigade
- Kicking efficiency dropped under real pressure compared to last year’s finals form
None of that requires a total list overhaul to fix. It requires better ball movement patterns and probably a personnel tweak or two, which is honestly the easier type of problem to solve in modern footy.
Canberra was more than just one gritty win
The wintry Canberra result matters more than a lot of ladder watchers will give it credit for. Breaking a losing run away from the Gold Coast in genuinely miserable, low-scoring conditions tells you something about competitiveness and about a group that hadn’t given up on the season even once finals were mathematically gone. That’s no notes stuff from a culture standpoint, honestly.
Sides that quit on a season once September’s off the table usually show it in body language, in soft contests, in blokes coasting through the last six rounds. The Suns didn’t do that in Canberra, and that competitive spine is exactly what you want heading into an off-season, because it means the leadership group still had the players’ attention even when the prize was gone.
Why 2027 can genuinely be a bounce-back year
Here’s the thing that gets lost when a club drops down the ladder, everyone assumes it’s a rebuild from scratch when actually it’s usually a tune-up. Gold Coast’s underlying list profile hasn’t suddenly gotten worse, their best players are still their best players, and the finals win from last year proves the ceiling is real, not manufactured hype from a good draw.
What 2027 needs is boring stuff, honestly, the unglamorous stuff. Better structures inside 50, smarter list management around depth at both ends of the ground, and a pre-season that treats last year’s finals berth as the floor rather than some lucky ceiling. If they nail those basics, a return to the eight is completely realistic given the quality already on the list.
The Queensland footy angle nobody talks about enough
As someone who genuinely wants footy to grow across this state rather than just my own club doing well, I reckon a competitive Suns side matters heaps for the game up here. Two strong Queensland clubs pulling crowds and pulling kids into the sport beats one strong club and one battling one, every single time. The AFLW program up here benefits too when the whole ecosystem is healthy, because juniors follow winners and a Suns side fighting for finals again gives Queensland footy a second genuine heartbeat.
So yeah, I’ll enjoy the rivalry side of things when we play them, that’s just being a fan, but I’m not writing off Gold Coast’s 2027 for a second. The tools are there, the win in Canberra proved the fight is there, and the fixes required are honestly more tactical than structural. That’s the good kind of problem to have heading into an off-season.
Get the forward connection sorted, keep your best twenty-two on the park more often than not, and don’t let last year’s finals win become a nice memory instead of a genuine benchmark. Do that and this slide down the ladder ends up being a one-year blip rather than the start of anything worrying.
