Quick Recruit Or Team Builder: Pick Your Footy Poison
Footy clubs love to pretend list building is some kind of precise science, all spreadsheets and player profiling software, when really it’s two blokes in a Highbury Road car park deciding whether to swing big on one bloke or quietly stitch together a whole team nobody notices until round 14. That’s the choice, isn’t it — Quick Recruit or Team Builder. One high-stakes signing that either saves your season or sinks it, or the long slow grind of filling every position with the footy equivalent of assembling flat-pack furniture without the instructions.
I’ve watched Richmond do both over the journey, sometimes in the same off-season, which tells you something about how clear-headed list management actually is behind closed doors.
The Quick Recruit: All In On One Bloke
Quick Recruit is the pokies approach to list management. You identify the one piece — a key forward, a genuine number one ruck, a midfielder who can actually win a contest without needing a committee meeting first — and you throw everything at landing him. Future picks, future-future picks, a bag of jumper guernseys and whatever’s left in the kitty.
Tigers fans know this ride well. We’ve had years where the whole off-season narrative was one name, one trade, one signing that was meant to fix everything that ailed us. Sometimes it works a treat. Other times you wake up in August having given away two years of draft capital for a player who’s since found a new home in the twos, and everyone at the club is suddenly very busy and unavailable for comment.
The appeal is obvious though — it’s decisive, it’s exciting, members feel like the club’s actually doing something instead of just drafting another promising half-back flanker from the Bendigo competition who may or may not ever play senior footy. One big name lands and for about a fortnight the whole fanbase walks around like we’ve already won the flag. Premierships aren’t won in a fortnight, mind you, but try telling that to talkback radio.
Team Builder: The Unglamorous Grind
Then there’s Team Builder, which is basically what every successful premiership list has actually done, even if nobody wants to admit it because it makes for terrible headlines. You don’t get one marquee name and a parade — you get a key defender here, a half-forward flanker there, a mature-age recruit who kicks goals from impossible angles and nobody saw coming, and slowly, patiently, often painfully, you end up with a list that’s actually balanced.
Our 2017 flag didn’t come from one quick recruit — it came from years of unglamorous accumulation, some of it through the draft, some through trades that looked underwhelming at the time, and a fair bit of luck that certain blokes developed later than expected and stuck around long enough to matter. Nobody wrote breathless columns about it in October. It just slowly became a very good list, the way bread slowly becomes toast if you leave it in long enough and don’t get distracted.
You could argue the Team Builder method is just Quick Recruit with the excitement surgically removed — which, to be fair, is also how I’d describe most of my twenties.
Why Fans Prefer The Quick Recruit Even Though It Burns Them
There’s something in human nature, or at least in footy fan nature, that loves the single decisive moment. We want the trade period equivalent of the final siren goal — one dramatic swing of the bat that changes everything. Team Builder doesn’t give you that. It gives you a steady, workmanlike improvement that’s genuinely harder to sell to a membership base that’s already sat through a few too many
