Crows’ Coaching Reshuffle Shows Rare Foresight at West Lakes
There is something quietly reassuring about a football club that plans three years out rather than three weeks out, and Adelaide’s confirmation of who will stand alongside Matthew Nicks in 2027 falls squarely into that category. In an industry addicted to the immediate, the Crows have made a decision that looks less like reaction and more like architecture.
A panel built for continuity, not panic
Let us be clear about what this is not. It is not a vote of no confidence in Nicks, nor is it the sort of restructure clubs undertake when the wheels have fallen off and someone needs to be seen to be doing something. Rather, it reads as the considered strengthening of a coaching department that already has runs on the board, with Adelaide finishing the 2024 campaign in September contention and building genuine list momentum since. The additions to the panel, drawn from rival clubs, suggest a football department prepared to pay a premium for expertise rather than simply promote from within for the sake of a tidy organisational chart.
It is worth noting, too, that poaching assistants from competitors is hardly scandalous in this industry, whatever the tabloid framing might suggest. Coaches move. Lists move. Ideas move. The AFL coaching fraternity is a remarkably small village, and the best practitioners within it tend to circulate between clubs every few years, taking with them a season’s worth of hard-won lessons about structures, player management and the modern game’s relentless tactical evolution. Adelaide, in this instance, has simply been proactive about where those lessons land next.
Why 2027 and not sooner
Some supporters will reasonably ask why the club has confirmed appointments for a season that remains some distance away. The answer, I suspect, lies in contractual housekeeping as much as anything else. Assistant coaches operate on fixed terms, often tied to the cycles of their current clubs, and securing a handshake agreement well in advance allows all parties — the departing club, the incoming coach and Adelaide itself — to manage the transition without the messy public tug-of-war that so often accompanies these moves when they are left to the eleventh hour.
There is also a broader governance point here that tends to get lost in the noise around any coaching news. Clubs that plan succession and panel composition years in advance are, almost without exception, the clubs that avoid the chaotic mid-season changeovers that so damage list stability and player trust. Adelaide’s football department, under David Noble’s stewardship as football boss, has been reasonably disciplined on this front, and this latest move continues that pattern rather than departing from it.
What it signals about Nicks’s position
I have written before, and will no doubt write again, that the loudest criticism of Matthew Nicks has rarely matched the substance of Adelaide’s actual on-field trajectory. The club’s list is younger and more talented than it has been in the better part of a decade, the pressure defence has improved markedly, and the Crows have shown they can mix it with top-four sides on their day. None of that is to say the premiership window is flung wide open — it plainly is not yet — but it does suggest a coach building something coherent rather than merely surviving.
Bolstering his panel with outside expertise, rather than leaving him to make do with whoever happens to be available internally, is the clearest signal the club could send that Nicks remains very much the man charged with taking this list forward. Boards do not generally invest in strengthening the support structure around a coach they intend to move on from within twelve months. If anything, this confirms Adelaide’s medium-term faith in the current coaching leadership, even as the broader personnel around him is refreshed.
The rival clubs losing out
Spare a thought, briefly, for the clubs now required to replace coaching talent of their own. This is the natural churn of the competition — nobody owns their assistant coaches outright, and ambitious individuals will always chase the next opportunity, whether that is a senior pathway, greater autonomy over a game-style component, or simply a fresh challenge in a new environment. It would be uncharitable, and frankly unfair, to suggest any rival outfit has been caught napping; these things are rarely one-sided, and in most cases the departing coach and the losing club part on perfectly amicable terms, with both sides having extracted value from the arrangement.
What it does underline, however, is the calibre of candidate Adelaide has been able to attract. Clubs do not typically lose coaching staff to rivals perceived as going nowhere. The willingness of experienced figures to commit their future to West Lakes, two years out from taking up the role, is itself a modest but meaningful piece of evidence about how the competition views Adelaide’s trajectory under the current administration.
A word of caution before the celebrations
None of this should be mistaken for a premiership guarantee, and Crows fans — myself included — would do well to resist the temptation to overstate what is, in essence, a sensible piece of list and staff management. Coaching panels, however well assembled, do not win flags on paper; they provide the structure within which players ultimately have to perform under scrupulous and occasionally ruthless September pressure. Adelaide has been here before, with promising personnel decisions that did not translate immediately into finals success, and supporters are entitled to a measure of healthy scepticism.
What can be said with reasonable confidence, though, is that this is a club conducting its business in the right order. Secure the structure, back the senior coach, bring in expertise where gaps exist, and allow the football program the stability to develop over multiple seasons rather than lurching from one review to the next. It is unglamorous work, and it will generate none of the hysteria that attends a trade period blockbuster or a controversial Tribunal outcome. But if Adelaide’s broader ambitions over the next three to five years are to be realised, it is precisely this sort of patient, well-governed decision-making that will underpin it.
The Crows will not win a flag in 2027 on the strength of a coaching panel announcement made in 2025. They might, however, be a considerably better-prepared outfit for having made it.
