Daniel Stewart’s death a reminder of footy’s wider family

News of Daniel Stewart’s death at the age of 37 travelled through the football community on Saturday with the particular heaviness that attaches to the sudden loss of someone who, for a few short years, wore the colours many of us watched every week. Port Adelaide’s confirmation that it was “deeply saddened” and that the news had come as a “shock” told you most of what you needed to know, and the club’s decision to wear black armbands at its first home game of the 2027 season is a small but proper gesture in the circumstances.

I write as a Crows man, which is to say I spent a good decade watching Stewart from the other side of the Showdown divide, usually hoping he wouldn’t take the mark that mattered. That is a strange sort of relationship to have with someone — adversary for ninety minutes a handful of times a year, and otherwise simply another name in the record books. But it is also, I think, the relationship most of us have with most players, and it is worth reflecting on why news like this lands so heavily regardless of allegiance.

A career measured in a handful of seasons

Stewart’s AFL career was, by the game’s own brutal arithmetic, a modest one: 36 games and 31 goals for Port Adelaide between 2010 and 2013. He was a key forward in an era when the Power were rebuilding from the bottom of the ladder, and players like him did not always get the headlines or the Brownlow votes. What they did get, if they were lucky, was a handful of years inside a system that demanded everything of them physically and gave back a life experience that very few Australians ever have — the guernsey, the membership base cheering your name, the sense of representing something bigger than yourself on a Saturday afternoon.

It is easy, looking at a stat line of 36 games, to underestimate what that represents. Getting onto an AFL list at all requires a level of talent and dedication that the vast majority of talented young footballers across the country never manage. Staying there for four seasons requires resilience against injury, against selection pressure, against the simple fact that someone younger and hungrier is always coming through the system behind you. Whatever else is said about Stewart’s time at Alberton, that much should be stated plainly and without qualification.

Why these deaths resonate beyond the club

There is a pattern to how the football community responds when a former player dies young, and it is worth naming rather than simply participating in it uncritically. The tributes come from the club first, then from teammates, then from opposition players who crossed paths with him on the field, and finally from fans of every club who never met him but feel, in some genuine if slightly inexplicable way, that they have lost a connection to a period of their own football-watching life. I suspect that is what is happening around Adelaide and beyond this week.

Port Adelaide supporters who were at Alberton or watching on television through those rebuilding years between 2010 and 2013 will have their own specific memories of Stewart taking a contested mark or leading at the right moment. Crows supporters of my vintage will remember him mostly as an opponent, which is its own, more distant, form of familiarity. But the wider football public’s reaction — and it has been considerable — speaks to something the competition does reasonably well, which is maintaining a sense that everyone who has worn an AFL jumper remains, in some loose sense, part of an extended football family, decades after the boots are hung up.

The governance question nobody wants to ask too loudly

I do not intend to speculate on the circumstances of Stewart’s death, and nor should anyone else; the family deserves privacy and the facts, where they are known, should come from those authorised to share them. But it is reasonable, in a week like this, to ask what structures exist to support players once their careers end — often abruptly, often before they are thirty, and often without the financial security or clear post-football identity that the wider public assumes comes automatically with an AFL career.

The AFL Players’ Association has made genuine strides on this front over the past decade, and the current collective bargaining arrangements include more robust provisions for mental health support, career transition programs and alumni engagement than existed when Stewart was first listed in 2010. Whether those programs reach every player who needs them, years after delisting, is a harder question, and one the Commission and the Players’ Association would do well to keep interrogating rather than treating as solved. It is the sort of unglamorous, structural work that rarely makes headlines but matters enormously to the people living through it.

Port Adelaide’s response has been the right one

The decision to mark the opening home game of 2027 with black armbands is a modest gesture, but it is the correct one, and it reflects well on a club that has, over recent years, generally handled matters of player welfare and alumni relations with a reasonable degree of care. It allows the football community a formal, public moment to acknowledge Stewart’s contribution without requiring the club to say more than it properly knows or should say at this stage.

It is also, frankly, the sort of gesture that costs a football club very little and means a great deal to the people who loved watching Stewart play — his family above all, but also his old teammates, the coaching staff who worked with him across those four seasons, and the rank-and-file Port supporters for whom a 36-game key forward from the early part of this decade remains a vivid, specific memory rather than an entry in a database.

A reminder, not a headline

Football, as an industry, has become very good at generating headlines — trade deadlines, tribunal hearings, broadcast deal negotiations, premiership predictions. It is considerably less practised at pausing, and this week offers a reason to do exactly that. Daniel Stewart played 36 games for Port Adelaide and kicked 31 goals, and now, at 37, he has died, leaving behind people who loved him and a football community that is, rightly, taking a moment to notice.

Whatever rivalry exists between Adelaide and Port Adelaide supporters — and it is real, and it is fierce, and I would not have it any other way come Showdown time — this is a week for setting it aside. The black armbands at Alberton next season will be a fitting tribute. In the meantime, the most useful thing the rest of us can do is extend some genuine sympathy to Stewart’s family and former teammates, and perhaps use the moment to ask whether enough is being done, across the whole competition, for the players who wear the jumper for a few short years and then try to build a life after it.