Fagan’s Fairytale: From Wooden Spoon to a Three-Peat Dynasty

Remember when the Lions were the butt of every footy joke going round, the club everyone pointed to as the cautionary tale of what happens when a rebuild goes sideways? Yeah, nah, we don’t talk about that anymore, because Chris Fagan just completed the most legit coaching job this competition has seen in decades.

Three flags in a row. Back-to-back-to-back. From a club that was picking up wooden spoons and getting smashed by six goals most weekends to the benchmark of the entire competition. If you’re not sitting back and appreciating what just happened here, you’re genuinely not watching the same sport as the rest of us.

The Bottom Before the Breakthrough

It’s easy to forget now, scrolling through highlight reels of Lachie Neale winning the ball at will or Harris Andrews flying for another intercept mark, just how grim things were when Fagan walked through the Gabba doors. This was a club finishing dead last, haemorraging members, copping headlines about whether Brisbane could even sustain an AFL licence long term. The joke used to write itself: send a struggling coach or a battling list manager up to Brisbane and watch the whole thing implode.

Fagan inherited a list with genuine bare patches and a fanbase that had basically forgotten what September footy even felt like. There was no shortcut on offer. No superstar trade that fixed it overnight. Just years of drafting, developing, backing young blokes through brutal losing seasons, and trusting a process that plenty of outsiders reckoned was never going to work in a non-traditional market.

Patience That Doesn’t Exist Anymore

Here’s the bit that genuinely does my head in when I think about it in today’s instant-results footy media environment. Fagan didn’t get the sack after year one. Didn’t get the sack after year two when the Lions were still floundering near the bottom. The club showed next-level patience, and it is honestly the single biggest factor in this whole story.

Compare that to how trigger-happy clubs are these days, dropping coaches after two bad years like it’s nothing. Brisbane trusted the bloke, trusted the plan, and let him build something from the ground up rather than chasing quick fixes. That patience is basically extinct in modern footy and it’s exactly why this triumph means so much more than just another flag.

• Years of bottom-four finishes before the turnaround properly kicked in
• A draft strategy that prioritised development over panic trades
• A coach allowed to coach without the pressure of weekly sack speculation

The Culture Shift Nobody Saw Coming

You can have all the talent in the world and still not get it done — footy history is littered with star-studded lists that never fired a shot in September. What Fagan actually built was a culture. Blokes who wanted to play for each other, who bought into defensive structures that weren’t always pretty but were absolutely ruthless when it mattered, and who had the hunger of a group that remembered exactly what it felt like to be laughed at.

That hunger never left, even once the flags started rolling in. If anything it got sharper. Teams that win back-to-back are usually fighting complacency by year three, but this Lions group looked just as desperate in the third flag as they did chasing the first one. That’s culture, not just talent, and that’s down to the environment Fagan cultivated from day dot.

Leadership Across Every Level

It’s not just the senior side either, and this is where I reckon Fagan’s legacy deserves even more credit than it gets. The structures he helped embed flowed right through the whole footy department, and you can see the flow-on effects in how seriously the club now takes its AFLW program too. Growing the game properly in Queensland was never just about one trophy — it’s about building something that lasts across the whole organisation, men’s and women’s footy alike, and the Lions have genuinely led the way on that front up north.

No notes on that side of things, honestly. A club that only cared about the senior men’s flag wouldn’t have invested the way Brisbane has in its broader program, and that’s a direct reflection of the standards Fagan set at the top.

Etching His Name Among the Greats

Where does this leave Fagan in the pantheon of great AFL coaches? I’d argue he’s already locked in a top-tier spot, and the history books are going to be very kind to him. Taking over a genuine basket case club and turning it into a three-peat dynasty is the sort of achievment that doesn’t happen by accident or by luck. It takes a coach who can read a list, manage egos, adapt a game plan across different eras of the competition, and keep hunger alive even once the hard part is supposedly finished.

You can debate premiership counts against other legendary coaches all day on social media, and plenty of footy heads will, but what can’t be argued is the degree of difficulty here. Building a flag team from a competitive list is one thing. Building one from the absolute bottom of the ladder, in a market that still gets questioned by outsiders about whether it even belongs in this competition, is an entirely different challenge.

What This Means for Queensland Footy

As someone who has watched the game grow up here, this three-peat is bigger than premiership cups sitting in a trophy cabinet. It’s proof that success in Queensland isn’t some fluke or novelty story — it’s sustainable, buildable, and repeatable. Kids growing up in Brisbane right now have genuinely grown up only knowing a winning Lions side, and that changes everything about how footy gets embraced in this state long term.

Fagan’s reawakening of this club isn’t just a premiership story. It’s the blueprint every rebuilding club in the competition should be studying right now, and it’s a reminder that patience, culture and genuine belief still win out over shortcuts. The Lions were a punchline. Now they’re the standard. Fair play to the man who made it happen.