Free Agency’s New Order: Neale, Greene and the Power Shift

Two of the competition’s most decorated midfield generals have changed postcodes inside the same news cycle, and whatever else you think about the merits of free agency as a system, you cannot argue it lacks for drama when it delivers a dual Brownlow medallist to Collingwood and a former captain to Geelong in the same breath.

Lachie Neale’s move from Brisbane to Collingwood is the headline act, but Toby Greene’s switch from Greater Western Sydney to the Cats deserves equal billing, not least because of what it says about how the AFL’s player movement rules are actually working in practice as we head deeper into this era of year-round list management.

Neale’s exit and what it means for Brisbane

Let’s deal with the obvious first. Losing a dual Brownlow medallist and premiership captain is never a small thing for a club, and Brisbane fans would be entitled to feel a pang watching Neale walk out the door to a rival with genuine premiership aspirations of its own. The Lions built a flag around his ball-winning and his leadership, and replacing that kind of influence in the engine room is not something you do by simply reshuffling the depth chart.

That said, I’d caution against the instinct to frame this purely as a decline signal for Brisbane. Clubs lose champions all the time in this competition, and the ones that handle it well are the ones that have already built succession plans into their list rather than treating a star’s departure as a crisis to be managed on the fly. Whether the Lions have that depth sorted will be the real story of their 2025, not the exit itself.

Collingwood’s calculated gamble

From the Magpies’ perspective, this is a classic case of a powerful club using its position – financially and culturally – to bolster a midfield that, for all its premiership pedigree, has shown signs of needing fresh legs at the coalface. Adding a player of Neale’s calibre, even accounting for the natural caveats that come with adding a player in the back half of his career, is the sort of move that reinforces Collingwood’s status as a destination club in this market.

It also raises a question I think deserves more scrutiny than it tends to get in the breathless coverage of these moves: how much does free agency, as currently structured, simply reinforce the gravitational pull of clubs that already have the resources, the member base and the premiership credibility to be attractive? I’m not suggesting anything untoward in how this deal came together, only that the settings of the system naturally advantage clubs like Collingwood over, say, a rebuilding outfit trying to convince a star to sign on for a longer-term project.

Greene to Geelong and the compensation conundrum

The other major piece of business – Toby Greene’s move to Geelong after a decorated stint as Greater Western Sydney’s captain – brings its own set of governance questions, chief among them the adequacy of the compensation the Giants have received. A second-round draft pick for a player of Greene’s standing, a genuine finals performer and a leader who shaped the Giants’ identity through some lean years before their rise, strikes plenty of reasonable observers as modest.

This is where I think the AFL Commission needs to keep an open mind about reform rather than treating the current compensation formula as settled doctrine. The free agency system was designed, quite reasonably, to give players greater autonomy over their careers after a set period of service. Nobody serious argues that principle should be wound back. But the compensatory mechanism attached to it exists precisely to ensure the clubs who develop these players, often from teenagers into genuine stars, aren’t simply stripped of value with no meaningful recourse.

• A second-round pick, while not nothing, rarely replaces a captain-calibre contributor in both on-field output and intangible leadership value.
• The compensation formula weighs factors like age, salary and finals performance, but arguably underweights leadership and cultural contribution.
• Clubs in the Giants’ position – still building towards sustained finals success rather than already established as a powerhouse – arguably bear a disproportionate cost when stars depart mid-career.

Geelong’s quiet accumulation of talent

What shouldn’t be lost in the compensation debate is just how shrewdly Geelong continue to operate in this market. The Cats have, for the better part of a decade now, shown an ability to add proven, finals-hardened talent through trade and free agency windows without gutting their draft hand in the process, and Greene slots into that pattern neatly. Whether he can replicate his GWS form in the navy blue and white is a football question for another column, but as a piece of list management it is hard to fault Geelong’s timing or their targeting.

The broader governance picture

Step back from the individual deals and what you see is a free agency period that, once again, has delivered genuine upheaval at the top end of the competition while leaving the mid-table and rebuilding clubs to largely watch from the sidelines. That is not a criticism of Collingwood or Geelong, who are simply working within rules the Commission has set and are entitled to use to their advantage. It is, however, a reasonable prompt for the AFL to review whether those rules are delivering the competitive balance the league says it values.

My own club, Adelaide, has had its own history of both benefiting from and losing out to free agency’s quirks, and I suspect most supporters across the competition could say the same. The lesson from this period of movement, I’d argue, isn’t that any individual club has done anything wrong, but that the system’s settings – compensation formulas, draft pick values, the weighting given to leadership and finals experience – are worth the Commission revisiting with genuine rigour rather than leaving them to drift along on inertia.

What comes next

For Brisbane and Greater Western Sydney, the task now is turning a loss of star power into an opportunity to test the depth they’ve built beneath their departed leaders. For Collingwood and Geelong, the pressure shifts to delivering on the premiership expectation that comes with recruiting at this level. And for the AFL Commission, there is a quieter but no less important job: making sure the next cycle of free agency feels less like a lottery for the clubs left behind and more like a system that genuinely balances player autonomy with competitive fairness across the competition.