Geelong Cuts a Premiership Man Loose, and Nobody Blinks Anymore

Geelong put out one of those clipped little statements on Friday afternoon, the sort head office loves, thanking a bloke for his contribution before showing him the door, and by Saturday morning it had already been swallowed up by the news cycle like it never happened. A premiership player, mind you. Not some rookie who never got a game.

I’ll admit it needled me more than it probably should have, given I’ve got no real dog in this fight as a Carlton man through and through. But there’s something about the way these things get handled now, so clinical, so terribly efficient, that makes an old bugger like me want to have a whinge. So here we are.

The Cats Have Never Been Sentimental, and Fair Enough Too

Let’s give credit where it’s due first, because I’m not here to pretend Geelong haven’t earned the right to make these calls. They’ve turned list management into something close to an art form down there at Kardinia Park, squeezing one more finals campaign out of blokes everyone else had written off, then cutting the cord the moment the numbers stop adding up. It’s why they’ve been near enough competitive every single season for two decades, and it’s why premiership medals in that changeroom are about as rare as a quiet member at a Carlton committee meeting.

But there’s efficient, and then there’s this. A player who stood on the dais, who’s got a flag to his name that no amount of restructuring can ever take off him, getting the same treatment as a bloke delisted after two seasons in the twos. The club statement thanked him for his contribution to the football club, wished him well for whatever comes next, all very proper, all very corporate. Back in my day a bloke like that got a testimonial, a life membership dinner, maybe a mention in the club yearbook that actually meant something. Now it’s a press release and a group text to the beat reporters.

Premierships Used to Buy You Something

I’m old enough to remember when winning a flag meant a club owed you a bit of loyalty, not forever, nobody’s asking for a job for life, but at least a season of goodwill while they worked out whether you still had a role to play. These days the premiership cup barely buys a fortnight’s grace once your output dips below whatever the numbers boys reckon is acceptable. You could argue that’s just the cold reality of a salary-capped competition where every list spot’s precious and every dollar’s accounted for, and you’d probably be right. Doesn’t mean I have to like it.

What gets me is how quickly the whole industry’s made its peace with it. Twenty years ago a move like this would’ve had talkback running hot for a week, columnists like yours truly banging on about respect and tradition, the player’s teammates fronting up to defend him in the papers. Now it’s a Friday afternoon news dump, timed so it gets buried under the weekend’s build-up, and by Monday everyone’s moved on to arguing about the fixture or some new rule nobody asked for.

The Modern Delisting Playbook

Every club’s got the same script now, and you can set your watch by it.

• Release it on a Friday, preferably after lunch, so it gets minimum coverage before the weekend takes over.
• Thank the player for his contribution to the football club, always that exact phrase, like it’s been focus-grouped.
• Wish him well for his next opportunity, whatever that means for a bloke in his late twenties who’s spent half his life being a professional footballer and not much else.
• Let the coach front the media a day or two later with something vague about list balance and opportunities for younger players.

It’s not personal, they’ll tell you, it’s just business. Well, mate, footy was never meant to be just business, not down where I sit anyway, not for the poor souls who’ve bled for a jumper and a suburb that’s since been swallowed up by property developers.

Where’s the Bloke Meant to Go Now

The other thing that grates is what happens next for these fellas, because it’s not like the old days when a delisted premiership player could shuffle off to the local league and still be treated like royalty, playing out his days in front of a few thousand people who remembered exactly what he’d done for the jumper. Now half of them end up overseas in some rebadged league, or they’re straight into a media gig reading autocue for a network that had no interest in them a fortnight earlier, or worse, they’re just gone, off the radar completely, and you wonder if the game even thinks about that side of it anymore.

I’m not saying Geelong’s done anything wrong by the letter of the rules, because they haven’t, they’ve followed the process to the letter same as every other club does now. It’s the process itself I’ve got the shits with. Somewhere along the way the industry decided that sentiment was a luxury clubs couldn’t afford, that flags won and years given were just line items to be weighed against draft picks and salary cap flexibility, and once you accept that as the new normal there’s no arguing your way back out of it.

A Grumble From the Peanut Gallery

Look, I know how this sounds, some old fella from up the Holy Trinity way carrying on about how it was better in his day, and maybe it wasn’t better, maybe I’m just filling in the gaps with rose-coloured memories the way blokes my age tend to do. There were plenty of rotten deals dished out back then too, plenty of good players tossed on the scrapheap without so much as a thank you, so I won’t pretend the old system was some golden age of loyalty and decency.

But there used to be a bit more theatre to it, a bit more acknowledgement that you were dealing with a human being who’d given the best years of his body to a jumper, not just a name on a spreadsheet that needed shuffling to make room for next year’s draft haul. Geelong will go on being Geelong, turning over their list with ruthless precision and probably making finals again regardless, because that’s what they do down there better than anyone else in the competition, us Blues included, much as it pains me to admit it.

The player in question will land somewhere, good luck to him, he’s earned that much at least. I just reckon the least the rest of us can do is stop and acknowledge what he actually achieved before the news cycle moves on to whatever fresh controversy head office’s cooked up for next week. A flag’s a flag. Ought to count for something, even now.