The Last of the Steves: Coniglio and a Vanishing Footy Generation

There is something quietly poignant about a football competition losing an entire generation of names, and that is precisely what has happened with the retirement of Steven May at Melbourne. The AFL, once thick with Steves, Stephens and Stevens, is now down to a solitary representative: Greater Western Sydney’s Stephen Coniglio.

It is a trivial observation on its surface, the sort of thing that might fill an idle moment at the football rather than warrant serious column space. But naming trends, like most cultural phenomena that seem incidental, tend to say rather more about the passage of time than we first credit them for, and the disappearance of the Steve is as good a marker as any of how thoroughly the playing list has turned over since the competition’s formative decades.

A Name That Once Ruled the Competition

Go back to the early 1990s and you could field several competitive teams comprised entirely of Steves. More than 25 of them graced VFL and AFL lists in that era, a reflection of the name’s extraordinary popularity among Australian parents through the 1960s and into the 1970s. It was, for a period, the default name for a certain kind of sturdy, dependable footballer — the type who played fullback or centre half-forward and did not trouble the Brownlow count but was adored at his local club regardless.

That generation has now almost entirely departed the game, first through retirement and more recently through the slow attrition of time. Steven May’s departure at Melbourne, coming as it did before a ball had even been bounced this season, was reported chiefly for what it meant to the Demons’ defensive structure. But it also happened to close out one of the more remarkable demographic runs in the sport’s history.

Coniglio, Custodian of a Dying Breed

Stephen Coniglio now carries the name alone, which is either a delightful piece of trivia or a faint burden depending on how sentimental one is inclined to be about these things. The Giants co-captain has never, to my knowledge, been asked to reflect on his status as the last Steve standing, and I doubt he would consider it a matter of great weight. But there is something rather fitting about a name that once defined suburban Australian football narrowing down to a single custodian at a club that did not even exist for most of the Steve era.

GWS, born in 2012 into a competition already well into its Jack-and-Tom phase, has always sat slightly apart from the game’s older naming conventions. That its sole remaining Steve is also one of its most senior and respected figures feels less like coincidence and more like the natural order of things — someone has to hold the fort, and it may as well be a bloke who has captained the club through some of its more turbulent seasons.

Why Names Cycle Like Everything Else

Anyone who has spent time around baby name statistics, whether through parenthood or idle curiosity, knows that first names move in generational waves. They rise, they peak, they fall away, and eventually they either vanish or make a nostalgic return a few decades later. Footballers are simply a visible, publicly recorded sample of the broader population, and their names track the same fashions that swept maternity wards decades earlier.

The AFL of 2026 is dominated by Jacks, followed closely by an assortment of Toms, Sams and Lachlans — names that boomed in the 1990s and 2000s and are now filling out lists in numbers that would make the old Steves blush. It is not hard to predict, in turn, that today’s most common names will eventually thin out just as thoroughly, replaced by whatever the next generation of parents favoured in the cots of the 2000s and 2010s.

• Steves peaked in the early 1990s with more than two dozen on AFL lists.
• Jack has emerged as the most common name in the competition heading into 2026.
• Tom, Sam and Lachlan round out the modern equivalent of the old Steve boom.

A Reflection on the Game’s Long Arc

None of this amounts to anything the Commission needs to worry about, nor does it belong anywhere near a broadcast rights negotiation or a fixture review. But it is a useful reminder, in a competition often preoccupied with the next salary cap adjustment or draft concession, that the AFL is fundamentally a story of generations passing through. The names on the guernseys are a small but telling ledger of that turnover, and watching them shift is not unlike watching the game itself evolve — gradually, almost imperceptibly, until one day you look up and realise an entire era has quietly left the field.

Adelaide supporters of a certain vintage will remember plenty of Steves in Crows colours over the journey, and I suspect most clubs could say the same. There is a mild melancholy in acknowledging that well has finally run dry, even as it makes way for whatever naming fashion eventually succeeds Jack and Tom at the top of the ladder.

What It Means Going Forward

Stephen Coniglio will not carry the mantle forever, of course. He is well into his thirties, and when he eventually calls time on a decorated career, the name Steve may disappear from AFL lists entirely for the first time in the competition’s history — barring, one supposes, an unexpected revival in maternity wards over the past decade that has simply not yet filtered through to the draft.

Until then, there is a certain dignity in being the last of something, even something as modest as a first name. Coniglio has spent his career being defined by leadership, resilience and a knack for the contest rather than nominal trivia, and that will remain the case regardless of how this particular footnote plays out. But next time the Giants run out with Coniglio at the coin toss, it might be worth a quiet nod to an entire generation of Steves who came before him, and to a competition that, name by name, keeps quietly renewing itself.