North’s Fringe Dwellers Get Paid – And Good On Them
North Melbourne have gone and tidied up a couple of loose ends on their list, handing contract extensions to two blokes who’ve spent more time wondering about their footy future than actually playing footy. Good on them, I reckon, because as an Essendon man who has watched my own club handle list management like it’s an extreme sport, I know exactly what it looks like when you don’t sort this stuff out.
The limbo nobody talks about
We spend all our time at FootyTalk banging on about superstar re-signings and will-he-won’t-he sagas involving genuine stars, but the real grind of list management happens down the other end of the list. These are the blokes who aren’t getting the Fox Footy cross during the warm up, who aren’t being asked about their manager’s phone calls on SEN. They’re just trying to find out if they’ve still got a job come October.
Contract limbo is a horrible place to live. I don’t care what sport you’re in, not knowing whether you’re employed next year while you’re also expected to train full tilt and play your role for the jumper is a mental load most of us would struggle with in any workplace. Try turning up to the office every day not knowing if you’ve still got a desk in January, all while being expected to smile for the cameras and give one percenters for the cause. That’s the fringe player’s lot.
Why this actually matters to North
North Melbourne are deep into a rebuild, there’s no sugarcoating that, and rebuilds live and die on depth as much as they do on top-end talent. Every club chasing finals footy needs its stars, sure, but the clubs that actually get there have got twenty-two blokes who know their role and trust the bloke next to them. You don’t build that trust by churning your list every pre-season and leaving blokes twisting in the wind until the last possible minute.
These two fringe Roos aren’t going to be best and fairest contenders anytime soon, and nobody’s pretending otherwise. But they’re the sort of players who hold a team together on the track, who do the video review without complaining, who take the young bloke under their wing when he’s nervous about his first senior game. That stuff doesn’t show up in the Champion Data stats pack but any list manager worth their salary knows it’s priceless.
I’ve seen how the other side looks
At Essendon we’ve had our fair share of list dramas over the years – and look, I won’t pretend we’re the gold standard for how to run a footy department smoothly, we’ve tested more systems at this club than most, from the Tribunal to the MRO to a few other acronyms I wish I’d never had to learn the ins and outs of. But even putting the headline-grabbing sagas aside, I’ve watched blokes at my own club sit in limbo for months on minimum deals, and it never ends well for team culture. Blokes start looking over their shoulder, agents start fielding calls from rival clubs, and suddenly you’ve lost a player for nothing because you dithered on a one-year extension that would’ve cost buttons.
North, to their credit, haven’t done that here. They’ve looked at the squad, decided these two blokes are worth keeping around the group, and got it sorted before it dragged into a saga that didn’t need to happen. It’s not glamorous, it won’t make the six o’clock news, but it’s exactly the sort of boring, sensible decision-making that clubs in rebuild mode need more of.
The bigger picture for the Roos
North’s rebuild has copped plenty of stick from outside, and fair enough too, the wins column hasn’t exactly been cooperating the last couple of seasons. But there’s a difference between a club that’s floundering and a club that’s building something with patience. Keeping your fringe depth content and your list stable is part of that patience. You want your younger blokes coming through watching senior pros get looked after when they do the right things, not watching them get cut loose the second results dip.
It also sends a signal to the rest of the competition – and to player managers sniffing round for value signings – that North are a club that looks after its own. That reputation matters more than people think when you’re trying to attract free agents or convince a promising kid to commit long term. Nobody wants to sign on at a club known for leaving blokes hanging.
A word for the battlers
I’ll admit I’ve got a soft spot for this stuff because it’s not sexy content, it won’t trend on footy Twitter, but it’s the stuff that actually keeps clubs functioning. The fringe player grind is real and it’s brutal – you’re training as hard as the superstar next to you, you’re putting your body through the same pre-season punishment, but you’re one bad VFL form and one injury to a teammate away from either playing finals or getting delisted. Having that uncertainty removed, even for a year or two, is worth more to those blokes than any fan sitting at home scrolling past the headline will ever appreciate.
So fair play to North Melbourne here. It’s a small transaction in the grand scheme of the footy news cycle, it won’t shift premiership odds and it probably won’t even rate a mention on the Sunday footy shows, but it’s good, sound list management from a club that needed exactly that sort of stabilty heading into another big pre-season. Sometimes the best stories in footy are the quiet ones – the ones where nobody’s left wondering if they’ve still got a job.
Good list management isn’t always flashy. Sometimes it’s just making sure the bloke who does the dirty work knows he’s wanted back.
As an Essendon supporter who has lived through every conceivable football saga going, I can tell you this much – the clubs that sort the boring stuff out early are usually the ones who avoid the dramas later. North have ticked a small box here, but it’s one worth ticking.
