I am a Fremantle Football Club supporter since their inception in 1994, I, like many others has purple pulsing through my veins. I have been a loyal supporter over those yeas, we knew supporting a new team in the AFL was going to be challenging. The AFL under pressure from the clubs were happy to grant Fremantle a licence as they sought to dilute the ability of the cross town rival to draft the best talent in the state.

We had a period of relative success in early to mid 2010s, the team was competitive, playing finals and just missed out on an inaugural premiership. Then from 2016 to 2021, the club engaged in a rebuild, this was six years out of finals contention before a breakout year in 2022. The young team was not only competitive, they had a chance for a premiership. Their finals campaign was derailed by a deserving winner, you don’t get too upset when your team is beaten by a more skilled and desperate team.

So we are missing the 2023 finals, after six years out of contention, we had one finals appearance before missing the cut again. So, the question I ask is how long does a team rebuild take? I would say three years is a reasonable time frame. That allows a team at the bottom of the ladder to select top young talent in the pre-season draft as well as recruiting talent and trading non-required players. The problem for Fremantle Football Club is their player selection and trading strategy, they traded away their medium-term future for what they believed was a short-term fix, they could not be so wrong and wasted half a decade of player’s success.

Based on what I have observed for rebuilds at other clubs, three years is a reasonable team rebuild period. So six years is really equal to two team rebuild periods. Sure, you take on young players, they have plenty of development time and should be competitive after four to six years. So a six year rebuild results in a finals appearance in year seven followed by missing the finals a year later and finishing down the ladder again. This is a disastrous period for the club, financially viable yes, but still starved of on field success.