2025 AFL Season Previews: Sydney
Fool me once, shame on – shame on you. Fool me – you can't get fooled again.
Jetting over to the Harbour City to have a gander at some Swans.
2024 ladder position: 1st (17 wins, 6 losses – eliminated at Grand Final stage)
2024 best-and-fairest: Isaac Heeney
Senior coach: Dean Cox
Story of the season
How I Met Your Mother. Lost. Dexter. Killing Eve. All common results for the Google search query “good TV series with bad final episodes”. All reduced to scrapping for second place – probably third place – for that particular honour. Because the Sydney Swans seem to be developing an extremely unfortunate habit: looking like the best team in the AFL, or very close to it, until the day it matters most. To lose one Grand Final by 10 goals or more may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose two looks like carelessness. I have some experience of supporting a team that fell on its face in a Grand Final that it notionally had a very good chance of winning. It doesn’t just make the day stink. It gives the entire season the retrospective air of a Shakespearean tragedy. People you emotionally invest in, hurtling, unknowingly, towards a grisly end. John Longmire seems like a phlegmatic character. I’m sure he doesn’t think that the season was wasted just because it ended the way it did. But I do wonder: at what point – was it when Eric Hipwood did the Akermanis hand over mouth celebration? Weeks before the game? During the post-mortem? – did Horse decide he’d had enough? It’s not for us to know. Dean Cox, his longtime lieutenant, has assumed the reins as Swans head coach. He’ll start the season with an emotionally bruised group – and without Errol Gulden.
Summary of game style
I’ll open with a caveat: I am about to describe how Sydney played under John Longmire. But, given the high level of continuity, and Dean Cox’s own remarks to that effect, I’m not expecting major changes.
The Swans combine control with chaos. When starting with the ball in their own back half, they typically like to gain territory with short kicks and uncontested marks before looking for inboard kicks that beat the first opposition defensive layer and open space in or near the corridor. They’re happy to take time to find the right option: Sydney were the second-slowest ball movement team and took the fifth-most possessions per possession chain. But once they succeeded in punching a hole through the first layer, they were off to the races. The likes of Chad Warner and Errol Gulden are excellent at carrying the ball (Sydney ranked second in the AFL for bounces) and creating overloads that either allow for shots from outside the 50-metre arc or unimpeded kicks to leading forwards. Excellent back-half kicks like Nick Blakey are key to making it all work. The Swans were fourth in the AFL for kicks, fifth for marks, and third for corridor disposals.
Defensively, the Swans apply an aggressive forward press that aims to generate high-quality scoring opportunities. No side in 2024 scored more from chains which originated in their forward half. Although they were only league average for turnover position differential (the part of the field where they won the ball vs. where they lost the ball), Warner, Gulden, Tom Papley and Isaac Heeney ensured they were extremely efficient at converting those opportunities into scores. The Swans’ press was good enough to overwhelm most teams – they conceded the third-fewest scores from the opposition’s defensive half.
Where Sydney did struggle was against sides that built up with controlled kick-mark sequences and had the foot skills to beat their forward press (hey, sounds a lot like the Swans!). In the seven games the Swans lost last season, they lost the uncontested mark count in six of those games. In five of them, their opponents took more than 20 uncontested marks. In their two worst defeats, against Port and then Brisbane in the Grand Final, the Swans lost the uncontested mark count by 51 and 64 respectively. Control is the way to play against them.
List changes
In:
Jesse Dattoli (2024 National Draft, Pick #22)
Ned Bowman (2024 National Draft, Pick #26)
Riley Bice (2024 National Draft, Pick #41)
Riak Andrew (2024 National Draft, Pick #55)
Blake Leidler (Rookie Draft)
Ben Paton (Rookie Draft)
Out:
Jacob Konstanty (trade – North Melbourne)
Luke Parker (trade – North Melbourne)
Harry Arnold (delisted)
Jaiden Magor (delisted)
Lachlan McAndrew (delisted)
Cooper Vickery (delisted)
Sam Reid (retired)
List profile
Number of top-10 draft picks: five (T-13th)
Average age at Opening Round: 25 (7th)
Average number of games played: 82.8 (4th)
A list that didn’t need much change didn’t undergo much change. Jesse Dattoli was one of my favourite players in the 2024 draft pool, a Toby Greene-esque marking half-forward/midfielder who ought to excel in a mature program. Ned Bowman, on the other hand, was one of the biggest bolters of the draft. Given the quality of Sydney’s late drafting, you’d think they spotted something they really like about the forward, who took an absolutely humongous speccy for the Norwood under-18s. Riley Bice, a mature-age recruit from VFL Premiers Werribee, and Riak Andrew, younger brother of Gold Coast unicorn Mac, are lovely stories and should provide valuable depth in important positions.
Elsewhere, the Swans’ list is a mix of superstars and highly effective role players, often taken at very late picks. With one notable exception, the backline leans more heavily toward the latter end of the spectrum. The apparent decision to move Tom McCartin up forward this season raises some questions about the depth of Sydney’s key defensive stocks. One or two injuries, and you get to fringe or untried players very quickly. But although Sydney’s backline personnel might lean towards modest, it is superbly well-organised. The Swans conceded the lowest expected score per shot last year and also faced the fewest defensive one-on-ones – testament to its highly efficient spacing, fluidity, and the willingness of defenders to come off their direct opponent to intercept or affect a third man up spoil. That exception I mentioned before is named Nick Blakey. He’s probably the best attacking defender in the game, combining effective disposal with lightning speed and an endearingly goofy gait. Jake Lloyd and Lewis Melican are excellent soldiers.
The midfield is teeming with talent. Isaac Heeney, Chad Warner and Errol Gulden are the superstars. The loss of the latter to a nasty ankle fracture on the eve of the season will be a big blow, and not just because of his talent – he played a unique hybrid winger/midfielder role that may now need to be retooled. However, as talented as the engine room, it does have the faintest whiff of the Port Adelaide problem about it – three gun players who all prefer going forward than helping in defensive transition. James Rowbottom, one of the best defensive midfielders there is, holds things together. Expect Angus Sheldrick (more on him later) to feature much more prominently (assuming his body holds up, knock on wood) and the likes of Tom Papley and James Jordon to still get the occasional run through the middle. With Gulden’s injury, Justin McInerney and Jake Lloyd will probably get first crack at patrolling the wings.
The Swans’ forward line can be devastating – but it can also flatter to deceive. The smalls and mediums are excellent. Tom Papley is a pressing machine, excellent finisher, and world-class pest. Will Hayward is a great marking forward. The talls are good – although probably not great. Joel Amartey and Hayden McLean have been outstanding value given both were drafted as rookies, both as forwards and in auxiliary roles (Amartey as a disruptor of opposition interceptors, McLean as a secondary ruck) but they can sometimes go missing if the Swans are on the back foot. An honest assessment of Logan McDonald’s trajectory suggests he’s now probably more likely to end up a very good forward rather than one of the very best in the game. But he’s still young enough to change that. John Longmire liked to station a midfielder (Luke Parker, James Jordon, Taylor Adams, even Chad Warner) at half-forward to negate opposition rebounders and force front-half turnovers. Given how vital those turnovers are to Sydney’s attacking engine, I wouldn’t expect that to change under Cox.
Line rankings
Defence: Above Average
Midfield: Elite
Forward: Above Average
Ruck: Above Average
The case for optimism
Despite a second helping of Grand Final heartbreak in three years, Swans fans should still have many more reasons for optimism than pessimism. The first and most important thing to say is that Sydney’s list is outstanding – and young enough that it should still be in contention for the foreseeable future. Of their over-30 players, probably only Dane Rampe, Jake Lloyd and Brodie Grundy are important pieces. Their top 10 players, based on their ratings over the last 20 games, have an average age of 26.6. Assuming there’s no psychologically-driven downturn, the Swans aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
This year, they’ll also gain the fresh perspective of a new coach – albeit one who knows the players, both as athletes and humans, almost as well as the man he replaced. Dean Cox served one of the longest apprenticeships in footy. He is well-schooled in the Sydney way. After hearing the same voice for more than a decade, a new way of looking things, combined with the newfound authority to swap some magnets around and slightly tweak how the Swans move the ball and defend, could be precisely the fillip the side needs.
There’s another argument that I don’t think I’ve read anywhere. It’s a challenge to the assumption that last year’s Grand Final defeat is more likely to scar the Swans than galvanise them. Why? Why wouldn’t a talented group of players that knows that, despite the harsh glare of media scrutiny, was closer than all but one side to winning a Premiership, and has been right near the top of the game for three years, use that disappointment as motivation to go one step further? Full disclosure: I’m sceptical about the whole concept of psychology being a meaningful driver of outcomes. But if one gives it credence, then I’m not sure why the pessimistic argument (that they’ll collapse/regress) is more convincing than the optimistic one. The Swans are still good. And now they’re motivated by one hell of a revenge fantasy.
The case for pessimism
Let’s just get it out of the way up front: will the Swans be hobbled by their failure in last year’s Grand Final? The boring answer is that no one knows. Regular readers will know I generally don't put much stock in player psychology. It all just feels a bit like voodoo. I basically treat effort and desire at the elite level as a given, and regard team quality, and the ability of coaches to fashion a system which compliments that talent, as the two main determinants of outcomes. The Swans themselves are a good example of why the concept of “mental scarring” is probably overrated. They suffered an even more ignominious defeat in the 2022 Grand Final. Injuries were the main reason 2023 was underwhelming. And then, with a bit of luck, they became the best team in it for almost all of 2024. What makes this situation unique is that it’s happened again. The Swans could not have been better prepared for last year’s Grand Final. Aside from Callum Mills, they had virtually their best team out there. They were fortified by the experience of 2022. And the result was… almost as bad. I’ll repeat myself: I don’t usually put much stock in stuff like this. But, given the bevy of former players raising it as an issue, perhaps it’s best to adopt a posture of intellectual humility. Maybe the experience won’t matter. Maybe it’ll steel the Swans. Or maybe it’ll knock the stuffing out of them. We won’t know until we know.
With the unfalsifiable stuff out of the way, let’s move onto more comfortable terrain: regression to the mean. The Swans were awesome (for almost all of) last season. They were also very, very lucky. It begins with injuries, or rather, the lack of them. According to analysis in The Age, the Swans had the fewest games missed by best-22 players of any club, and by a fair margin at that. Unfortunately, there’s already been some regression to the mean. Errol Gulden fractured his ankle in Sydney’s final pre-season game. He will miss a significant amount of footy. In addition to having a benign run with injuries, the Swans also overperformed their underlying quality of play. They were seventh for expected score differential per game, and first – again, by a large margin – for the difference in expected score performance per game (essentially how much they overperformed minus how much their opponent underperformed). I can see it now: the Swans fall back to the pack because the variance pendulum swings the other way with injuries and finishing, and the mainstream footy media declares that the mental scarring thesis has been vindicated.
I’ve spoken about psychology, injuries, and the spectre of plain old bad luck. It’s also worth briefly mentioning that the Swans are forecast to have the third most-difficult draw. I think this will be less impactful than the other causes for pessimism – they ended up with the fourth-toughest draw in 2024 – but you know what they say about straws and camels’ backs.
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Breakout player
You can’t go anywhere in the Harbour City without hearing people predicting a breakout year for Angus Sheldrick. It’s the talk of the town! The 21 year-old midfielder has shown exciting glimpses since his debut, but a combination of injury and the form of senior players meant he didn’t play a single senior game in 2024. With a full pre-season under his belt, and his passage to the first team likely to be made easier by injuries to other players, expect him to show the competition what he can do.
Most important player
Isaac Heeney took to his first season as a permanent midfielder like a swan to water, going from richly talented half-forward to one of the five or 10 best players in the game. A first (I had to double-check this, I couldn’t believe it) club best-and-fairest was a rich reward, and you suspect he will be intensely driven to avenge his side’s failure on the big stage.
Biggest question to answer
How smooth will Dean Cox’s transition from second banana to first banana be? Theoretically, it should be as smooth as a well-greased cake tin. Cox served a seven-year apprenticeship, and has taken over a list he knows better than anyone, at a club that is commercially and institutionally stable. But the skills you need to get the corner-office job aren’t the same as the ones you need in the corner-office job.
What success looks like
Winning the flag would exorcise any demons that have taken residence in the minds of Swans players and fans. But I reject the notion that only one set of players and supporters can be happy after the conclusion of the footy season. You can win even if you don’t lift the cup. So I think we should lower our expectations, ever so slightly, for the Swans. Getting back to a prelim would constitute a successful start to a new era.
In a nutshell
The combination of a new head coach and a second chastening Grand Final defeat in three years means there are wider error bars on the Swans than last season. But they’re absolutely capable of doing what they couldn’t last September.
Agree? Think I’m a fool who’s biased against Sydney? Share your thoughts in the comments.