Millions of people attend AFL games every year. Some haunt online forums to indulge their addiction. Some attend their club's training sessions. Fewer still – the hardiest souls of all – attend pre-season training. It’s a deeply optimistic thing to do. It’s also, indirectly, a popular thing to do. As I mentioned, very few fans attend pre-season sessions. But many more are interested in how the coaches and players of the club they support spend the three-and-a-bit months that make up pre-season. And, with newsroom budgets not stretching as far as they used to, passionate amateurs often fill the void, providing vision and testimony from the track. I wanted to learn more about them. Who are they? What compels them to sacrifice precious summer hours to watch men in fluorescent bibs run time trials? What insights do they gain – or believe they gain? What, in a general sense, makes them tick? So I asked around on social media and eventually heard from four patient superfans. They confounded some of my assumptions, upheld others, and, above all, prompted me to reflect on what it means to love your team in a cynical world.
Josh is an Eagles fan who grew up 90 minutes out of Perth. Keys (presumably not his real name – but Keys he shall remain) is also an Eagles fan, born and raised in Perth as the East Fremantle-supporting son of two Subiaco Football Club fans. Rick is an Essendon man. He was born, as he puts it, a drop punt away from Cross Keys Oval, where the Bombers used to train in the 1970s and 1980s. He remembers seeing the players run past the family home to training. And, least but certainly not last, there’s Gary. Gary was born into a Footscray-mad household, helmed by a “strong-willed grandparent who couldn’t fathom how the children could support a team from anywhere other than the area they were born in” (too right!).
The four men – and they are men, which I’ll mull over later in the piece – came to support their clubs in recognisable but slightly different ways. To paraphrase Mark Twain, footy origin stories never repeat themselves, but they often rhyme. Rick had no choice. He was born into a Bombers-mad family and still remembers his first game. “Fitzroy at Windy Hill,” he reminisces. “The Dons lost by 79 points. I still remember Terry Daniher’s sticky hands and Tim Watson’s dashes through the centre. But more than the excitement of the game and the players, I was struck by the roar of the Essendon faithful.” Gary didn’t have much of a choice, either. He remembers going to games at Western Oval, the old name of Whitten Oval, as a kid. “My nanna would have a friend, actually they were a much younger neighbour, who’d drape a scarf over a nearby seat for her, so Nan would always have a place to sit. That’s how it was back then.” Gary still vividly remembers when, unable to attend games on account of living in country Victoria, he would furiously refresh his computer every couple of minutes to check the Friday night scores. (On a similar note, I remember when Friday Night footy was broadcast on delay into Adelaide.)
Josh and Keys sailed on different seas. Josh was inducted into footy, and the Eagles, from his family. But it’s not always been plain sailing. At times, Josh has struggled to pair his own principles with the knowledge that, as the first Western Australian AFL club, and one with close links to the resources industry, the Eagles are regarded as representing the big end of town. So much so that, when both WA teams entered the AFLW, Josh initially barracked for… Fremantle. He eventually drifted to the Eagles midway through the competition’s fourth season – “blame Dana Hooker.” Keys also had a choice to make. When he was a kid, there was no AFL – and there were no West Coast Eagles. Like so many non-Victorian kids of his age, he got his VFL fix from The Winners (shout out to Rhettrospective for their sterling work uploading old footy-age like this to YouTube). Keys was 19 when the Eagles were formed. And he confronted a fork in the road. Stick with North Melbourne or divert his affections? “In the end, parochialism won out,” he told me. But it would take a heartbreaking 2-point elimination final defeat to Melbourne in the 1988 season to turn him into the diehard he is today.
So we now understand how they came to footy in general. But the operative question remains: why go to pre-season training specifically? And how do they make the time? There’s a surprising amount of variety in the life circumstances that enable them to attend. Four people, four different stories. Josh, who has Mondays off work, is drawn to the spectacle. “I really like seeing the big names, and the spooky intimacy of a near-empty stadium,” he says. But he’s also drawn to the anti-spectacle – the modest humanity of it all. “There’s something special about seeing players mess around, cheer or deride each other, dawdle around before or after.” That feeling is compounded by the embryonic state of the Eagles’ development. “There’s plenty of reason to go along and get glimpses into what’s being developed and toyed with.” Keys, meanwhile, was initially motivated by curiosity and the prospect of something to do. He was at something of a loose end after returning to Perth following 20 years in northwestern WA, and found solace watching Eagles pre-season sessions (and East Perth WAFL games) across 2016 and 2017. Today, he sets his own work hours, and has maintained the habit – even adding the occasional open training during the season proper. He enjoys seeing the work the players put in, especially when they’re rehabilitating from injury. “So when someone like [provocative pundit] pots the club for a drop in training standards without watching them train, I know he’s full of shit,” Keys says.
Rick attended Essendon training once a week between when he finished high school and when he got his first full-time job. Today, he lives close to the Hangar and has rostered days off from work. He, too, is curious to see the progress of young and convalescing players. For years, he’s channelled that curiosity into filming the sessions. “My first training video was from the 1985 pre-season,” he says. Today, Rick is one of several Essendon fans who, via social media, brings training to supporters who aren’t able to attend in person. Gary, who’s now retired, gets to almost every session. “At this time of year, it’s terrific to see the new arrived draftees or players we traded for running around in the team colours. I’ve even gone to some of the community camps or when they train away from the Whitten Oval.”
This brings me neatly enough to what I think is the most interesting question of them all. What do these four men, all different in temperament in circumstance, believe they learn from attending pre-season? There’s more variation here than I thought there would be. Gary has always been fascinated by how training is actually performed in a professional sporting environment. After all, it’s an active workplace, not entirely unlike a factory or a school. Supervisors helping staff, teachers instructing pupils. “Track watching isn’t just about watching the players run around and there is a lot of information you can see if you know what to focus on,” says Gary. He clearly relishes the details. “For example, a defender might join in midfield drills and sure enough they start getting a run in the midfield rotation. This is what happened with Ed Richards last year.” Similarly, attending training also gives Gary a glimpse of tactics Bulldogs coach Luke Beveridge might employ against specific opponents. “When we played Brisbane [in Round 13, 2024] we used James O’Donnell as a negating forward against Harris Andrews. It didn’t quite work, but it was a planned and practiced move. Knowing what the normal drill is and then seeing variations often tells a story.” As a result, Gary says, he’s rarely surprised when Beveridge unveils a tactical or positional tweak on game day.
Rick, a grizzled veteran of this whole endeavour, sees a bit of everything. “I get an understanding of our skill level, which players look fit and who’s struggling, our morale and the bond between the players, and some insight into some of the tactics and strategies the coaches are trying to implement.” Josh’s interest is primarily psychological. “Who's assertive, uncertain, peppy, stagnant, unfocused – hearing the chat between coaches and players, how certain coaches motivate certain players, and how that reflects in the drills and practices at hand,” he says. But he also sees an opportunity to discover some things which the West Coast Eagles would prefer remained undiscovered. “Particularly in early pre-season, injuries and niggles aren't treated particularly transparently. The fervour around the start of the season isn't quite there, and there's probably not much demand on the club to disclose what proportion of sessions some third-year player is doing coming back from their slightly tender elbow.” Keys concurs. It’s partly because of the club’s tendency to secrecy that he appreciates the chance to see what’s going on, in terms of player injuries and team progress, without needing to rely on someone else's (inevitably mediated) point of view. Gary reinforces the point. “I find attending training is often a myth-busting exercise,” he says. “The myths you read versus the training you see.”
Trusting their own point of view, and enabling others to form their own, is something all four of my subjects have in common. The main way that manifests is through sharing vision or testimony. I mentioned earlier that Rick films and shares clips on social media. There’s quite an audience for it. Last pre-season (heading into 2024), his 160 videos were viewed 842,000 times. The West Coast fans, Josh and Keys, each have their strategies. Josh, with tongue firmly in cheek, describes filming portions of the seasons he attends as the act of “a heroic vigilante”. Perhaps not, but there’s no doubt that seeing continuous footage is more satisfying than cultivated, club-sanctioned social media montages. Keys is a little more old-school, but no less dedicated. “I’ll usually write up a reasonably detailed report on what I’ve seen on the West Coast Bigfooty board,” he says. Indeed, that’s how I found him in the first place. Gary goes above and beyond. He’s the administrator of the Whitten Oval Online Forum (WOOF), a comfortingly retro messageboard where Dogs tragics can have their say. “I share plenty of details on WOOF with the Doggy-Bag Takeaways, a bit on BlueSky and X but the character restrictions are often an inhibitor, and I share some information on a couple of WhatsApp groups,” he tells me. He draws the line at sharing what he terms club-sensitive information. There’s a point to be made here about the symbiotic relationship between these ultra highly-engaged fans and the clubs they support. For footy clubs, fans are lifeblood, resource, and antagonist, all in one. These four illustrate the point perfectly. Rick and Gary have been intertwined with their clubs for all their life. I’m sure that, on some level, they view what they do as instantiating the love they feel. And yet, they’re also providing fellow fans with more avenues to scrutinise and criticise. Similarly, Josh and Keys love the Eagles, but I can detect a hint of frustration from them both not only about the club’s current on-field predicament, but also about the way they do things off the field.
In the subtitle to this piece, I called it an affectionate portrait. It’s affectionate, but it’s more of an impressionistic sketch than a portrait. It could never really capture the full array of feeling and motivation that leads to such commitment. One reason why is that it only captures the views of men. More men attend AFL games than women. The gap is smaller than you might think – as of 2019, women made up 41% of fans at games. There’s no data about the gender share of the diehards who attend pre-season training, but I suspect it’s more skewed towards men. The main explanation, as I see it, is that men are more likely to be exposed to the factors – the influence of male relatives, going to games with a stable group of male friends, parasocial relationships with their teams, stereotypical male predispositions to sports analysis, male-dominated broadcasts and footy media, the innate violence of the sport, etc – which turn them into obsessives. But just because something is (or might be) a particular way, doesn’t mean it ought to be. No one believes gender parity in pre-season training attendance is the defining moral issue in footy. It’s more that a decent proxy for the inclusiveness of our game is how comfortable women feel to embrace their inner nuff. I regret that I wasn’t able to speak to any women for this piece. If I return to the topic, it’s definitely something I’ll redress.
Yet I think – I hope – that even if their identity, or their life circumstances, or their fervour are different than the four men I spoke to for this piece, every reader can recognise something of themselves in them. For the last couple of pre-seasons, I’ve eagerly awaited news from “Bigman”, a poster who, like a foreign correspondent from a bygone age, furnishes the Adelaide Bigfooty board with forensically detailed reports from the track. Reading his missives is like being ushered behind the velvet rope to a place beyond the reach of the mediating effects of journalists or in-house club social media.
There’s no doubt that the frisson of feeling like you’re in the know, that you’re accessing the capital-T truth, motivates both the supporters who attend pre-season training and those who consume the content they produce. But when I think about the people who take time out of their schedules to see burly men with whistles bark instructions at younger, burlier men, another image comes to mind. They’re pilgrims – true believers who venture to a place of worship without knowing what they’ll encounter but nonetheless find nourishment in the belief that, one day, they will reach the promised land. Some, like Rick, Gary and Bigman, become minor prophets. Others prefer to believe in silence. But ultimately, they are all animated by the same force.
There’s something to that. But perhaps – and forgive me for adding another metaphor to what’s already an unsteady pile – history and literature can give us an even better comparison. In Miguel de Cervantes’ classic, Don Quixote, a lowly nobleman – untethered from reality after imbibing one too many chivalric romances – adopts the persona of a knight-errant and sets out to revive Spanish gallantry. A central object of Quixote’s desires is the beautiful Dulcinea del Toboso, who he imagines as the highest ideal of feminine perfection. And “imagines” is the key word here. Dulcinea, strictly speaking, doesn’t exist. But the brilliance of the story is that, despite his manifest delusions, Quixote is transformed by his journey – a journey which he would never have embarked upon without that spectacularly deluded belief in his mission. Cervantes’ story bequeathed to the English language the concept of the quixotic, an impractical idealism in service of lofty ideals. Don Quixote is a fool and a madman. But, for pursuing what he believes in (or… what he believes he believes in) he’s also a hero.
In a world where more and more of our cultural and even personal experiences are governed by algorithms, and where we are encouraged to hide our feelings behind a shield of cynicism, ardently supporting a footy team is an irrational act. How else can you describe outsourcing a non-trivial part of one’s wellbeing to, say, the Crows? And yet, that’s exactly what the pre-season pilgrims do. They understand that, for all but a few sets of fans, a default posture of optimism is irrational. But that’s still what they choose to embrace. Optimism might be irrational. But, in a world that so often inspires the opposite, it’s also defiant. Josh, Keys, Rick and Gary love their clubs. Not to the point where don’t criticise them (quite the opposite). But because those clubs furnish them with the elements – community, anger, sadness, happiness – that are the basic ingredients of an emotionally fulfilling life.
Einstein never said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results (the phrase most probably came from the pen of mystery novelist, Rita Mae Brown). But it’s hard to not see a hint of that in these four men, and indeed anyone who attends their club’s pre-season training. We love despite the knowledge that our love is doomed to hurt us – be it through bereavement, break-up, or finishing 15th when you thought you might actually make finals. We moan. We groan. We lament. But, ultimately, we hope, we dream, and we believe.