The Unbearable Lightness of Being Carlton Coach
Thoughts on the end of Michael Voss’s tenure.
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In the end, Michael Voss took it upon himself to sever the final fraying cords that kept the sword suspended above his head. On Tuesday morning, as most of us were drinking our first coffee of the day, news broke that the 50 year-old had resigned as Carlton’s senior coach. One suspects it was that or face the ignominy of being sacked. The writing had been on the wall – quite literally – for a long time. Voss’s Carlton hasn’t beaten a finalist in over a year. Second half fade-outs had gone from a curiosity and subject of mirth for many to a weekly occurrence (and subject of mirth for many). Other writers have told the story of Voss’s tenure from the emotional perspective available only to Carlton fans. Smarter analysts than me, similarly sceptical of claims that the fade-outs were driven by fatigue or fear, have attempted to identify their substantive causes. Instead, I want to use this essay to pose and probe some questions which might shed light on why coach and club have decided to part ways now, the peculiar demands of AFL coaching in 2026, and where Carlton go from here.
It’s obvious why Voss is no longer Carlton coach. As President Rob Priestley and CEO Graham Wright reminded us multiple times during their press conference following Voss’s departures, the Blues are 1-8 this season. They have won just five of their past 20 games. The flashes of competence had become duller, the mood darker, and the on-field problems more vexing. Footy’s brutal meritocracy had rendered its verdict: Voss could not meet the requirements of leading an AFL side to success in the 2020s. He fell on his sword before the sword fell on him. A more interesting question than why is why now? Reports from journalists I assume have sources within the club have tended to stress that the club hierarchy wanted to give Voss every chance to succeed. That’s laudable on its face. Carlton’s hierarchy was desperate to instill stability and shed the reputation for moving coaches on too quickly. But Voss, who remained in situ well past the point it was obvious he had run out of answers, was a poor application of that principle. One of a club’s most important ongoing tasks is to constantly update its beliefs about its senior coach. Voss was possibly the correct choice of coach after Carlton made a prelim in 2023. He was undoubtedly the wrong choice after Round 9, 2026. I don’t think that necessarily constitutes definitive proof that he was a great coach in 2023 or a bad one by 2026. But somewhere in between those two points – separated by 966 days – was an inflection point the club failed to heed.
We should be sceptical of claims that continuity and stability are desirable in all circumstances. They’re desirable if you’re sure you’ve got the right guy. But Carlton is an object lesson of the costs of overcommitting to the wrong guy. The breakdown of Voss’s relationship with Charlie Curnow prompted the spearhead’s trade request after the 2025 season. The Blues made list management choices in accordance with Voss’s desire to pursue an increasingly archaic style of play. Those are real costs which are likely to take years to repay. After teasing its supporters with the prospect of a contention window, the club is now staring down the barrel of yet another rebuild. Its stars are fading. Curnow’s departure has provided them with more picks to begin pivoting the list, but the AFL’s decision to tighten big matching rules means more of those resources will be absorbed by matching a likely bid for star father-son prospect Cody Walker. There’s a strong case that Voss should have been let go sooner than he was, even though that might have deepened the perception that Carlton pulls the trigger too readily. I’d rather be saddled with a reputation for acting too quickly than making the wrong decisions. There’s also a case – albeit a weaker one – that, with the damage already done, Voss may as well have been allowed to see out the remainder of his contract, in a bid to soak up as much of the toxicity as possible (and, one could say, to guarantee Carlton the highest possible draft pick).
Two weeks ago, I wrote about the difficulty of evaluating whether a coach is “good” when the problems he or she is required to solve change, data is expensive, and counterfactuals are scarce. Voss tested that proposition because he lasted at least a year longer in the job than results merited. He was definitively the wrong coach well before his resignation. Does that mean he was the wrong appointment in the first place? Here, too, one can find arguments for both sides. His tenure as Brisbane’s senior coach was unsuccessful and looks worse given the dynasty quite literally began after him. Voss, unusually, was handed a senior coaching job before serving any sort of apprenticeship as an assistant. The apprenticeship came later – a seven-year stint as Port Adelaide’s midfield coach. On the other hand, Voss looked like a good fit for Carlton’s list circa 2022. “Looked like” is doing additional work here, too. Voss looked like a senior coach out of central casting – fit, vigorous, still young enough to remind onlookers of his playing days.
The mistake Carlton made wasn’t necessarily appointing Voss. It was committing to a decision-making process that made him the inevitable choice. Recall that Carlton’s coach search began with public overtures to Alastair Clarkson and Ross Lyon (who declined when asked to participate in an interview). Both had been senior coaches before. It was only after the field winnowed that Voss and Adam Kingsley emerged as firm favourites, with Voss’s “first-hand experience” believed to have helped him win the role. Four and a half years on, the club statement announcing Voss’s appointment makes for fascinating reading. Then-president Luke Sayers (himself a fascinating presence throughout this era of Carlton’s modern history) is quoted as saying that Voss’s “credentials and vast experience in football made him the right person for the job.” This strongly suggests the Carlton hierarchy had taken a decision that the successful candidate needed prior senior coaching experience. But if they actually consulted evidence to reinforce that claim, they didn’t share that with the public. A more obvious explanation is that Carlton learnt the wrong lesson from David Teague’s short-lived stint as senior coach. (A cynic might add that Sayers sought the prestige of snagging a big fish.) But the George Costanza principle – do the opposite of what you did yesterday – isn’t a good heuristic for a professional organisation. A better one is to actually commit to an evidence-driven decision-making process.
Michael Voss would probably have been a great coach in the same era he was a great player. He was king of the beasts in an era when beasts bestrode the plains. It doesn’t require a great leap of imagination to picture his reputation, his success, his intensity – his aura – translating into coaching. The fact it ultimately didn’t is perhaps more evidence for the argument that the best players (across all sports) rarely make good coaches. Perhaps they never had to learn how to hold space because they could rely on their talent. Or perhaps they’re not able to compute Ollie Hollands fumbling a ground ball or Harry McKay missing from straight in front of goal. Beyond that, there’s the narrower and more relevant point that Voss’s inchoate football intelligence – his command of his body and his temperament – didn’t translate into the specific kind of football intelligence demanded by modern AFL coaching. The Greek poet Archilochus wrote that “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Voss the player and Voss the coach both knew one big thing – overwhelming their opponents with physical force. But footy today requires knowing many things. That’s true in terms of the game’s growing tactical complexity but also in terms of the sprawling demands of the job itself. The modern AFL senior coach is less a football philosopher-king and more a chief executive of a distributed system: adjudicating between competing game-style models, managing non-playing staff, implementing the findings of increasingly sophisticated analytics, and making real-time decisions that require synthesising information from many different sources. I’m sure Voss was good at some of those responsibilities. But very few can handle them all at once, especially in an environment where power has often been concentrated. The modern coaches best equipped to navigate that complexity were often players who had to think their way through their careers rather than talent their way through them. Coaches of yore might have been absolute monarchs, but they ruled over modest kingdoms.
The first is structural. The rule changes I wrote about in “Has the AFL broken footy?” didn’t affect all clubs equally. In fact, there’s a strong case to be made that they adversely affected Carlton most of all. The 6-6-6 rule, introduced in 2019, neutralised the capacity of dominant contested midfielders to physically control stoppages. The tightening of the stand and holding the ball rules reduced the reward for winning the ball at the bottom of a pack. The last disposal rule opened the game up in ways that further disadvantaged sides built around stoppage dominance. All these rules converged on the AFL’s overarching goal: to reduce stoppages and increase scoring. Carlton’s best players during Voss’s tenure – Cripps, Curnow, Weitering, McKay – formed a strong core, but one which was optimised for a style of footy that the AFL was legislating away. Some of those changes predate Voss; we were already three years into the 6-6-6 era when he took the job. But the point is that it blunted the power of the players he relied on most. A smarter football department might have identified the trajectory earlier and begun building a different kind of list. That didn’t happen.
The second problem is the one that came to define the public narrative: the fade-outs. They were predictable. They were embarrassing. And they kept on happening. As games progressed, Carlton’s ability to compete at the source deteriorated. This graph tells the story.
Carlton, especially in the first half of Voss’s tenure, was a powerful side that could run up the score against lesser opponents. But, like a classical tragedy, the fatal flaw was there from the very beginning. Not once throughout Voss’s 104-game tenure did Carlton have a positive rolling differential in third quarters. It seems fitting that his trajectory as Carlton coach was a macrocosm of his side’s perennial fade-outs. He won 31 of his first 52 games, just 19 of the next 52.
Voss wasn’t the only senior figure at Carlton to depart on Tuesday. That afternoon, the club announced that list manager Nick Austin was also leaving (reports suggest it was neither voluntary nor amicable). Austin was the person most responsible for the construction of the list Voss coached. While it’s true that the Cripps, Curnow, McKay, and Weitering were all at the club prior to Austin’s arrival, there was still ample, largely unmet opportunity to surround them with reliable role players. I won’t relitigate all the drafting and trade failures here. Suffice to say there were many. Austin and Voss leaving on the same morning was Carlton’s acknowledgement that the failure was both shared and total. Blame belongs to Voss, Austin, and a systematically miscalibrated decision-making culture that optimised for bruising contested footy at a time when the rest of the competition was accelerating away from it. Michael Voss spoke often – to the point it irritated increasingly impatient Carlton fans – of “pounding the rock”; working away at getting better at his side’s strengths. Austin didn’t speak much to the media. But one can characterise his approach to building this list in a similar way. The next list manager will probably need to take a stick of dynamite to the rock.
There’s one more contributor to this failure worth naming – one that sits outside the club’s walls but shaped the context in which decisions were made: the mainstream footy media’s role in sustaining Voss’s political capital long past the point the evidence warranted it. Footy media is not a monolith, but a fair chunk of it spent the better part of four years functioning as an informal support network for a coach whose results were waning. The reasons are more banal than conspiratorial. Some pundits and hosts were friends with Voss. Some had idolised him as a player and found the neural pathway to critical assessment blocked by the memory of what he once was. Some simply wanted to be his friend, and access and accountability have always made strange bedfellows. The net effect, whatever its cause, was that the media often felt overly generous to Voss and hostile to less chummy coaches. Carlton fans who expressed frustration were often characterised as impatient. It’s pretty remarkable that Voss’s character and playing aura could still function as a kind of reputational force field. It’s also evidence of how much of the mainstream football media’s evaluation of coaches is still informed by instinct, relationships, and residual reverence rather than rigour.
Graham Wright deserves some credit for being sufficiently clear-eyed to see that the failure of the Voss era had many fathers, and for (eventually) making a decisive call to swing the blade. But it leaves the club in an unusual position. At the time of writing, Carlton has no senior coach, no national recruiting manager (Michael Agresta left the role in February), and no list manager. That leaves Wright with virtually untrammelled power inside the club. Perhaps that’s good. But power without constraint has not always yielded good results at Princes Park.
Any path that leads to a coach leaving a club mid-season is inevitably strewn with errors. The most important thing Carlton – Wright – can do now is commit to a process which minimises the occurrence of future errors. The first, and, given it’s one they’ve made before, most easily avoidable error to avoid is overindexing on a short-term positive regression of results under Josh Fraser. Carlton’s players could feel liberated. Fraser could find a real tactical exploit. The ball could begin bouncing Carlton’s way (definitionally, the end of an unsuccessful coach’s tenure tends to be particularly unlucky). Fraser may be an excellent coach. That is genuinely unknowable at this point, which is exactly why the question of process matters more than the question of Fraser’s individual qualities.
That doesn’t mean that Fraser’s performance for the rest of the season should be discounted. There’s still enough time for him to implement meaningful changes to Carlton’s style. The quality of the process should be assigned greater importance than the final results. (Incidentally, this was something Voss lamented that Carlton didn’t do enough in his exit interview with Damian Barrett.) Appointing Fraser as the permanent senior coach could be the correct decision. But Carlton shouldn’t mistake a dead-cat bounce for evidence of a turnaround, avoid the hard work of a genuine succession process, and end up with a caretaker made permanent by institutional inertia. Dysfunctional footy clubs are distinguished not by their ability to identify problems but by their tendency to “solve” them by embarking on the path of least resistance.
This is an opportunity. As Jake Niall put it in his excellent column reflecting on Voss’s departure, Carlton now holds Pick 1 in the coaching draft. There are talented candidates out there (Nathan Schmook canvassed the most likely options in a piece for the AFL website.) The point is not that Carlton should appoint any particular one – looking enviously at Melbourne’s early success under Steven King is understandable but needn’t necessarily be a guide – but that the club should undertake a genuine search, conducted without a predetermined answer. Carlton needs a senior coach. It also needs a list manager with analytical rigour and the capacity to think five years ahead, and a head recruiter who can replenish the list for sustained competitiveness. Those are three important appointments.
Success is following a rigorous process that acknowledges bias and uncertainty. Failure is following a process which looks thorough but isn’t. Hiring Fraser permanently because Carlton won a couple of games because of expected score overperformance. Appointing Longmire because he strikes the coteries as the image of a winning coach, even when the evidence shows that footy is increasingly the domain of new men with new ideas. Getting in a list manager who’s close to the right player agent. Carlton has made the wrong decision for the wrong reasons here several times before. The argument for optimism is that Wright doesn’t have any of the baggage that has prevented the Blues from fully adapting to footy modernity. He has years of experience at successful footy clubs, and was instrumental in the decisions to appoint Sam Mitchell and Craig McRae at Hawthorn and Collingwood respectively. Being an outsider is good. I wouldn’t be surprised if the choice to appoint him as Carlton CEO was driven partly by the knowledge that one day, not too soon after starting in the job, he would be in precisely this position. Is it a good job? I think so, because the AFL is a highly desirable industry and there are only 19 senior coaching jobs in the country. But it will be a hard one. The next Carlton coach will need to oversee what is a rebuild in all but name, in the shadow of footy’s loudest, most passionate, most frustrated fanbase.
It’s reasonable for Blues fans to be saddened by Voss’s departure – not because he was a Premiership coach in waiting, but because he gave them some joyous moments and always carried himself with dignity in an industry where not everyone does. He took Carlton closer to the summit than anyone had since David Parkin. But the evidence that he could not solve the problems posed by modern footy had become impossible to rebut. Being a head coach is a daily plebiscite, and he had way more of a go than most get.
Making the right decisions isn’t incidental to the process – it is the process. The player who makes the right choice at the right moment in September is the end-stage of a chain that begins with the board appointing the right list manager, who identifies the right players, who are developed and instructed by the right coach. Carlton’s opportunity now is to finally get the beginning of that chain right. Few decisions signal more about a club’s perception of its own identity and predicament than its choice of head coach. Everything else flows from there.
Straight from the chart
The way some sides have embraced aggressive handballing as a means of piercing opposition zones has been the biggest tactical change to start 2026. The average number of handballs per side per game is up almost 5% (from 146.6 to 153.5) while handball metres gained has surged by 27% (from 255.8 per side per game to 324.9). But the growth isn’t equally distributed across teams or players.
This graph shows a bespoke group: the 68 AFL players who have played at least five games in 2026 while also averaging 10 or more handballs per game. How much territory they gain is strongly correlated with the role they’re asked to play for their team. Some players win it on the inside. Others create damage and gain territory on the outside.
We’re now deep enough into the season to conclude that the changes to the ruck rules have had a real impact on scoring from centre bounces (sorry – centre square ball-ups). Scoring from that source has increased by 20% from last season (from 11.4 points per side per game to 13.7).
Given the increased premium on winning or at least halving centre clearances, I thought it would be interesting to see which players are most effective at winning them. Most of the usual suspects feature here. There are probably two things to say. The first is that not all clearances are made equal. Geelong, for example, are seventh for net centre clearance wins but second for the differential from centre clearance scores. Bailey Smith is very good, but not among the competition’s very best, at winning centre clearances. The second thing to say is: Jason Horne-Francis [eyes emoji]. He appears to be taking the next step in his development.
Let’s consider how many possession chains each side generated in Round 9. There were three games which featured noticeably less “churn” than the rest – Fremantle’s victory vs. Hawthorn on Thursday night, the Gold Coast-St Kilda game in Darwin, and the Richmond-Adelaide game to end the round. All three featured relatively fewer stoppages and turnovers.
A proposition I want to test in coming weeks is the strength of the correlation between the number of possession chains a side generates and its likelihood of winning. Qualitatively, I think there is one: good sides win more clearances, force more turnovers, and – all else being equal – force more difficult shots (and so earn more kick-ins). While it’s also true that good sides don’t turn the ball over (so have fewer opportunities to counterpress and win it back), and don’t concede as many shots (and so perhaps concede fewer behinds), I don’t think that effect will be as strong. At least, that’s my thinking. We’ll see what the numbers say!
Fremantle, Sydney, and Geelong’s victories were all built from the same material: significant superiority at converting their clearance wins into scores. As I’ve written before, scores from clearances aren’t just a referendum of midfield strength and structure, they’re also a test of how well defensive systems adapt to giving up clearances. Some teams set up specifically for that by dropping a spare player a kick behind a stoppage and trusting in their ability to force “dirty” exits.
Nevertheless, these results will increase the chatter about the defensive robustness of the Hawthorn and Collingwood midfields. Nathan van Berlo, Adelaide’s midfield coach, would probably not have enjoyed coding Sunday afternoon’s game, either.
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Footnotes
Some closing Michael Voss stats. He won 50, lost 53, and drew 1 of his 104 games in charge. His cumulative points differential peaked at +644 points following an 18-point win against Geelong in Round 7, 2025. It stayed positive even as results deteriorated. The final tally was +280. As strongly implied by that number, Voss’s Carlton won bigger than it lost. His average winning margin was 31.1 points, compared to an average losing margin of 24 points.
Courtesy of friend of the newsletter, Emlyn Breese: of the 48 coaches to reach 200+ VFL/AFL games, Michael Voss ended up with the third-lowest win rate (across tenures). Only Bill Stephen (Fitzroy and Essendon) and Ted Whitten (Footscray) were less successful.
Melbourne have kicked 100+ points in six of their first nine games (and were a point away from making it 7/9). In the process, the Demons became the first team this season to bring up the ton against the #1-ranked Sydney defence. Before their game in Round 8, the Swans were averaging only 65 points against per game in 2026.
While we’re on the subject of the Dees; their losing score (114) in that game against Sydney was the highest losing score in an AFL game since North (somehow) lost 118-119 to Collingwood in Round 14, 2024. There have already been eight 100+ losing scores kicked this season, which already matches the 2024 total. There were just five 100+ losing scores recorded in 2025.
Round 9 saw the nine Melbourne-based sides play the nine non-Melburnian sides. That had only ever happened once before – Round 4, 2021.
Recommended reading
Riley Beveridge on the problems Voss could never solve.
Nic Negrepontis on the rollercoaster ride of Voss’s time at Carlton.
Jono Baruch on how Voss restored belief but couldn’t take the next step.
Nathan Schmook on the 10 leading candidates to succeed Voss.
New Freo Substack alert! I really enjoyed this piece from Evelyn on how Justin Longmuir’s “boring” footy has taken Fremantle through their Long March. It’s time to get our best scientists to understand what draws introspective Dockers fans to Substack like moths to a light.