LIKE Blackberry, Blockbuster and Kodak, the Essendon Football Club has become a one-time iconic brand lost in the modern world.
Hubris in the early 2010s, failure to keep pace with professional change, misplaced worship of past heroes, questionable recruitment and employment of at least a couple of rogue administrators have conspired to not just erode the Bombers' once grand status, but to seemingly leave the club indefinitely languishing in mediocrity.
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On field, Essendon's 2026 began as 2025 ended – horrendously badly. While there are 22 matches remaining to remedy problems, and while the Bombers won't be the only team this year to receive a 10-goal Hawthorn belting, there were too few passages of play to suggest a shift away from 20 years of disappointment.
And if former captain and six-time best-and-fairest winner Zach Merrett wasn't already specifically planning his next project to exit Essendon by midway through the third quarter of the game against the Hawks, then I'd be surprised.
I have been regularly critical of Merrett's myriad mixed messages, with his public desire to stay with Essendon lined up against his multi-year ferocious pursuit of a way out, exposed last year in his meeting with Hawks coach Sam Mitchell. But I feel sorry for him that Essendon, to this point anyway of a career which started amid the heavy sanctions attached to the drugs program of 2012, has failed to provide him with an off and on-field environment to properly showcase and celebrate his extraordinary talents.
Essendon was way too emotional and pig-headed in its refusal to allow Merrett a passage to Hawthorn in last year's trade period. And that decision will loom even more ominously in coming years as it seeks to continue to rebuild (it fielded the second youngest team in round one) in national player drafts which will be suffocatingly compromised with concessions for the 19th AFL licence in Tasmania. Then there is the impending subsequent announcement of the addition of a 20th team, and the now-regular influx of elite talent being quarantined for access to clubs in the growth states.
Merrett might be the only player on the Bombers' list who would be guaranteed a game at all other clubs, and he hasn't wanted to be a Bomber for a long time now. Even in the months since his failed transfer to the Hawks last October, he hasn't lost hope of getting there.
The three first-round draft selections the Hawks offered for him last year would have likely converted to late-first round picks. Not transacting, in my eyes at the time and even more so after match number one of 2026, was madness by Essendon.
It has become a source of ridicule that the once-mighty Essendon has not won a final since 2004. Recruitment and development have clearly been deficient. Since that season, the Bombers have had just eight players, on a total of 12 occasions, be named in an All-Australian team - Merrett (2017, 2021, 2023), Jobe Watson (2012, 2013) and Michael Hurley (2015, 2017) have been multiple All-Australian Bombers since the end of 2004, with Dustin Fletcher (2007), Cale Hooker (2014), Dyson Heppell (2014), Joe Daniher (2017) and Darcy Parish (2021).
There is great hope internally on 2025 draftees, particularly Sullivan Robey and Jacob Farrow, and on other young Bombers Archie Roberts, Nate Caddy and Isaac Kako. But identifying an order of merit beneath Merrett is highly subjective as well as alarming. I always go with Sam Durham. But it might be Nic Martin, currently injured, or Jordan Ridley, also again injured. Whoever it is hasn't yet established himself indisputably amongst the best 100 players in the competition.
New chairman Andrew Welsh spent the off-season attempting to stabilise Essendon after the mess of David Barham, who in late 2022 described himself as an "agent of some sort of change" when he rolled a president, three directors, coach Ben Rutten – who had made the finals in 2021 – and CEO Xavier Campbell. A CEO that Barham then appointed, Andrew Thorburn, lasted a whole 30 hours in the job.
While Welsh, to this point of tenure anyway, has been keen to refrain from heading down the fraught path of employing an "Essendon man" to fix the Essendon problems, he has overseen the transition of Dean Solomon from the club's board to assistant coach ranks.
Four-time premiership coach Kevin Sheedy, maybe the greatest "Essendon man", has always loved Solomon, and is happy to tell people he'd make a good Essendon coach. Sheedy, then a board member, wanted James Hird as coach, not Brad Scott, when Barham rolled Rutten.
Scott is contracted to the end of 2027 and the decisions he has made in his three and a bit seasons in charge have been for the greater Essendon good.
But having been involved in professional football for the past 30 years, as a player at two clubs, a coach at two clubs and as the AFL's senior football department administrator, Scott knows he won't be provided with the luxury of unlimited time to fix this organisation.
He knows he's on the clock to return the Bombers to a ruthless and feared legacy brand powerhouse.