What's Good About This Place?

How Chris Fagan started rebuilding the Brisbane Lions

Following four straight Grand Finals and an historic three-peat in the early 2000s, the Brisbane Lions made the AFL finals just once in the next fourteen seasons.

The team’s average home crowd was half what it was during the glory years, and the club was hemorrhaging cash.

Unparalleled success was followed by unrivalled mediocrity.

In 2017, change arrived. Chris Fagan was hired away from Hawthorn to become the new head coach of the Lions.

Hawthorn had managed to match Brisbane’s feats of the early 2000s by stringing together a three-peat of their own in the 2010s. Fagan, as the coaching and development director, and then the GM of Football, was an instrumental senior leader in all four of Hawthorn’s premierships.

“I didn’t know a lot about the club when I got the job,” Fagan says, “so I spent the first three weeks trying to find out as much as I could about where everything sat.”

At the culmination of his fact-finding mission into the club’s administrative realities, Fagan said he was a little bit intimidated about the task at hand.

“The club was at a real low, there wasn’t a lot of trust. It seemed to be an environment where it was every man for himself, people trying to save their own backside or their own role. There didn’t seem like there was any direction forward,” he recalls.

It might be expected that someone coming from the top team to the bottom team would arrive with a defined blueprint of success. Fagan had his ideas, but he largely took the opposite approach — he asked more and more questions.

“The best thing I did when I arrived was I sat down and interviewed every player, and every staff member in the football department.”

Fagan asked everyone these same three questions:

1. What’s good about this place?

2. What’s not so good about this place?

3. If you were the coach, what are 2-3 things you’d do to turn the place around?

“I guess I was just going on a bit of a fishing expedition and trying to identify trends for what the club was really like,” Fagan remembers of that time.

Here’s what he found through his interviews:

• There were good people at the club

• There was a lack of direction

• People weren’t enjoying their jobs

• People weren’t sure of what was expected of them

• Players said it was safer to be in rehab than it was to play (alarming!)

• The players wanted to be treated like men

“One of the reasons I wanted to speak to everyone that worked there was that I wanted them to feel like I was willing to listen and willing to take on board their ideas,” Fagan says. “I wanted to get across to them that if we were going to go anywhere, we were going to have to do it together, it wasn’t just going to be me coming in and sprinkling Hawthorn fairy dust on everyone and suddenly it’s going to happen.”

Fagan also steeled himself for a long road back, knowing that it was going to take a lot of time for trust to be rebuilt, and for winning to be taught to players who’d never won before.

With new leadership and a fresh direction in place, the Lions actually got worse. In his first season, Fagan’s Lions won the wooden spoon. Dead last.

“We started to see results in the first year but it was an exercise in resilience because we weren’t getting as many wins as we would have liked,” Fagan says.

It was difficult to continue to argue that there was progress without wins, but incremental strides being shown on-field were supplemented by monumental strides being taken off-field. “Anyone hanging around the club would’ve seen huge improvement off-the-field, and by the third year we were ready to show all of that out on the field,” Fagan adds.

Fast-forward a decade, and the Brisbane Lions sit on the precipice of matching that iconic early 2000s team with a three-peat of their own.

Fagan’s Lions have made the last three Grand Finals, won the last two titles back-to-back, and currently sit fourth as we approach the business end of the season.

Not just bottom-to-top, but bottom-to-dynasty. And it started by taking the time to sit with people, be present, and ask them some questions.