John Longmire is one of Essendon’s most significant appointments in decades; in fact, he could be the most important.
With unimpeachable football credentials as both player and coach, he is exactly the sort of person Essendon has needed, yet has been unable to attract for years.
His appointment as Essendon’s new head of performance instantly reshapes the image of the club. It changes the image of an organisation that has been smashed in recent years as amateurish.
He gives authority to a football department and, by extension, to the club. He is not a messiah; he won’t single-handedly change Essendon on the field. What he is and what his appointment does is enhance the idea of Essendon bringing in football people of gravitas.
The Pullman sexual assault investigation has hurt the Sydney Swans’ reputation, but for decades, stretching back to Paul Roos then John Longmire, the club had a football program and a playing culture that was the envy of other clubs.
For two decades, the same could not be said of Essendon. The club has struggled to attract elite players and staff while being plagued by off-field factionalism.
When the senior coaching position was vacant, some candidates pulled out fearing either a boat race for a pre-ordained candidate in James Hird, or were dissuaded by Essendon’s simmering factionalism.
Club president Andrew Welsh and the board’s appointment of Mark McVeigh offered dual benefits: it secured a long-term assistant with multi-club experience, a current trend in modern coaching, while bringing a popular former Bomber back to the club.
Critically, he is also a friend and teammate of Hird’s and tightly connected with that generation of Essendon players. So if the club was not going to appoint, or re-appoint, Hird then hiring a person of McVeigh’s standing would silence any further agitation over Hird not being chosen.
To bring Longmire in, the man McVeigh worked under at Sydney, to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with him at Essendon is as politically smart as it is a clever football appointment. It projects a mature image of the club to be embraced by such a respected figure.
Longmire does not come in as general manager of football, nor as coaching director. He is general manager of performance, which is a hybrid role blending parts of both coaching director and some responsibilities carved away from the general manager of football role. He will oversee not only coaching but player development, where the club has just hired Brent Prismall as their new head of development. Essendon is still looking for a new general manager of football.
The belief at the club is that the role of the senior coach has become so big it is unreasonable to expect one person to cover everything without burning out.
The idea is that Longmire can ease some of the burden of media, corporate and commercial work that the senior coach would normally do, while also being involved in coaching, strategy, mentoring the coaches and overseeing player development.
They insist he is not coming in as de facto head coach. Whether Longmire will be in the coaches’ box on match day with McVeigh or whether McVeigh coaches from the boundary while Longmire is in the box is yet to be decided. But it will be McVeigh’s decision – he is the head coach.
Essendon now appears to have a blend of two coaching types. One, in McVeigh, is the 45-year-old assistant who has done a long apprenticeship in good programs and is ready for a senior gig like Craig McRae and Damien Hardwick were, and like Josh Fraser is. In Longmire, on the coaching panel and in football management, they have something of the avuncular Chris Fagan type.
The appointment of Longmire furthers what has been a wholesale turnover of the football department over two years, started by former CEO Craig Vozzo and who, after stepping down for personal and family reasons, has continued to consult the club on how a football department should look and be structured.
Matt Rosa took over as list manager two years ago and began a thorough turnover of the list. They brought in the highly regarded Mathew Inness to head up conditioning at the start of the year. Prismall was appointed head of development two weeks ago, and now Longmire arrives.
Last year Essendon stood in the way of Zach Merrett leaving for Hawthorn because they wanted to show they would not be pushed into accepting a deal they didn’t like just because the player wanted to leave. Pragmatically, it was not the right decision, as they will get less this year for him, but at the time they wanted to be seen to stand up for themselves.
They will not stand in Merrett’s way this year.
When Brisbane began their club-wide rebuild to construct this latest dynasty, they did it from the top down and the bottom up.
They got veteran CEO Greg Swann in and set about making sure they had in place good people in key roles across coaching, football management and list management. The playing side was the slowest piece because young talent coming in, moving players out to turn the list over, and then instituting a cultural change can take time to filter through before you see results on the field.
Essendon has been trying to do something similar. David Barham started the process before passing it over to Welsh, who has worn some political heat, but he has made some big decisions. Securing Longmire is the biggest of them.
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Michael Gleeson is an award-winning senior sports writer specialising in AFL and athletics.Connect via X or email.
