In 2016, the Brisbane Lions finished on the bottom of the AFL ladder.
This year, they’re Premiers for the third consecutive year, only the third club in modern history and the first to achieve two three-peat of their own.
It’s a fitting symmetry that Chris Fagan was a senior figure in that Hawthorn run before arriving at Brisbane in 2017 to build one of his own, this time from the bottom of the ladder up.
I’ve had the privilege of being involved with the Lions since Fagan’s appointment, and if there’s one thing I keep coming back to, it’s that this turnaround was never really about talent. What changed was culture, and more specifically, who was allowed to own it.
When Fagan took over, he inherited a playing group that had, by his own admission, spent years wanting to leave rather than stay. The easy read on a club in that position is that it needs a stricter regime – more rules, more consequences, more control from the top.
Fagan did close to the opposite. He built structures that handed genuine ownership of standards back to the players themselves, not standards imposed and policed by coaching staff, but standards the players set for each other and held each other to.
The very first meeting he had with the players he spoke for about 10 minutes and said “I want this to be a player led team, so you guys are going to review yourselves”, he then threw to me to run the review. We identified the behaviours the players were accepting from each other that were negatively impacting their performance. From there the players started to build their trademark and agreed behaviours – their desired culture.
The results didn’t come quickly. Two heavy years, a first finals appearance in 2019, a preliminary final loss in 2020, a Grand Final loss in 2023 that might have broken plenty of playing groups. But the Lions did not break, if anything, each setback sharpened the group’s willingness to be honest with each other, and further down the Relationship Pyramid, as we would say at Leading Teams.
By 2024, the culture behind the breakthrough had been years in the building. A back-to-back followed in 2025, and now, a historic three-peat.
The hardest discipline in sport isn’t building a winning culture. It’s refusing to let it slip once winning becomes the expectation rather than the surprise. This group has now done that three years running.
From the bottom of the ladder to a three-peat, built not on one great list or one great coach, but on a culture the playing group chose to keep prioritising, building and owning, year after year, through the setbacks as much as the success.
