Country Roads: The Secret Behind The Brisbane Lions Dynasty
Seventeen points down. Barely four minutes remaining. The Wharfie Time tolling bells ringing and Fremantle preparing to celebrate its first premiership.
Then Brisbane did what Brisbane has seemingly learned to do better than anybody else.
They stayed in the game.
Four unanswered goals later, the Lions had somehow stolen the 2026 Grand Final by seven points, completing a historic premiership three-peat and joining their 2001-03 predecessors in football immortality.
But perhaps the most revealing word in Brisbane’s dynasty is not win.
It is stay.
Because 13 years earlier, Brisbane’s greatest problem was not convincing talented footballers to come north. It was convincing them not to leave.
The Wound That Became a Blueprint
Sam Docherty. Elliot Yeo. Jared Polec. Billy Longer. Patrick Karnezis.
The infamous Go-Home Five all requested trades at the end of 2013, compounding a retention problem so severe that 12 of Brisbane’s previous 15 first-round selections had either left the club or been delisted since 2001. Michael Voss had already raised concerns around homesickness and player welfare.
The damage lingered. Brisbane won seven games in 2014, four in 2015 and three in 2016.
By the time Chris Fagan arrived late in 2016, Brisbane did not simply need better footballers. It needed people capable of building lives in Brisbane.
The first great clue came that November.
Brisbane turned its prized draft hand into Hugh McCluggage and Jarrod Berry, best mates from the North Ballarat Rebels. McCluggage had left Warrnambool for boarding school in Ballarat. Berry had come from Horsham. They already understood separation, independence and building a life away from home.
The Lions also selected fellow country products Cedric Cox and Alex Witherden that year. A recruiting strategy targeting country Victorians to guard against the go-home factor.
Ten years later, McCluggage and Berry were still there.
Not merely retained, but premiership Lions.
Country Roads to Brisbane
That philosophy continued appearing in different forms.
Zac Bailey grew up in Darwin before leaving home as a teenager to board at Prince Alfred College in Adelaide. He juggled school football, Norwood, the Northern Territory and Allies programs before Brisbane selected him at pick 15 in 2017. Fagan would later describe him as a resilient young man who had already moved interstate to chase his dream.
Kai Lohmann came from Maryborough in country Victoria and moved with his brother to Ballarat to advance his football, eventually reconnecting there with childhood friend and future Lion Harry Sharp. Brisbane drafted him at pick 20 in 2021.
Charlie Cameron’s road to Brisbane was even more winding. Born in Mount Isa and raised for much of his childhood on remote Mornington Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Cameron later boarded at Marist College in Brisbane before moving with his family to the mining town of Newman in Western Australia. It makes the man whose Gabba anthem became Take Me Home, Country Roads an almost perfect symbol of the Lions’ unconventional recruiting story.
Then there is perhaps the purest Brisbane story of them all.
Born in Papua New Guinea, Bruce Reville moved through Cairns and tiny Burrum Heads, played junior football in Maryborough and made four-hour trips south to train with the Lions Academy. Undrafted in 2019, he worked jobs including at an abattoir and driving forklifts while continuing through Brisbane’s VFL system until finally earning a rookie contract.
These were footballers for whom the road to the AFL had already required leaving comfort behind.
Homegrown Lions
Brisbane also discovered that the best defence against homesickness was sometimes obvious: develop Queenslanders.
Dayne Zorko, the former Broadbeach bricklayer, was overlooked in four consecutive drafts before Brisbane finally gave him his chance. He became a captain and ultimately a triple-premiership Lion.
Harris Andrews spent more than 200 junior games at Aspley, joined the Lions Academy relatively late and was still available at pick 61 in 2014. He eventually became one of the competition’s premier defenders and Brisbane’s premiership captain.
Eric Hipwood grew up on the Sunshine Coast after moving to Queensland as a three-year-old, playing his junior football with Caloundra before progressing through the Lions Academy and later Aspley Hornets in the NEAFL. His connection to the Hornets runs even deeper. His grandfather Ken helped establish the Aspley Football Club, while his father Brad played senior football there, giving Hipwood a genuine family lineage within Queensland football. Brisbane matched Richmond’s bid at pick 14 in the 2015 draft, keeping one of Queensland football’s brightest young talents in his home state.
The Academy has since created an increasingly powerful pipeline. Sunshine Coast product Ty Gallop, drafted after Brisbane matched Geelong’s bid at pick 42 in 2024, is another example.
Jack Payne, Keidean Coleman, Reville, Daniel Annable and others have helped transform Queensland development from an assistance program into a list-building weapon.
Brisbane stopped viewing Queensland’s smaller football population as a disadvantage and started treating it as territory.
Bloodline Dividend
Then came the inheritance.
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In 2022 Brisbane matched North Melbourne’s bid at pick two for Will Ashcroft, son of 318-game Lion and triple-premiership player Marcus Ashcroft. The same draft delivered Jaspa Fletcher at pick 12, son of former Lion Adrian Fletcher and himself a six-year Lions Academy graduate.
Two years later came Levi Ashcroft, secured at pick five after Melbourne’s bid.
Marcus had helped build Brisbane’s first three-peat.
Now his sons helped construct another.
Father-son access gave Brisbane an advantage. Development made the advantage matter.
From Retention Problem to Destination Club
Perhaps the greatest indication that the club had truly changed came when geography stopped mattering.
McCluggage became one of the AFL’s most sought-after free agents in 2024, with strong Victorian interest, yet signed for another seven years.
Victorian number one pick Cam Rayner had clubs circling ahead of free agency and instead signed through 2031. Brisbane offered him security after his ACL injury; Rayner repaid it with loyalty.
Perhaps the ultimate symbol of Brisbane becoming a destination club, Conor McKenna had already returned home to Ireland after his Essendon career before choosing to leave again and join the Lions ahead of several other interested AFL clubs.
Berry signed through 2029, while damaging forwards Bailey and Logan Morris recently snubbed lucrative interstate offers to remain in the Sunshine State.
The contrast with 2013 could hardly be greater.
Brisbane’s recruiting strategy may have reduced the risk of players leaving. Fagan’s culture ultimately removed the desire.
Few players better represent the bridge between Brisbane’s two eras than key defenders Ryan Lester and Darcy Gardiner.
Lester arrived from the Oakleigh Chargers in 2010 alongside future Go-Home Five member Patrick Karnezis, while Gardiner was drafted from the Geelong Falcons in the wreckage of 2013.
Both stayed through the losses, rebuild and resurrection to become long-serving pillars of the side that eventually transformed Brisbane into a premiership powerhouse.
The Trade That Almost Never Happened
And then there is Josh Dunkley.
In 2020 Dunkley requested a trade from the Western Bulldogs to Essendon. The clubs could not reach an agreement and the move collapsed.
Two years later he again sought a new home.
This time Brisbane was waiting.
The Lions completed the deal in the final half-hour of the 2022 trade period. Dunkley arrived as a Bulldogs premiership player and best-and-fairest winner. By 2026 he was a Brisbane co-captain alongside Andrews and McCluggage.
The player Essendon could not land became one of the leaders of a Brisbane dynasty.
Sometimes list management is planning.
Sometimes history needs a little luck.
The Real Secret
Recruiting country footballers was never some magical formula.
Brisbane recruiting boss Steve Conole has acknowledged as much, warning that retention could not simply be solved by drafting players from one particular region. Welfare mattered. Development mattered. Relationships mattered. Coaching mattered.
That is what makes Brisbane’s transformation remarkable.
The Lions learned from the Go-Home Five to identify footballers comfortable with independence. They grouped friends together. They invested in Queensland. They exploited father-son opportunities. They found overlooked footballers from Darwin, Maryborough, Broadbeach, Aspley, the Sunshine Coast and Papua New Guinea.
And then Chris Fagan gave them something recruitment strategy alone never could.
A reason to stay.
Four days after completing the three-peat, Fagan stepped down as Brisbane coach. He leaves behind more than three consecutive premiership cups.
He leaves a club where once everybody seemingly wanted to go home.
Eventually, Brisbane became home.
