GEORGIE PARKER: The Brisbane Lions thrive on culture and respect in the wake of premiership three-peat

It’s been a little over a week since Brisbane won the AFL premiership, and so begins the many tall poppy comments about their success and how they built the list that got them there.

Successful father-son selections and academy access will forever get picked apart, and Brisbane, more than most, provides plenty of ammunition for those who believe the system needs changing (without ever really looking at the ones that didn’t quite work out). Will Ashcroft, already clearly one of the competition’s best players, arrived through the father-son system, (Levi pretty good too!) while premiership captain Harris Andrews came through the Brisbane Lions Academy. The Lions have benefited from both mechanisms, and there is a legitimate conversation to be had about the advantages they provide.

I currently live in Brisbane, so I can visually see and completely understand why the academy exists. This is rugby league territory. AFL doesn’t occupy the same place in the sporting landscape here that it does in the southern states, and developing young Queensland talent requires more work.

But I was lucky enough to sit at Brisbane’s best and fairest during the week and it made me think less about how you get great players into a football club and more about what makes them want to stay there.

It was Chris Fagan’s final best and fairest as Lions coach, and during the night he asked every player who had been part of the grand final team to stand individually. One by one, he looked at them in the eye, and spoke to them and the entire room about them as players. He explained what they brought to the side, the role they performed and why they are important to Brisbane’s success. It didn’t matter whether he was talking about the ‘best’ player on the ground, or the 23rd man selected. Every player was made to understand exactly why he mattered as a player and as a person.

And for the first time since I retired, I genuinely missed playing sport.

Watching those players look up at their coach reminded me how powerful it is to be part of an environment where you feel valued and respected. It also made me wonder whether, when we analyse Brisbane’s success, we naturally place too much emphasis on the advantages we can quantify and not enough on those we can’t.

We can point to Ashcroft and see the value of father-son. We can point to Andrews and see the value of an academy. We can look at where players were drafted, what they are paid and what mechanisms allowed a club to access them, and attach some sort of tangible value to all of it. But culture is much harder to measure.

There is no draft-pick value you can attach to a player feeling genuinely valued by his coach. There is no column on a salary cap spreadsheet for players enjoying coming to work, loving your teammates or believing deeply in the person leading you and the direction your team is going. Yet sitting in that room watching Fagan speak, it was difficult to believe those things haven’t contributed enormously to Brisbane’s success.

The quantifiable advantages might help explain how talented players get to Brisbane. The unquantifiable ones might help explain why they want to stay.

Fagan is particularly interesting because he didn’t come into coaching with the authority of being a premiership hero or being a great AFL player. He never played at the highest level, so his relationship with his players couldn’t be built around what he had achieved himself. From what I witnessed in that room, it has been built on something much more powerful: respect. He clearly loves his players, and they clearly love him.

Money also obviously matters in professional sport. Careers are short and players should maximise their earning potential while they can. But the longer you spend in elite sport, the more you understand the value of being happy. When you are young, you can probably assume most high-performance environments are relatively similar. Once you’ve experienced a few, you realise they absolutely aren’t.

All these things might not appear on a contract, but they can absolutely become part of the calculation when deciding whether to stay, leave or perhaps even accept a little less money to remain somewhere you genuinely love playing.

That is the part of equalisation the AFL can never really control. It can change father-son rules, review academy access and adjust the draft in pursuit of an even competition. It can try to equalise access to talent. It cannot equalise the environments those players enter once they arrive.

Brisbane has undoubtedly benefited from the romanticism of the father-son or the necessity of the academy but it has also built a football club where those players seem to genuinely want to stay.

And sitting there listening to Fagan explain why every one of his players mattered, that was what made me miss sport. Not the medals or even playing the game itself, but remembering how good it feels to belong somewhere you never want to leave.