The Goodes-O’Loughlin Medal will again be handed to the player judged best on ground when the Marn Grook tradition returns to the Sydney Cricket Ground on Friday night. Sydney host Collingwood in Round 10, and the match-day honour will once more carry the names of Adam Goodes and Michael O’Loughlin.

The medal, formally announced in 2016, has become one of the clearest links between the club’s present and two of its greatest Indigenous champions. Isaac Heeney has won it three times, taking the award in 2018, 2021 and 2025, while Chad Warner claimed it in 2023 and 2024. Lance Franklin won it in 2017 and 2022, Tom Mitchell took the first medal in 2016, Sam Reid won in 2019 and Luke Ryan in 2020.

The honour is not just ceremonial. It is awarded in tribute to two of the greatest Indigenous players to have graced the AFL arena, and its design carries the blue and red colours of Sydney’s first Marn Grook guernsey, which was designed by Goodes’ mother, Lisa Sansbury. That detail ties the medal to a broader effort that has always sat behind the night itself: making First Nations presence part of the game, not an add-on to it.

Goodes and O’Loughlin’s football records give the medal its weight. Goodes retired at the end of the 2015 season after 372 games in the red and white, with two Brownlow Medals, two AFL premierships, three Bob Skilton Medals and the 1999 AFL Rising Star award among his honours. He was Australian of the Year in 2014. O’Loughlin played 303 games for the Swans from 1995 to 2009, was part of the club’s 2005 premiership side, won the best and fairest in 1998 and was a dual All-Australian, a member of the Indigenous Team of the Century and a Hall of Fame inductee in 2015.

They were already linked long before the medal existed. In 2005, Goodes and O’Loughlin were named at centre half back and full forward respectively in the AFL Indigenous Team of the Century, recognition of careers that stretched well beyond one club or one era. Together they also founded the GO Foundation, which has now awarded more than 1000 scholarships in Sydney, Adelaide and Canberra, and has pushed for First Nations participation in Australian football and zero tolerance for racism across sport and society more broadly.

That is why Friday night matters beyond the premiership points. The GO Foundation is the match day partner for the game, and the medal will again place Indigenous excellence at the centre of the Swans’ home stage. At the SCG, the best player in a Round 10 clash between Sydney and Collingwood will be judged against a medal that is both a sporting award and a statement of what the club says it wants the night to mean.

The question now is not what the medal stands for. It is who will join Heeney, Warner, Franklin and the rest on its list when the Marn Grook tradition returns to the SCG.