Brad Scott has left Essendon this week, and he did not front the press conference on Tuesday that announced his departure. The exit cuts open old wounds at a club that has never properly moved on from the supplements scandal, even as it tries to sell a new era of stability.
It is hard to escape the sense that many people never thought Scott was the right fit for Essendon. Nearly four years on from his appointment, the club is again at a crossroads, with supporters left to weigh what his departure means after a wretched run with injuries and a rebuilding effort that never fully settled.
There is a reason the boardroom noise around Essendon keeps sounding like history repeating itself. In September 2022, James Hird came within a hair of reclaiming the top job, while Kevin Sheedy was aboard Lindsay Fox’s luxury yacht celebrating Fox’s 85th birthday and believed Hird would get the nod. He was later told Hird had missed out. A few months earlier, the club’s sesquicentennial celebrations had turned into a reunion of its most symbolic figures, with Hird and Sheedy as the headline acts and Hird emerging through a thick plume of smoke at the MCG.
That was the backdrop to Scott’s tenure, which began with a selection panel including Josh Mahoney, Andrew Thorburn, Jordan Lewis and Robert Walls. The appointment was meant to bring clarity after years of drift, but the line through his time at the club has been instability, a theme that became even harder to ignore as injuries mounted and results stalled. The internal message around rebuilding, alignment and purpose arrived too late to stop the doubts from hardening outside the club.
Scott’s own history made the contrast sharper. When he left North Melbourne in 2019, Ben Buckley described his decision to step aside as selfless and honourable, words that fitted the way he had carried himself through a difficult change. At Essendon, the farewell has been far less tidy. The club moved on without him in the room, and the optics were plain: the man brought in to steady the place was not there when the explanation was given.
Scott once summed up the mood around North with the line, “There’s nothing but blue sky for North,” and he also bristled at the burden of rebuilding, saying, “I inherited a mess, it’s not my fault, give me time and space.” Those words now feel like part of a wider career arc: a coach asked to fix a problem bigger than the team in front of him. At Essendon, the problem has never been just wins and losses. It has been identity, memory and the failure to close a chapter that keeps reopening.
Matthew Lloyd has urged Essendon to go all in after Brad Scott’s sacking, while Andrew Welsh has argued the club made the move after a poor run. That may be where the debate lands publicly, but the larger truth is more awkward. Essendon keeps trying to build forward while dragging its past behind it, and until the club finally decides what it wants to be, every coaching change risks becoming another version of the same story.
