Top: Essendon chief executive Xavier Campbell. Left: List manager Adrian Dodoro. Right: Football manager Dan Richardson.

I have been talking about cultural issues at Essendon for a while now. That annoys people because they think it’s too convenient and cliched. What does it actually mean, they ask.

Well in a nutshell, for a long time, and I’m talking decades, for Essendon I think it’s been about an inflated sense of importance, and essentially a failure to make the right decisions because its so-called “big club” status has offered a false sense of security.

It’s been about a failure to follow process (drug saga, anyone?), a refusal to admit error, and too much power either in the wrong, or too few hands, be it inside or outside the physical surrounds of the club itself.

Every time, particularly this week, when I tweet something about the subject, I’ll get a lot of responses about Adam Saad or Joe Daniher, or Ben Rutten. But this is about something a lot bigger than just this particular group at this particular time. Because the processes of the club are fatally flawed.

It’s not just recruitment, or list management, or coaching. For example, what about development? I asked a couple of months ago on here name me a bona fide AFL champion Essendon has produced of its own accord over the past two decades apart from Jobe Watson? Answer? There isn’t one. What does that tell you?

And if player development is a real priority, why has there been a virtual revolving door of development coaches and staff over recent years, too many to recall here in one go.

I’m neither here nor there on recruiting and list manager Adrian Dodoro, but I bet you can’t name another club at which one man, given the lack of on-field success Essendon has had for 20 years, would have continued to hold those roles all that time.

Doesn’t that say a lot about the inability of this whole club to hold itself to account? To not just talk about setting standards, but be prepared to act when they’re not being met?

And if the administration isn’t held to account by itself or by a board which seems to have all the rigour of a wet lettuce leaf, why is it any surprise that players start wondering why they should be held to account either?

The single best comment on this cultural stuff I’ve heard in the last week came from Matthew Lloyd last night on Footy Classified. It was on the back of a discussion about the range of draft picks Essendon could expect for Saad and Daniher.

He said: “It doesn’t matter who comes in, if you cannot get the environment right, they’ll fall by the wayside, too.” Lloydy gets it. I wish more Essendon people did.

People want names, scapegoats. But this isn’t all just about Dodoro, or chief executive Xavier Campbell, or football manager Dan Richardson. Or Rutten. Or former president Lindsay Tanner. Or the new one in Paul Brasher. Or the board. This is a collective failure. Indeed, one which while it includes, also precedes them.

They’ve all been at fault in letting an inadequate environment drift along. In a series of bad appointments, bad decisions, in identifying issues too late then knee-jerk reactions. Misreading the list (again). Losing the wrong people on and off the field.

Of failing to see the increasing disconnect of supporters, who are sick to death of the never-ending spin and corporate speak, the pat video messages from players, or when the communications they get from the club aren’t straight up honesty about why things aren’t going well, exactly where the club is at and what needs to be done, but insulting offers of discounts on crappy merchandise.

Of failing to recognise that while headquarters at Tullamarine may look flash on the inside, for fans who want to get close to their club, on the outside it’s a barren, soulless cold and uninviting place.

Drive in the Melrose Drive entrance and there’s not even any signage to tell you you’re there. That stuff actually matters, guys. Ignoring it all repeatedly shows a disturbing tone deafness. “Sure, we got blown away by 10 goals, but here’s a great offer of 20% off a useless sponsors product you don’t need or want as our way of saying thank you.”

Is this all too big picture? OK, I’ll give you a few specific questions. Like on Saad and Daniher. Look, it’s great to talk tough about players needing to buy in, and if feathers are ruffled so be it, and feeding little damaging anecdotes about guys like Saad to the media so fans will turn on him and call him selfish.

But is it just rationalising the loss of a player who only a couple of days ago you were trying desperately to keep?

Essendon had a chance a year ago to make a stand on those so-called standards when it knew Rutten, who’d been there a year as an assistant, would be effectively coaching in his own right in 2020. It could have traded Daniher and Orazio Fantasia and said to the playing group “you’re either in or you’re out”.

Instead it chose to let the tail wag the dog for another year during which standards and morale deteriorated further. See, that’s about culture. And another 12 months of treading water because you won’t make tough decisions says only one thing: a weak culture.

Perhaps it’s not so surprising then that the Dons didn’t want Rutten fronting the media even though he was coach, instead wheeling out Worsfold to repeat the same deadpan mantras about “learnings”.

And why would he do anything else when it wasn’t his team or his coaching? That disrespected fans more than anything. They’re smarter than you think, guys.

Essendon seems to have an obsession about optics, and about the world caving in if it somehow has to admit it got things wrong. But guess what, fans appreciate that a lot more than corporate gobbledygook and spin. And they know an arse-covering exercise when they see one.

Speaking of which, let’s talk about that disastrous coaching succession plan. I know that plenty of people who it impacted upon thought it was a terrible idea. Campbell was a big fan, though. Why?

Well, maybe go back to John Worsfold’s premature contract extension at the start of 2018 after the virtual write-off of 2016 when Essendon fielded a virtual reserves team, and then in 2017 limping into a finals series and again getting destroyed in an elimination final.

That didn’t need to happen. This isn’t a slight on a guy who at least took on what became the most thankless coaching job in football, but it’s not as though rival clubs were exactly beating a path to Worsfold’s door.

That extension took in 2019 and this year. By the end of the first of those two years, the club decided it wanted someone else. But it’s pretty hard not to conclude the CEO was so worried about the optics of admitting they’d got the extension wrong that they got too clever by half in engineering a never more than very awkward-looking dual coaching set-up.

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What about on-field leadership? Well, the player leadership group has been a bit of an elephant in the room. And for good reason.

They might have delivered some very good and at least serviceable football for Essendon, but Jake Stringer, Devon Smith and now Dylan Shiel aren’t renowned among coaches as being the most team-oriented players, and there’s a fair argument none had spent enough time at their new club to be officially anointed leaders, as the latter two were this year.

But players vote on that group. They elected them, which might also say a bit about how undemanding their own standards have been. Again, the administration copped out by refusing to overturn a decision it had grave reservations about.

Zach Merrett, meanwhile, was voted out. That may or may not have been the right call. But if you’re going to do that, you at least owe him an explanation. And my understanding of that schemozzle is that Merrett never actually heard officially from the club about it until he found out via the media. That’s not good culture.

What’s also not good culture is when you shut out the members from even effectively having a say on who represents the club at board level.

As I mentioned a couple of weeks back, that’s effectively what’s happened with the board election process. I think Kevin Sheedy has plenty to contribute, I think he’s prepared to ask questions. Does he need to be on the board to ask them, though?

But now, because he’s been appointed by the board to fill casually the position Katie Lio resigned from to allow him on, he’ll be taking her position on the election ballot paper in December, endorsed as a ticket with football director Sean Wellman, also up for re-election.

That effectively renders an election redundant, because any other potential candidates – and there were plenty – now know they have no chance of beating two club premiership heroes.

It’s smart politics from the administration, avoiding potential negative publicity, but it’s also made a mockery of a democratic process, effectively locking members out of having a say in the running of their own club. They don’t even have a public members’ forum anymore to voice any concerns they may have – that’s been done away with, too.

Again, it’s hard not to see conscripting Sheedy on to the board as anything but another arse-covering exercise, and a shiny new toy to wave at fans as a diversionary tactic. That’s culture, too. A dictatorial one.

Two episodes for me best sum up Essendon’s cultural malaise. The first is from late 2017, when the Bombers, fighting for a finals spot, played tepid football all day and were eventually overrun, at home, by Brisbane, then bottom of the ladder with two wins.

It was a stinker, and a disappointed Xavier Campbell tweeted the following mild rebuke: “Not good enough. Not even close. Fans deserve so much better. 41,000 came out today and we let you down.”

Pretty mild stuff. Incredibly, the playing list was so livid that Campbell then had to apologise to the leadership group. What does that say about the strength of a club’s culture on either side of that equation? And that was four years ago.

The other story is worse. And it’s from even longer ago, back in 2015. It’s about when Essendon was looking for a coach to replace James Hird. A shortlist of candidates was assembled. It featured some pretty impressive names.

But, unknowingly to those who assembled it, it was also redundant. That’s because then-president Paul Little had made a unilateral decision to jump in his private plane, fly to Adelaide, and attempt to hire Worsfold as coach.

It’s fair to say the board was less than thrilled when they knew about that only when they saw it on TV. So were those so-called coaching candidates when they got wind of it.

A pity, too, because a couple of them have since gone on to become pretty highly regarded on the coaching front. Had they made even half the impression at Essendon they have subsequently elsewhere, the club might have avoided some of the mess it is now in. But not all of it, mind you.

Because this once mighty club’s greatest failing might be its seeming inability to concede just how far it has fallen. Even now. After this stinker of a year and with key players wanting out. Yes, that’s about culture, too. A culture of denial.

Matthew Lloyd was talking about players when he observed that even the best, if the environment wasn’t right, would fall by the wayside.

Essendon’s environment definitely isn’t right. It hasn’t been for a long time. And unless it first wakes up to that fact and then takes some pretty drastic action not just on the field but in much of its operation, a whole club might find itself similarly falling by the wayside. If it hasn’t already.