The AFL has a talent problem and it’s not restricted to the playing field. As the competition has expanded to include a national women’s league and soon 19 teams, veteran club bosses have lamented the dearth of emerging off-field leaders across the competition.

Consider these significant off-field decisions since the 2023 grand final. Having lured revered club boss Brian Cook out of retirement for a two-year stint, Carlton president Luke Sayers extended the 69-year-old Cook’s contract until the end of 2025.

St Kilda, searching for a new chief executive, is expected to appoint former North boss Carl Dilena but not before the club sounded out 66-year-old Trevor Nisbett, who had only just retired after 24 years in the top job at West Coast.

Unable to find a suitable replacement in AFL football operations for Brad Scott, who had returned to coaching 12 months earlier the league’s new chief executive Andrew Dillon appointed Geoff Walsh, 67, as a football consultant to oversee some of the game’s most pressing issues.

Walsh, who retired as Collingwood’s football boss in 2020, spent little time in the pasture. First he was lured back to oversee Carlton’s football review in 2021, then to run an even more brutal eye over North Melbourne in 2022, and then for a short-lived stint as St Kilda’s head of football.

After the Western Bulldogs missed the finals last year, they appointed Peter Jackson, 70, to investigate and recommend changes at the club.

The previous year North Melbourne had offered Jackson the top job, a role that eventually went to Jen Watt under Jackson’s imprimatur. Watt, who served a long apprenticeship at Melbourne and then the MCC, is one of the rare success stories of the early AFL leadership programs.

Jackson pointed out that when former AFL boss Andrew Demetriou approached him in 2013 to steer Melbourne out of the football and financial wasteland: “I was an old bloke then.”

He blames the AFL’s failure to truly invest in promoting young talent on the leadership dearth. “Andrew Dillon knows what I think,” he said. “Gillon McLachlan knew what I thought. It’s been coming for 15-20 years. People like (Brisbane Lions boss Greg) Swann and I have been warning them for a long time.