Are we seeing a new way of AFL players retiring?

Jordan Lewis is a Dee. Sam Mitchell is moving to Perth. We still don’t know what Jimmy Bartel will be doing next year. It seems to be a big off-season for the transition from playing to not playing.

First of all, from a club perspective, things are much easier when the player sees the writing on the wall and calls time himself.

It seems there are three accepted ways to do this: during the season, effectively immediately (think Troy Chaplin); during the season, effective at the end of the season (Matthew Pavlich); or after the season has ended, little fanfare (Corey Enright).

Then there is the somewhat enforced retirement. North Melbourne provides us with all the best examples in 2016. Brent Harvey decided that he couldn’t see himself in another jumper. Nick Dal Santo wanted to start the next phase of his life rather than bed down at another club for possibly only a season. Drew Petrie just wasn’t attractive enough to another club. Michael Firrito got the hint. All four seem to have had their careers ended.

What Hawthorn seems to be doing may be pushing this issue to other clubs, who look past this to acquire leadership and intellectual property. Now they don’t need to worry about how they transition Lewis and Mitchell to retirement, they outsourced that job.

The Hawks also don’t have to worry about plummeting form and seeing a club champion running around for Box Hill. Clubs will little cultural and emotional attachment to a player will have fewer qualms about dropping a player who is not performing.

This seems to be the first example of this happening and being publicised by the club moving the players on. Certainly Lewis and Mitchell are not the first premiership players with over 200 games at a club to move on (although only one other player with over 250 games and four premierships has ever changed clubs, and that was because George Harris was ousted as President at Carlton and he was the only thing keeping Alex Jesaulenko there). And surely we all know that images of Sam Mitchell wearing some white-clash-jumper monstrosity with an eagle on it somewhere isn’t going to tarnish our memories of Mitchell as one of Hawthorn’s best ever.

It’s just that this could become the norm. North had a problem this year with a bunch of players who the club didn’t want to continue on. By Round 21, none of them had announced they were retiring. They went the nuclear option and announced all four wouldn’t be offered new contracts in one hit.

Geelong, on the other hand, have a different approach, and so do their players. I can’t remember the last time a Geelong player announced during a season he was retiring at the end of it. In 2012, Matthew Scarlett knew he was finishing up before he played his last game but kept mum. I get the sneaky suspicion that Enright was of the same mindset, and his tears after Geelong’s preliminary final loss betrayed his true thoughts.

Others were shown the door by the club in one way or another: Josh Hunt, Paul Chapman and Matthew Stokes all finished their careers at other clubs, and Steve Johnson and James Kelly will do the same. Would the club have preferred they retire as one-club players? Not enough to do anything differently.

Now Geelong are in a predicament with Bartel, where he has a contract for 2017 but the club wants him to quit. Lewis and Mitchell both had contracts at Hawthorn for 2017 and they got moved. Do you reckon Chris Scott listened to what was happening to Lewis and Mitchell and thought “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Obviously, it is a sticky situation when a club and its player differ on when a playing career should end. It seemed about five years ago we hit a limit to how much the league collectively could be committed to youth when Leon Davis, fresh off an All Australian year, couldn’t engender any interest from the two Western Australia clubs and was finished at 30 years old. Things are better now, although Essendon’s need for top-up players probably created a bit of a false economy in 2016.

What is certain is how that Hawthorn have done what they have done, it is more likely to happen in the future. Whether it is a hand-held transition like Hawthorn’s or something that looks more like pointing towards the door, we’ll have more moments in the AFL that closely resemble seeing Michael Jordan running around in a Washington Wizards jersey.

It’s just a question of whether, as a football-watching community, we are ready for it, considering we’ve endured a bit of change recently.