Former Swans coach regrets not doing more for Adam Goodes amid ‘diabolical’ treatment of AFL star

Former Sydney Swans coach John Longmire has opened up on his regret for not doing more to support Adam Goodes in the final years of his career, as the two-time Brownlow medallist faced “diabolical, almost unforgivable” treatment.

Writing in his autobiography released this week, Longmire said the final years of Goodes’s career were a source of regret.

“I wish everyone had done more,” he said. “Adam Goodes was not just a champion footballer, he was a leader and a man of immense courage. What he endured was diabolical, almost unforgivable.”

Longmire led Sydney for more than a decade before resigning in 2024, having won a flag in his second season, in 2012. He had been a Swans assistant as Goodes emerged as one of the country’s best players and stepped into the head coach role with his star midfielder-forward at his peak.

After calling out racism from a 13-year-old Collingwood fan in 2013, Goodes was subject to targeted booing from opposition fans. The treatment was immediately condemned by some, but it took four years after Goodes’s 2015 retirement for the AFL to apologise unreservedly.

Longmire regrets not doing more at the time. “In hindsight, I should have threatened to pull our players off the ground if the booing didn’t stop,” he said. “It might not have changed anything but it would have brought the matter to a head and forced the industry – and the community – to consider what this continued behaviour was doing to one of the game’s greats.

“It would have been an extreme act – but then what was happening to Adam was extreme too. Unfortunately, there were no guarantees anything would have changed.”

Adam Goodes retired from the AFL in 2015. Photograph: Cameron Spencer/Getty Images

Longmire wrote he noticed booing of Goodes increased following the Collingwood match in 2013 and its aftermath, when former Magpies president Eddie McGuire suggested Goodes could be used to promote the musical King Kong.

“It was in that game that he [Goodes] called out a young Magpies supporter for calling him an ‘ape’, which started a firestorm that wasn’t of his making, but he showed great empathy,” Longmire said.

“Collingwood president Eddie McGuire apologised on behalf of the club after the game, but torched that apology with an insensitive comment on radio a few days later that cut to the core. If only it had ended there.”

McGuire subsequently offered a personal apology in both a call to Goodes and in an address to the media. In the 2019 documentary The Australian Dream, he described his comment as “just a mistake, it was a misspoken moment”.

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In the same documentary, Goodes recounted the phone call from McGuire. “When I finally took his call, I just said ‘you’re not a friend’,” he said. “He just forgot where he was, he forgot that he was on radio, and it was just an off-the-cuff thing that he would say at a barbecue, at a bar, and it just highlighted my point. That casual racism is there, it’s alive and it’s flourishing in our communities.”

Longmire said the booing increased again after the Swans player was named Australian of the Year in 2014. “It saddens me to know that the place Adam once felt most comfortable – on the football field, showing his skills to the world – ended up being the place where he felt most uncomfortable.”

Longmire missed out on the head coaching job at the Tasmania Devils last month when Ken Hinkley was appointed.

After winning the AFL premiership in 2012, Longmire went on to lose his next four grand finals. His autobiography is titled Pain, Perspective & Premierships.