A lot of hay and media attention has been made with the coaching future of Michael Voss. The current top man at the Carlton Football Club has been plagued with critics calling for his head, and unfortunately for Voss, his players aren’t giving him much of a defence.
The club he leads is currently submerged in the bottom four, a far cry from the finals that the team had set their sights on in previous years and with a clash against the old nemesis, Collingwood, looming, many are holding their breath as to what happens next.
The Board has ended up being Voss’ greatest defence, sticking by the beleaguered coach last year when it looked like almost a certainty that his time at the helm of his second club had come to an end. Instead of axing the coach, the Board went against its own fan base and publicly backed the coach. However, Voss’ performance hasn’t improved, prompting renewed calls from supporters to part ways with the coach, even this early in the season.
This has resulted in some of those in the media taking potshots at Carlton’s fans, with members of the established AFL media and a variety of other groups trading shots over who has the right to call for the removal of a coach.
At the moment, Voss faces a major predicament where he is almost screwed either way.
Voss’ Current Coaching Record
Before we jump into the predicament that Michael Voss faces at Carlton, let’s take a look back at his record. Voss is currently in his fifth season at the helm of Carlton and took the club back-to-back finals campaigns before the wheels fell off the cart last season, and the club finished 11th.
However, in his first three seasons at Carlton, Voss had a record of over 40 wins in 71 games, giving him a win percentage of 56.
To put this in perspective, this would land him as Carlton’s most successful coach since David Parkin, who finished his Carlton coaching career with a home and away win percentage of just under 62%, which included three Premierships from five Grand Final appearances.
Parkin is also the last Carlton coach to choose his own departure timeline, with every coach since Parkin ultimately being sacked by the club. This includes Dennis Pagan and Mick Malthouse, who were both recruited to the club for the Premiership success that they managed at other clubs.
Back to Voss – his last few seasons have seen an almost incredible fall off. In Round 19, 2024, Carlton was sitting two-points clear in second place behind minor premier Sydney. Since then, Carlton has lost 23 of 35 games, and Voss’ coaching record at Carlton is set to slip below .500 for the first time, unless he and his team can pull off a minor miracle against Collingwood, a team that the Blues haven’t beaten since Round 20, 2023. That is the only time Voss has coached the Blues to victory over the club’s bitter arch rival.
A big part of Voss’ fall off has been the fact that AFL has swung from being a battle for contested possessions and clearances to favouring fast ball movement. As a result of the changes, Carlton’s big-bodied and powerful but slow midfield has struggled to keep up with the sudden change of pace.
Voss finally sought to address this last week by dropping the reigning best and fairest, George Hewett. This seemed to help somewhat with the speed through the middle, but ultimately was not enough to prevent another fadeout against Adelaide at the start of Gather Round.
The Predicament: Part 1
Everything about Carlton in the last 20 years has largely been about patching over problems rather than seeking a long-term fix. The fear of being left behind and chasing the rest of the league yet again is something that truly haunts Carlton and its fans.
Blues fans seemed to feel like they had come out of the end of a long tunnel when Voss led them to a Preliminary Final in 2023. Then, in 2024, just as it looked like Voss would lead them back to the promised land at the top end of the ladder, the wheels fell off, and the apple cart seemed to disintegrate quicker than a carton of milk left out in the sun. That’s right, I mixed metaphors to describe the situation.
The club was forced into an awkward position. Stick by the first coach that came close to taking them into the top 4, or again hop on the coaching bandwagon to find someone who can return the Blues to the top of the ladder.
However, any decent coach will have watched what has happened at Carlton over the last decade and would be all too aware to stay far away from the horror show. Until recently, the club has repeatedly backed the player over the coaching staff in what has resulted in a hostile environment for any coach, regardless of how deeply they were ingrained in the club.
Seemingly having learned their lesson of jumping off their coach in favour of someone who can provide them a short-term fix, as they did when they ditched Ratten for Malthouse, the club has now opted to stand by their beleaguered coach, even as he faces a more unenviable position.
However, now the players are likely feeling that it is only a matter of time before they see the club replace Voss with someone else. This makes Voss’ challenge of recovering the players even harder, as he likely struggles to convince them that he isn’t a dead-man-walking, whilst simultaneously encouraging them to play for him and his style of game that only seems to be working for short bursts at a time.
However, this isn’t the only problem that Voss and the Carlton Football Club face in the coming year.
The Predicament: Part 2
An issue facing Carlton this year is that they need to manage a balancing act between succeeding and not doing too well. With the club anxious to draft Cody Walker, the son of former Carlton player Andrew Walker, in the face of another raft of changes to the draft that saw Carlton scrap up enough draft capital to make sure that they could match any potential bids on Harry Dean. There are future ramifications as well, with the recent performances of Lukas Koutoufides, the son of former captain and premiership player Anthony.
Given the unknown changes that could be facing the future of the Father-Son rule, one that has magically avoided impacting certain football clubs, Carlton won’t want to be lacking the draft capital with their chances to miss out on generational players in Walker and Koutoufides. Especially if that raft of players, together with some of their up-and-coming players like Dean, the Camporeale boys, Jagga Smith, Talor Byrne, and Jack Ison, could help lead the club back to the top of the ladder again.
Conclusion
It seems more than likely that Voss’ tenure as Carlton coach will come to an end this season, either when the board buckles to the public pressure and fires the coach, or when his contract ends. If Voss and the administration can hold on until the end of the season, the club will be in the fortunate position where they won’t have to pay off their outgoing coach’s salary for the first time since the departure of David Parkin a quarter of a century ago.
While fans may dismay the fact that their club’s once promising future is circling the drain again, breaking away from a 25 year tradition could be a positive step in the right direction for a club that has meandered through that same time period.
