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The white shoe brigade, meter maids, schoolies week, fake tans… the Gold Coast has always had a problem with authenticity.
And when it comes to myopic Melbournites and their footy, the need for authenticity can reach the point of bloody-mindedness.
So if Gold Coast Suns are the real deal in 2025, just how does the heartland react if they’re playing major finals in September?
They might applaud an expansion team with a myriad of teething issues for finally graduating.
Or, as I suspect, many will dismiss the Suns as a soulless plastic creation that doesn’t deserve their interest, let alone sympathy.
For some, the drafting ‘gifts’ the Suns have received represent all that is wrong with the modern AFL. Notwithstanding that every AFL team, with the exception of Geelong, has built the same way over the last 30 years.
Many will believe the Suns have not truly earned their way to AFL credibility.
But that view deserves scrutiny.
If, and it’s still an if, the Suns do play finals it will represent the end of the longest wait for a team to play its first final series since the 12-team era.
Even the Suns’ spiritual forefather, the originally Gold Coast-based Brisbane Bears, managed to play a final in their ninth season despite the routine disasters that haunted the club’s embryonic years.
Will Graham celebrates a Gold Coast goal. (Photo by Matt Roberts/AFL Photos/via Getty Images)
When the Bears did finally make it, it was with a wave of support from down south. Once pitied, the Bears were genuinely embraced as a feel-good underdog story when they rose.
Other expansion clubs’ first finals experiences brought their own cities or states behind them in a way that franked their AFL presence.
The cynicism around the Suns whether it’s this year, next year or if it had happened three years ago, is that in a functioning equalised competition, they’ve turned up to the party embarrassingly late.
The Suns will forever be compared to their twin expansion creation the GWS Giants, which adds to the ambivalence around the Suns’ story.
Whether true believers like to admit it or not, the Giants are an on-field success story that some of Victoria’s oldest and proudest clubs could follow.
The ability to bravely build from ground zero with big losing seasons, become a contender and then remain a perennial threat is one that rational Victorian fans admire.
An eighth finals appearance in ten seasons appears certain in 2025 and perhaps this will be the year they achieve the ultimate. Despite consistently having talent prised away, they are a model of consistency that is only bettered by the Cats over the last decade.
Toby Greene celebrates a GWS goal. (Photo by Matt King/AFL Photos/via Getty Images)
Their ability to vault back into a preliminary final in 2023 after its one truly bad six-win season in 2022 reeked of a club that has the intangibles once-powerhouses Carlton and Essendon have been fumbling unsuccessfully to regain for two decades.
Their crowds may be meagre, but the thinking footy fan would never begrudge the Giants’ success.
They are steeped in on-field industriousness that the Suns have never looked like having.
Until now.
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The Rowell-Anderson tandem in the middle is symbolic of the gradual, sustainable and, frankly anti-Gold coast glitz shift.
Finally, the Suns look like their Giant cousins.
Which gets us back to the authenticity question.
The stereotypes of the region, combined with memories of the ‘Bad News Bears’ and a string of other failed or underachieving sports franchises have been a metaphorical load the Suns have had to carry.
Which is slightly unfair.
The AFL has privately admitted to mistakes in the club’s set-up.
Tin sheds for a home, combined with inexperienced administrators made for a tumultuous opening.
The steady loss of players added to the soulless narrative. From down south, this just looked like another version of Christopher Skase’s Bear mirage.
What that completely disregards is the organic and impressive success story of grassroots footy in the region.
The Gold Coast Australian Football League started in 1962, and through the various iterations of Queensland footy structure since, has been a constant growth story.
Starting as a second-tier league, the region now boasts four clubs in the state league QAFL, all with recent success.
Standing apart are the Southport Sharks, the community club that grew and in many ways made the Suns’ expansion a reality. Moving beyond the QAFL, it now competes strongly in the VFL and is arguably the strongest stand-alone club below the AFL on the east coast of the nation.
It might also be the greatest community club success story of the last 50 years.
Gradually participation has increased on the Gold Coast. While Auskick participation has increased by 83 per cent in the region since 2022 according to AFL figures, the more sober but sustainable figure is that there are 6,000 locals beyond Auskick that will play in junior or senior club competition each weekend this year (a rise of 18 per cent since 2022).
The noise from the AFL in Queensland is that Australian Rules is poised to overtake Rugby League for participation across the state, which would be a landmark day.
The 2025 Suns feel more representative of that base than ever before.
With eight Queensland draftees (including 2022’s three Gold Coast locals in the top 25) in the last two years, almost 30 per cent of the Suns’ list are Queensland natives.
Locals are starting to show up too. Last year’s 26,157 members eclipsed the NRL’s Titans own record numbers by more than 10,000.
So while the AFL-artifice narrative continues down south, it’s hard to begrudge an authentic footy community 60 years in the making having its moment in the ‘Sun’ this September.
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