In Defence of Patrick Voss

History is written by the victors, and Bigfooty rumours are written by losers.

There’s a mounting narrative from Essendon fans that Patrick Voss’s potential was accurately assessed, but pervasive off-field issues led to him being delisted. This story requires selective amnesia for how Voss’s time at Essendon actually played out, and a complete lack of familiarity with Freo’s risk-averse recruiting. These rumours are a post hoc justification for a very mundane list management mistake, or less charitably, plain old sour grapes.

Cards on the table: I have no non-public intel here to contradict claims that Voss was getting on the beers prior to training sessions, partying through the night before games. But these rumours circulating of serious problem behaviour are wholly incongruent with the evidence publicly available.

For one, there’s the repeated testimony of Voss’s VFL coach. If you painstakingly trawl through old Essendon forums—perhaps during some sort of Substack-induced psychotic episode—you will find no contemporaneous attestation of these rumours. (Rather, a misplaced optimism for the KPF career of Harrison Jones.) Then there’s the fact Patrick Voss wasn’t even outright delisted; he’d been told there might be a rookie spot for him to be re-listed, depending on how the trade and draft period shook out. The prevailing sentiment among Essendon fans at the time of Voss’s delisting seemed to be well-wishes for his future, even muted frustration from certain fans at the decision to delist him. But only muted: while Voss was putting up tidy enough goal tallies in the VFL as a lead-up forward, that ferocious contest he’d been recruited for was stymied by the grown men he was lining up against. Two years in the system, and Patrick Voss hadn’t made his debut at AFL level.

Much has been retrospectively made of Voss’s VFL Best and Fairest win, but at the time this could be dismissed as a participation trophy for simply playing all 18 games in the struggling VFL side (Essendon’s VFL team finished the season in 17th place, with just the 5 wins).

And Voss did have flaws in his game—some of which haven’t gone away. Patrick Voss is not a good contested mark; this was remarked upon by VFL watchers at the time, though the VFL doesn’t collect stats on contested mark to verify. Voss doesn’t take the ball well overhead, and he’s not a high leap. In 2025 at Freo, Voss went at just 0.8 contested marks per game; in 2026, he’s down to 0.5. Compare that to Freo’s other tall forwards: Treacy is going at 2.1, Amiss is going at 1.4. The caliber of key forward who is going at 0.5 CM a game is, uh, Will Lewis. This was, and is, a serious shortcoming for an aspiring key forward.

‘Not surprising. One trick pony that got found out at the lower level, hard to see how he’d convert it at AFL level,’ wrote an Essendon fan on Bigfooty about the delisting.

The other primary factor in the decision to let Voss go was redundancy. Peter Wright looked cemented as the Dons’ tallest target. Essendon’s leading goal-kicker in 2023 was Kyle Langford. Jake Stringer was playing a very similar big-bodied role to Voss. Harrison Jones had been ruled out with injury after only 5 games, but Essendon would have expected his return to their forward line in 2024. Then there was Sam Weideman. Sure, Langford, Stringer are shorter than Voss—but if you don’t jump high, and your pack marks don’t stick, you’re basically playing a medium role anyway. In 2026 “why would you need Patrick Voss for when you’ve got Sam Weideman?” sounds like what you’d gibber as the orderlies fasten your straightjacket, but in 2023 it wasn’t so outlandish to assess Voss as surplus to needs.

So, what about off-field concerns? I’m sure Patrick Voss likes a beer or two. I’ve seen the guy. Voss has publicly said he went cold turkey in season 2025, which speaks to an understanding that there was improvement to be eked out in his own professional standards. But this must be understood in the context of Andrew Brayshaw’s informal “no drinking in season” club, organised amongst multiple Freo players emulating Brayshaw’s own freakish professionalism. Typically, AFL clubs are not Mormon missions; cutting loose every so often in-season is unremarkable behaviour for an AFL player, let alone a nineteen year old. But Voss didn’t have that buffer afforded to first round picks or established b23 players. His delisting was a marginal decision—therefore, minor behavioural concerns could have tipped the otherwise balanced scales.

What makes me most certain that rumours of serious behavioural issues are unfounded is the fact that Freo picked Voss up.

Freo’s talent identification in Victoria has been elite, with a well-embedded network of turncoats within the VFL, betraying their homeland and funnelling secrets about Switkowskis and Reids out west. If there were rumours circulating of serious off-field issues they would have certainly reached David Walls. The Garlick-era Fremantle Dockers have had an ironclad “no dickhead” policy; this means that Freo have been standoffish with offering a “fresh start” to troubled talent, such as West Australian Bobby Hill. For any longtime Freo fan, the impetus for this unofficial policy is blindingly obvious: we were torched by the Jesse Hogan trade due to unresolving off-field issues, and an alleged lack of professionalism from another forward prospect drove out future two-time Brownlow medalist and future two-timer Lachie Neale.

It is vanishingly unlikely that in preseason 2024, Fremantle would have risked disrupting their promising rebuild to bring in a known problem player, let alone a delisted rookie pick without a single game on his AFL résumé. Our structure was seemingly cemented with Treacy and Amiss locked in as our two long-term KPFs, and the Darcy/Jackson ruck combo with Dogga rotating through the forward line—Voss was picked up purely as depth. Our previous KPF depth, Josh Corbett, was the paradigmatic Freo culture pick up—selected for his sunny professionalism within the four walls rather than any on-field impact. Freo have spent gruelling years trying to foster a professional environment, promise young interstate stars a bright future if they sign on long-term. The idea that Freo would bring in an inveterate boozer on only his word that he’d changed his ways, exactly the right age bracket to recruit our other youngsters into misbehaviour, is preposterous. (It almost goes without saying, but recent headlines concerning disabled cubicles illustrate the risk of introducing troubled players to your young stars.)

As a Freo fan, I don’t even have skin in this game. Sure, Voss is our guy. But it would reflect equally well on Freo if Voss was completely off the rails at Essendon, arrived at Freo, and was transformed by the exemplary club culture into the self-starting workaholic he is now. It simply doesn’t align with how events unfolded. The narrative that Patrick Voss was the problem all along serves as a self-soothing fairytale for Essendon fans unwilling to confront their own list management failures.

The real explanation: it’s hard to be a big boy.

Let’s map the trajectories of two rookie pick KPFs.

Josh Treacy is a 195cm key forward selected at pick #7 in the 2021 rookie draft. A very physically developed teenager, his game was built around contest work. He struggled to effectuate this at AFL level, and was shunted down to the 2nds by availability.

Patrick Voss is a 195cm key forward selected at pick #9 in the 2022 rookie draft. And I’m not going to repeat myself: big boy meets men.

So how does Treacy stick around on a list, while Voss gets unceremoniously cut? Did Freo’s list management anticipate Cyclone Treacy’s stratospheric rise with precision that the BOM could only dream of? Obviously not, or they’d have taken Treacy far earlier in the draft, and wouldn’t have spent so much of 2023 sniffing around Logan McDonald.

Freo had far less forward options kicking around their list than Essendon. Freo have wandered in a tangled, thorny post-Pav wilderness—turning to, inter alia, Matthew Taberner, Jesse Hogan, Rory Lobb, Shane Kersten, even Nat Fyfe playing as a KPF. Almost as soon as Treacy debuted in 2021, he was handed a 2-year contract extension.

But the decision wasn’t all desperation, it was also extrapolation. Treacy and Voss both arrived at their football clubs as kids who looked like men. A teenager initially struggling to physically impact in seniors is rote player development—obscured only by the fact that these two didn’t look like teenagers. Good teams factor the slow build in: fellow big boy Shannon Neale went 3 years at Geelong before getting consistent game time.

If Treacy and Voss had looked like your typical lanky kids coming into the system, there might have been more sympathy when Treacy spilled a contested mark, or Voss failed to break through a tackle. Unlike crafty key forwards—your Jye Amisses, your Logan Morrisses—who can instantly impact at AFL level, a contested KPF needs those years of physical development. A big boy is not a man.

But one day, it clicks.

There’s not much to say about Josh Treacy’s career trajectory that my “Josh Treacy 2027 Coleman Medalist” tramp stamp doesn’t already spell out. Patrick Voss’s trajectory remains a bit more ambiguous.

The obvious take is that the Prancing Pony is an unqualified success story. Patrick Voss is playing as a key forward in the ladder leader, and is the 17th leading goal-kicker across the league (one goal ahead of Nate Caddy in 18th place, the only Essendon player to crack the Coleman top 20). But some aren’t buying the hype. Voss’s detractors say it’s easy to kick goals for a side that keeps winning, picking up the 3rd best KPD week after week.

What Voss is doing is anything but easy. Behind the scenes, Voss drills contested marking as an early morning extracurricular—resulting in only modest improvements so far on-field. (Emphasis on ‘so far’—wouldn’t be surprised with a big uptick in the coming years. He is still only 23.) Voss’s real improvement has been his contested work at ground level: relentless tackling, selflessly shepherding defenders away from his teammates, and his big-chested ball-winning brute force. Voss is averaging 2.1 tackles inside 50. The next best key forward is Shannon Neale, on 1.4. Freo’s tall forward line only works because our big boys apply ground level pressure that would typically require smalls. Patrick Voss has made himself indispensable.

This is why the rumours rankle me. The Patrick Voss story is a fairytale. Even in our beautiful game, with its diversity of player sizes, shapes, positions, roles, it is easy for a player to fall short. It happens to hundreds of kids every draft, it happens to dozens of delisted players each off-season. Patrick Voss couldn’t sort out his contested marking; that should have written off his chance at ever making it as an AFL key forward. If he made it on to an AFL list, it would only be as a rookie pick. Even on a list, he’d never get the call up to debut. If another team gave him a second chance, it would only ever be as depth.

It’s not the sort of fairy tale where your wishes are granted by a fairy godmother, a magic wand, a genie from a lamp. The magic comes when you don’t give up.