Expansion clubs are supposed to struggle. That's the script. A new team enters a national competition, spends a decade getting belted, slowly gathers talent, and if everything breaks the right way, contends for a premiership somewhere in its second or third decade. The Adelaide Football Club read that script, ignored most of it, and won two premierships before its eighth birthday.
It has spent every year since working out what a club is meant to be when the winning stops.
A state, not a suburb
To understand the Crows, you have to understand what South Australia felt in the late 1980s. The SANFL was one of the strongest state leagues in the country, and South Australians took considerable pride in that. But the old VFL had gone national — West Coast and Brisbane came in during 1987 — and suddenly the best players were leaving, the spotlight was shifting, and a whole football state was watching from the outside.
When Adelaide was admitted and debuted in 1991, it wasn't a suburban club with a local catchment. It wore the state colours of red, blue and gold. It took its nickname from the old "Croweaters" tag for South Australians. It carried a grievance, a point to prove, and the backing of roughly an entire state that had waited for exactly this.
The support was total, and it showed. Football Park at West Lakes became one of the loudest grounds in the competition, and success arrived far faster than anyone had a right to expect. Under Malcolm Blight, Adelaide won the 1997 premiership and then backed it up in 1998 — a feat few clubs of any vintage manage. Andrew McLeod won the Norm Smith Medal in both of those grand finals, and he remains the only player ever to do so. Darren Jarman kicked five goals in the 1997 decider, a performance still talked about in Adelaide.
There was a cost to the "state team" identity, though. When Port Adelaide — the SANFL powerhouse that had long resented the arrangement — entered the AFL in 1997, the state's unity split down the middle. The Showdown derbies that followed became some of the fiercest local contests in Australian sport. Adelaide was everyone's team for six years, and after that it was half a city's team forever.
The long middle
What followed the flags was not failure, exactly, but something less romantic: competence without a finishing touch. Preliminary finals that went the wrong way. Good seasons that ended one win short. The Crows were consistently respectable and intermittently very good, which in a two-team town is its own peculiar pressure.
The most significant change of that era wasn't on the field at all. In 2014, the club left suburban West Lakes for Adelaide Oval on the riverbank in the city centre, and the transformation was immediate. A ground that had sat half-empty for afternoon matches became a 50,000-seat cauldron that sold out again and again. Adelaide's home-ground advantage, already strong, became one of the most talked-about in the league.
Then came a stretch of years that no script could have anticipated.
2015, and a grief nobody rehearsed
Phil Walsh arrived as senior coach for 2015 — a former player and long-time assistant who had finally earned the top job, and who was already reshaping the club in his image. In July of that year, he was killed at his own home. His son was charged over his death.
The football world has few precedents for that kind of loss. The AFL cancelled the Showdown scheduled for that weekend, a decision essentially unheard of at the top level of the game. Fans left scarves at the gates of Adelaide Oval. Players from both Adelaide clubs, and from clubs far beyond the state, openly grieved a man most of the country had only known as a football strategist. It remains one of the strangest and saddest weeks the competition has had.
The anthem, sung in the dark
Two years later, Adelaide gave its supporters the best season in the club's modern history. The 2017 side won the minor premiership and entered the finals as the competition's best team, and it was during that finals campaign that one of the AFL's most enduring images was created.
The floodlights at Adelaide Oval failed during a final, halting play and plunging the ground into an awkward, drifting pause. Someone played INXS's "Never Tear Us Apart" over the PA system, and something like fifty thousand people sang it in the dark, without irony, without prompting. It has been the club's anthem ever since.
That moment said something about Adelaide that the ladder never quite captured. For all the premierships and the droughts, the club's deepest asset is belonging — a whole city's worth of it, delivered weekly and unconditionally.
The fairy tale ended a few weeks later, when a Richmond side writing its own remarkable story overwhelmed Adelaide in the grand final. A heavy loss, but the kind a club recovers from. What happened next was harder to recover from.
The camp that broke a grand finalist
In the pre-season of early 2018, coming off that grand final loss, the club sent its players through an intensive camp run with outside facilitators, designed — in the language of the time — to build resilience and push comfort zones. It did the opposite of what was intended. The camp fractured the playing group. Trust eroded. Key players left over the following seasons, and the side that had been the competition's best 12 months earlier slid down the ladder with startling speed.
The details stayed largely private for years, partly because players themselves asked that they remain so — which tells you something about how raw it all was. When Eddie Betts published his memoir in 2022 and described his experience of the camp, the club formally apologised to its players. By then, Adelaide had fallen far enough to collect the first wooden spoon in its history, in the 2020 season squeezed into Queensland hubs.
The lesson has been repeated in sporting organisations around the world, and Adelaide paid full price to learn it: culture is not a training module. It is built over years and it can be broken in a weekend.
The slow way back
Matthew Nicks took over as coach ahead of the 2020 season and began a rebuild of the most patient kind — draft and develop, trade carefully, accept short-term pain. Jordan Dawson crossed from Sydney and grew into midfield leadership. Young players arrived in batches rather than stars, and were given time.
Meanwhile, something else was happening at the club that the men's drought obscured. Adelaide's AFLW team won the first ever women's league premiership in 2017, and added further titles in the seasons since — proof that the organisation's systems could still build champion teams even while the men's side searched for its second act.
And through all of it, the membership kept climbing. Adelaide has spent long stretches with one of the largest — at times the largest — membership bases in the league, through good years and dreadful ones. That is the paradox at the heart of the club. Results wobble. Belonging doesn't.
What the drought is actually about
It has now been well over a quarter century since Adelaide's last men's premiership, a sentence that would have sounded absurd to anyone watching McLeod glide through the 1998 grand final.
But the club's story was never really a premiership count. The flags came early precisely because the support behind them was total — a state willing a team into existence and then lifting it. The long apprenticeship since has been about something harder: surviving tragedy, dismantling a broken culture, rebuilding without shortcuts, and discovering that the thing people sing about in the dark was never the winning anyway.