Michael Voss exit closes door on Carlton’s era of premiership contention that never was

We are inside the first minute of the 2023 preliminary final and you get to see everything Carlton has the potential to be under Michael Voss.

Sam Docherty, the former Carlton captain who has fought back after testicular cancer, latches onto a loose ball at half forward and sends Matt Cottrell running into an open goal.

Even though the match is being played at Brisbane’s fortress, the Gabba, there is a huge contingent of travelling Carlton fans sitting behind the goals. The entire right pocket is covered almost entirely in Blue.

For the remainder of that first quarter, the non-stop roars of the Carlton fans seemingly inhale the ball through the big sticks over and over again.

Spurred on by their loyal and loud fans, the Blues are firing on all cylinders. The forward pressure is manic, the transition football slick, and Brisbane has no answers.

Cottrell’s goal is followed by majors to Harry McKay, Jack Martin, Docherty and Charlie Curnow, and Carlton is seemingly riding a tidal wave into its first grand final since 1995.

Less than three years after that preliminary final, which the Blues wound up losing by 16 points, several key men from that line-up are now gone.

Curnow, Jack Martin and Tom De Koning are all now playing important roles at rival clubs, and Voss, the key to all the positive cultural strides Carlton had made in the lead-up to the preliminary final, is gone too after another loss to Brisbane at the Gabba.

The first quarter of the 2023 preliminary final promised to be the start of Carlton’s journey to the promised land under Voss. It is now the pinnacle of the entire era.

It is ironic that the way Carlton lost the preliminary final, racking up a huge early lead before slowly but surely coughing it up, is exactly what wound up undoing the Voss era for good this season.

Voss arrived at a fractured club when he was hired by Carlton at the end of 2021.

A review Carlton had undertaken in 2021 revealed the club had been severely fractured in multiple departments.

Voss’s predecessor, David Teague, said after his last match that he felt he didn’t have the full support of those inside the club, while the review found that Teague’s game plan was supported by just 30 per cent of the playing group.

The arrival of Voss, ex-Geelong chief executive Brian Cook and president Luke Sayers was meant to catapult the Blues into an era of unparalleled professionalism and contention.

The Voss-Cook-Sayers era Blues did a lot of things right, and yet Carlton is still so far from its 17th premiership. Like Voss, both Cook and Sayers have also departed.

Even with all of the magic of 2023, Voss somehow always felt like he was a bad couple of weeks away from losing his job.

That is a tough reality for a coach to live in, and it is unsurprising that this same reality resulted in him eventually walking away.

The Voss tenure at Carlton is firstly a reminder of how hard success is to achieve, and secondly a testament to the clubs that have been able to remain competent for years on end.

Everyone’s goal is to be Geelong, but actually becoming Geelong is easier said than done.

The off-field metrics scream success for Carlton. Under Voss, the club’s membership grew by 25,000 across five seasons, culminating in a record-breaking figure of 106,345 in 2024 on the back of the preliminary final appearance.

However, football clubs don’t exist to become Fortune 500 companies, they exist to win games of football.

Winning is the only metric that matters to fans, and unfortunately this is the metric that Voss couldn’t ultimately find enough success in.

It is hard to believe that this current Blues core didn’t win another final after 2023 under Voss’s leadership.

On paper at least, Carlton had all the ingredients you would want in a premiership side — key position stocks at either end of the ground in Jacob Weitering, McKay and Curnow, a Brownlow-winning lead midfielder in Patrick Cripps, good ruckmen in De Koning and Marc Pittonet, and finally, zippy and annoying small forwards in the form of Jesse Motlop, Lachie Fogarty and others.

Good young cores are a cute and fun story until they get incredibly expensive.

It is a bill worth footing if you’re reaching prelims year after year. Is it a core worth paying for one successful finals run? Probably not.

Carlton found itself capped out with not a lot of success to show for it, and now stares dead in the face of another potential rebuild.

As the club announced the departure of Voss, its new chief executive, Graham Wright, president Rob Priestley and football boss Chris Davies all made pointed references to targeting youth.

Cody Walker’s arrival at the end of this year will supercharge Carlton’s rebuild, while Jagga Smith and Harry Dean are clearly on their way to becoming very good footballers. Sam Walsh is still locked in long-term and is in his prime.

Carlton faces big decisions on what to do with Cripps, Weitering and McKay at the end of the season.

Whether the trio all remains in Blue next season is entirely anyone’s guess, and even if one or more of them do, it is clear Carlton will look markedly different moving forward.

The good news for Carlton is that its next coach is undoubtedly building off a more solid base than Voss did.

This is not a situation where the players had stopped believing in Voss, like many of them had done with Teague.

In Wright, Carlton has a chief executive who is one of the most respected administrators in the game, a man who has built multiple premiership sides at multiple clubs.

Davies spent 11 years at Port Adelaide building a side that was a perennial finals contender, even if the Power did not go all the way.

And yet, even with all of that, a premiership is not promised.

If there is any club who knows about that, it is Carlton, which now appears to be wrapping up its own era of dominance that never was.