WHEN GARRY LINNELL started covering VFL football for The Age in 1984 the ball had already bounced on a debate that still rages today for journalists and media consumers.
Should the media focus on the off-field politics of the game, or should it concentrate on who kicked the goals and whose hamstring was torn?
Linnell straddled both as he made his way, yet there was a curiosity that gnawed at him amid the day-to-day chaos of the newsroom.
"We were covering it for the newspaper, but we still weren't getting to the real story," Linnell tells ESPN.
"There was something missing."
Linnell could see that the daily dramas of administration and financial crises were not discrete events. They were part of an interconnected narrative far beyond kicks and handballs.
"Why the hell was the VFL almost run into the ground in the 1980s? It was a basket case," he says.
30 years ago, Linnell let loose the answers to those questions in the form of his book Football Ltd.
It was, and remains, a landmark for the sport.
While he cringes at the thought of reading his work again, he acknowledges its snapshot of the times.
"I wanted to capture the changes; the baby steps into adulthood, and how the game grew up."
LINNELL'S INSPIRATION WAS American writer David Harris' 1986 book on the backroom machinations of the NFL, The League.
"I was obsessed over that book," he says.
"It was a beautiful piece of reporting. He'd spent three years on it and had access to all the owners of the franchises. He talked about how these blokes had paid enormous sums of money to own the team and basically own the city."
"I thought a version of this is now starting to happen in the VFL."
Linnell's response to those parallels was to write his own The League, spanning the 1980s to early 1990s of the Australian game.
He pitched it to publisher Pan MacMillan and, to his shock, received an instantaneous positive response along with an advance cheque.
By 1994 the now-AFL was starting to gather momentum and leave behind its nadir of the previous decade, so Linnell spent every spare moment of the year talking to those in football about what had just happened.
Despite events being recent and many of the protagonists still connected to the game, Linnell managed to conduct 250 interviews with off-field figures willing to speak candidly.
"Most people do enjoy talking about themselves, despite their claims to be modest and not wanting publicity," he laughs.
Irrepressible football administration lifer, the late Ron Joseph, was his most enthusiastic subject.
"Ronnie split the footy community, but he was a character."
While Linnell had access to most major players, Joseph helped open doors otherwise closed.
That Linnell was able to extract first-hand accounts from the likes of Joseph, Allen Aylett, John Elliott, Dick Seddon, and Peter Nixon has taken on greater historical significance given all have passed away in recent years.
The confessions held within confirmed Linnell's theories about why football had landed in the predicament.
"The politics were, and still are, brutal in football -- there are so many 'Type A' personalities. So those adept and cunning enough survived," Linnell says.
"But they weren't necessarily the best people for those jobs."
The examination landed on some dark, recurring threads.
Some of Australia's most successful businessmen behaved like irrational -- and financially irresponsible -- children when it came to pursuing a premiership.
And that the savagery of those politics left many who loved the game broken.
"It was very primal, and it was very territorial. It was a toxic time within the footy community."
WITH INTERVIEWS COMPLETED, a routine started where Linnell would wake at 4am to write half a chapter before trooping off to his day job. At night, he would put his young children to bed and read his notes late into the evening before rising to do it all the next day.
In its time, the result was stunning.
Commentators who had lived the era sat with jaws open like Luna Park as Linnell related the book's stories on the promotional trail. One-time Sydney Swans owner Dr Geoffrey Edelsten phoned ABC Radio and threatened to sue him on air.
READ: How a 'cowboy and a bulls--- artist' bought the Sydney Swans
30 years on, it has aged incredibly well.
This was not the case of a simple look under the administrative bonnet of Australian rules football; it was more a fly-on-the-wall account of how the entire vehicle was deconstructed against the fans' will and rebuilt anew.
Linnell exposed a world hidden away from even the most passionate fans in a way seldom replicated since.
As a reference point, it is the definitive historical account of the game's most turbulent time morphing from popular weekend frolic to corporate titan.
As a narrative it is a thriller told across twenty-one loosely chronological vignettes punctuated by brilliance, farce, and tragedy.
Yet what lifts it into the discussion for the best book ever written about the game are the character studies of the faceless men driving the change.
"I wanted to explain who these people were that nobody ever saw," Linnell says.
In Football Ltd their boardroom exploits leap off the page with all the alacrity of a Brereton shirtfront or Capper specky due to Linnell's vivid sketches.
The runaway train passion of Joseph, the unshakeable arrogance of Elliott, the bare-knuckled pragmatism of Jack Hamilton and the grandiose dreaming of Aylett, to name just a few, make this a truly human drama capable of the feature film treatment.
For that Linnell says he had a secret weapon, one of Australia's greatest writers and his mentor, Les Carlyon.
"I got Les to read over the chapters, and he'd call at 10pm at night," Linnell remembers.
"We used to talk on the phone four or five nights a week. We'd talk about words and how to portray characters and personalities.
"I had the best writer in Australia advising me. I still miss him every day."
30 YEARS ON from its release, the book has never seen a reprint and is not easy to find. Which is a shame.
The lessons littered throughout its 393 pages are as relevant today as they were in 1984 or 1995.
Those running the game now could do worse than find a copy. You think times are tough? Let me introduce you to the eighties.
Yet for all the AFL's administrative troubles in 2025, Linnell thinks the game and the AFL is in an extremely healthy spot compared to the league he forensically dissected three decades ago.
"When I wrote the book, I could never imagine how the game would look now, the revenue and the polish of the game," Linnell, who only recently returned to Melbourne after 25 years in Sydney helming senior management roles at Nine, Fairfax, and News Limited, says.
"I'm a big wrap for it -- when you compare it to the NRL...the NRL still looks like the VFL did in the 1980s."
And while his time amid the Australian rules bubble is long-gone, it did not stop an unofficial approach from within the AFL around 15 years ago to tell the next phase of footy's growth story.
Linnell had neither the time nor inclination to do it all again.
He thinks there would be an interesting tale to tell by someone, but it would be a technical one delving into the mechanics of television rights, membership growth and revenue equations that has seen the AFL ascend to its current place atop Australia's sporting food chain.
"When you look at how successful and huge it is now, it has defied world trends as a native game."
Yet, you suspect the other reason Linnell will not go back to the well is that those enormous personalities that made Football Ltd so intoxicating are virtually extinct from the sport.
"There are fewer cowboys on the range these days," Linnell says wryly.