When Winning Means Losing: Inside
The Ballad of Dan O’Malley
Football has always been about more than football.
It is loyalty, identity, masculinity, money and belonging, all packed into four quarters. But what happens when a football club decides that losing is the best way to win? What happens when winning becomes more important than the people playing the game?
That is the question at the heart of The Ballad of Dan O’Malley: A Football Tragedy, a new Australian play written by Paul Mitchell and directed by Therèsa Borg, which opened at Theatre Works’ Explosives Factory in St Kilda on August 12.
Based on the real-life 2009 AFL ‘tanking saga’, the play takes audiences inside the fictional Central Leopards, where bright-eyed new coach Dan O’Malley inherits a club in financial and on-field freefall. With the promise of future draft picks hanging in the balance, administrators begin pushing for something far murkier than simply losing a few games.
Dan is asked to compromise.
And that is where the real game begins.
At first, it sounds almost absurd: lose now, win later. Sacrifice the season, secure better draft picks and build for the future. But for Dan, it is not quite so simple. He has players to motivate. Young men who trust him. A team that needs something to believe in.
And suddenly, the coach who was brought in to lead is being asked to do the opposite.
This is where The Ballad of Dan O’Malley really finds its rhythm. The football is the hook, but leadership is the real game.
Dan’s dilemma is not simply whether to win or lose. It is whether he can continue asking people to believe in something he no longer believes in himself.
The play moves between humour, tension and uncomfortable moral questions, never allowing the audience to settle too much. Corporate greed sits alongside team spirit. Loyalty collides with self-preservation. Motivation begins to blur into manipulation.
And it asks some surprisingly relevant questions along the way.
What makes someone a good leader? Is it the ability to get results, or the ability to make the people around you better? How do you motivate someone when the system itself is working against them? And what happens when doing the right thing could cost you everything?
There is something particularly clever about placing these questions inside a football club. Football is built on belief. The coach says the team can win; the players believe it; the crowd believes it; and, for a few hours each weekend, everyone agrees to believe in the same thing.
Borg keeps the 80-minute production moving with an energy that mirrors the pressure building around Dan. There is little time for the audience to drift; the story steadily tightens as the distance between professional responsibility and personal morality becomes harder to ignore.
The cast—Justin Bell, Miles Paras, Julian Weeks, Adam Balales, Nick Mitchell, Gregory Caine and Lyndall Grant—bring the Central Leopards to life as a world that feels recognisably Australian: part workplace, part family, part religion and, increasingly, part business.
You don’t need to remember every detail of the 2009 tanking saga to enjoy it. You don’t even need to be a footy fan. The play understands that its real subject is universal: what people do when the institution they belong to asks them to compromise the values that brought them there in the first place.
After all the talk of draft picks, money, winning, motivation and power, Julian Weeks delivers a closing speech that strips everything back to one simple question:
What can you do for the person sitting next to you?
It is an unexpectedly moving way to end a story about greed.
Because perhaps leadership isn’t about being the loudest voice, the person with the most power or the one holding the trophy at the end.
Perhaps it is about who you bring with you.
Who you listen to.
Who you motivate when they are struggling.
And what you are willing to do for the person standing beside you when there is nothing in it for yourself.
That is what makes The Ballad of Dan O’Malley more than a play about an AFL scandal. It is a play about the choices made when nobody is watching and the kind of person, teammate, colleague or leader those choices reveal.
It is entertaining enough to pull you in, provocative enough to make you think and just uncomfortable enough to follow you out of the theatre.
The Ballad of Dan O’Malley: A Football Tragedy runs at Theatre Works’ Explosives Factory in St Kilda until August 22, and you don’t want to miss it.
Come for the football. Stay for moral dilemmas. Leave wondering what you would do for your neighbour.
Written by Bella Blake
For tickets and more information please visit https://www.theatreworks.org.au/2026/the-ballad-of-dan-omalley
