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Essendon president Paul Brasher has declared the Bombers can win an AFL premiership within three years as the embattled club embarks on a mid-season review.
Essendon president Paul Brasher maintains the embattled Bombers can break their AFL premiership drought within three years.
The Bombers are embarking on a full-scale internal review of their football operations after the club's woeful 2-9 start to the season.
After making an elimination final last season, many experts expected Essendon to challenge for a flag in the club's 150th year.
But almost nothing has gone right on or off the field for Essendon in 2022 as pressure has ramped up on coach Ben Rutten.
However, Brasher is optimistic the Bombers can win their 17th premiership by 2025, backing up their strategic plan released last December.
"We were terrible 2020, big improvement 2021, made the (top) eight and everyone's up and about," Brasher told SEN on Tuesday, after announcing the review to members on Monday night.
"We've had six-to-eight of our top-22 missing every week, importantly most of them being the hard bodies and experienced forwards.
"We certainly don't want to be 2-9, but you'll see an improved performance in the second half of the year.
"It hasn't changed my faith in the fact we've got a team that over the next two-to-three years can be a premiership team."
Brasher says the review, led by Essendon football director Sean Wellman, will be more "incremental rather than transformational".
He has thrown his support behind Rutten and football manager Josh Mahoney and "does not believe" jobs are hanging in the balance.
"We actually believe we have the right people in our football program, and we're supporting them," Brasher said.
"We're not happy with where we are and we need to obviously make some adjustments to get us to where we want to be.
"I think we're looking at perhaps adding rather than deleting (jobs).
"I think we need to continue to add resources in areas like player development, some of the support given to Ben and the coaching group.
"I don't believe they should see it as threatening, I think they should see it as a potential positive to help them to do their jobs even better.
"The point I was making (several weeks ago) was that we were not going to be doing an external review.
"I've seen a lot of them over the years in other organisations and often people go for the external review because they don't think they have the resources internally."
