Do we like them?

Do we like Lance "Buddy" Franklin?

Our score: 7 out of 10. Clean on harm and no pattern of mistreating anyone, but the evidence of his off-field good is thinner than his goal tally.

Franklin came out of the Wheatbelt country footy scene in Western Australia, cut his teeth at junior club Dowerin, and became one of the great forwards of his era. He joined Hawthorn in 2005 and moved to the Sydney Swans in 2014. By the time he retired in July 2023 he had played more than 350 games and kicked 1,066 goals.

On the field his biggest rap sheet is football tribunal business. The most memorable stoush came in 2022 over a strike on Richmond's Trent Cotchin. The AFL's own counsel called his conduct “cowardly behaviour” at the hearing, and the league then apologised to him and the Swans. Teammate Tom Papley said he had “made a mistake”, but the league still accepted the label was out of line. Not a court case, just footy being footy.

On the harm check we came up with nothing. We found no comments from him about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants, vaccines or the climate, and no sign he has sided with, or worked repeatedly with, people pushing harm. Absence of evidence isn't a ringing endorsement, so call this a pass on the record we could find, not a glowing reference. He's a private bloke, and his own coach called him “an extremely private and humble champion”.

Nothing big has hit the news lately beyond his plan for a one-off game for Dowerin, announced in March 2026. He said he would go back and play to help the club raise money for its facilities, with the aim of paying for a lighting upgrade at the oval. A footy legend rolling up to a country oval for the lights is hard to dislike.

The good stuff is mostly the quiet kind. The fundraiser for his home town is the clearest recent example, and his longtime coach John Longmire called him the greatest forward of his generation on retirement. We couldn't open a full page on his charity work, so we can't give a longer list than that. That's honestly the whole verified list.

So: would we support him? Yes. He's passed the harm check on what's out there and his good-person record is clean, with only footy-field tribunal rows against it. The score stops at 7 because the file we could read is short, not because anything came up against him.