West Coast Eagles are in no mood to change coach or CEO during the season or, quite possibly, after

And that is no easy task.

Don’t expect any rush to judgement from the club on their chief executive Trevor Nisbett or their coach Adam Simpson. Not before the end of the season, if at all.

The Eagles’ sheer size insulates them from many of the pressures other AFL clubs face. They will stay in profit, even in the face of a dire recent record. Most of their army of fans will sign up again next year for fear of being shut out of the 60,000 seat Optus Stadium – because, for West Coast members, being shut out probably means you stay locked out.

We can tell the Eagles they are getting this wrong, but most of the metrics we measure AFL clubs by keep telling them they are right – or, at least, they have been most of the time over their 36-year existence.

Off field, the Eagles are the AFL’s richest club by some margin.

West Coast in 2022 boasted the biggest membership in the AFL (102,897) despite a two-win season. Those performances contributed to a dip in club profits, but the dip took them from a $7.4 million profit in 2021 to a $3.5 million profit in 2022. And that profit came after a $2.7 million royalty paid to the WA Football Commission.

That means that, on a like-for-like comparison with most other AFL clubs who don’t pay royalties to state football bodies, the Eagles’ surplus was $6.2 million from turnover of more than $80 million in a season when they won two games and had two crowds affected by Covid-19 restrictions.

The Eagles report net assets of more than $108 million with an investment portfolio of $55 million. And this all comes just a few years after they paid $36 million of the $56 million required to establish their state-of-the-art training facility at Mineral Resources Park in Lathlain, east of the Perth CBD.

So they are big. Very big.

But does that make them right?

On field, since they entered the expanded VFL competition in 1987, only Hawthorn (seven) have won more than their four flags. Only the Hawks (nine) and Geelong (10) have played in more than the Eagles seven grand finals. Only the Cats can match their record of not having missed finals for more than three years in a row at any stage.

Geelong did it just once in 2001-02-03. If the Eagles miss again this year, they will have done it twice – in 2008-09-10 and in 2021-22 and almost certainly this year.

In 36 completed seasons in the expanded VFL/AFL, West Coast have played finals 25 times.

So they have a lot of reasons to think they are good at what they do.

Why would they doubt it?

Well, there is the fact they have won only five games from their last 37 from a midway point in the 2021 season almost two years ago. There is one of the longest injury lists in AFL history, many of which are collision injuries, but some are soft tissue injuries which have afflicted younger squad members.

And there are a couple of questionable re-signings. Nic Naitanui who hasn’t yet played this year has been contracted until the end of 2024 and Jeremy McGovern – who has missed six, seven and 12 games in the past three seasons – has torn his hamstring off the bone this year but is understood to be in possession of a two-year contract extension secured just prior to his latest injury.

CODE Sports contacted West Coast chairman Paul Fitzpatrick on Wednesday for his thoughts on West Coast’s current predicament and whether change was necessary.

Fitzpatrick said that he wasn’t commenting because he didn’t want to start a day-by-day, blow-by-blow account of the club’s senior people and whether they were safe in their jobs.

What did become clear in conversation, though, is that there will be no rush to judgement on anyone at West Coast and that will apply to Simpson and Nisbett in particular; the people the club believes are the ones critics have in their crosshairs.

And the club is right to think they are the ones in the crosshairs.

When a CEO has been in the chair for 25 years and a coach has been there for 10 and you are looking at one win in every seven games with almost every second game resulting in a 50-point hiding, the coach and CEO are going to be in the firing line.

Just don’t expect West Coast to be pulling the trigger before the end of the season, if at all.

Fitzpatrick didn’t say this but the reality for Nisbett is that, if the end is to come, it will more than likely come in the form of an agreement between he and the club that there is an end date to his tenure at some point in the near future.

And the reality for Simpson is that terminating his contract is highly problematic under the terms of the AFL’s soft cap rules. It is widely assumed Simpson is contracted until the end of 2024.

CODE Sports understands the contract runs until 2025 which means that, if Simpson was terminated by the Eagles without another club to go to at the end of 2023, West Coast would almost certainly breach its football department soft cap and potentially face millions of dollars in penalty taxes as well as the pay out on top of money required to employ a new coach.

Are the Eagles getting this wrong?

There is a growing chorus of critics that say they are.

Do the Eagles think they are wrong?

Not yet. Not by a long shot.