Brisbane Broncos dramas, dating back to Wally Lewis in 1990, have returned in blaze of controversy
John Ribot will always remember the day the Broncos announced they were hitting Bambi.
After just two years in the competition, Wayne Bennett sacked Wally Lewis as captain after the 1989 season.
“I had to be the bearer of bad news then. This was the first public hanging in Brisbane for nearly a hundred years,” said Ribot, the club’s first president, who was in charge when the club won its first two championships in 1992 and 1993.
“That was probably the most controversial thing we did; we had to tell Wally we had to move on with his life.”
In the background is a widening rift between the Broncos and Maguire and former captain Gorden Tallis, who has been a constant critic of the Brisbane hierarchy.
A first win of the season against Craig Bellamy’s Storm in Melbourne appeared to be a panacea for the Broncos’ woes on and off the field in early 2026.
But a breakdown in relations between Maguire and defense coach Ben Te’o has kept the flames burning over Brisbane, with last year’s Reece Walsh-inspired grand final victory seemingly a distant memory.
In other cases, the departure of an NRL team’s assistant coach might not have made as much of a splash.
But Te’o’s sudden decision to walk after just three rounds and six weeks after Haas’ bombshell speech has further increased scrutiny on Maguire’s intense style and long-term sustainability.
Te’o remained silent about his exit. While there were reports of a verbal clash over tactics at a dinner in Melbourne last week, observers say the 39-year-old has outplayed Maguire, with whom he previously played at Souths and who won the 2014 grand final.
A strong-willed character and highly respected by the Brisbane squad, Te’o, the former Queensland forward and England rugby center, is seen by some as a potential NRL head coach of the future and clearly saw breaking free of Maguire’s shackles as the best way forward.
Losing him was a failure, and after the avalanche surrounding the Broncos beforehand, even Tallis said this week that he hoped the news cycle would shift to another team.
The former Test enforcer’s role as his former club’s chief critic on television and radio has been an inevitable aspect of the Brisbane melodrama.
Tallis is known to be a friend of Lachlan Murdoch, chairman of Broncos majority owner News Corp, but there is tension going back decades at the club where he is a legendary figure.
He was benched by Bennett in his final game in 2004 and fell out with him a year later when the coach sacked assistant coaches Kevin Walters, Gary Belcher and Glenn Lazarus.
More recently, Tallis and other former Brisbane players were also angered by Walters being sacked as head coach in 2024 and replaced by Maguire a year after leading the Broncos to the grand final.
Tallis, who became a minority shareholder of the Gold Coast Titans, also has a convoluted history with Maguire. He was previously forwards coach at Souths Maguire took charge of Redfern in 2011, bringing in his own coaching staff.
It’s not Tallis’ fault that Haas and Te’o left, but eventually Broncos officials decided they had had enough of his comments and removed his name from one of the meeting rooms at their headquarters in Brisbane’s inner west.
While it wasn’t as if they tore down Lewis’ statue outside Suncorp Stadium, the message was clear.
“I don’t think there’s much going on at the club,” Broncos chief Dave Donaghy said this week. “To be fair, I think a lot of external perceptions and opinions don’t match what’s going on internally.
“If you look at our results, they are very strong. Look at our membership numbers. We have reached almost 70,000 members. We have a really strong sponsorship team.
“Let’s not forget [last] Friday night. We beat Melbourne in Melbourne for the first time in 10 years. So if that’s going wrong in a club, I think you’ll get a lot of people signing up for it.”
It’s also less than six months since the Broncos broke a 19-year title drought in Maguire’s first season as manager, but you wouldn’t know it.
So Maguire and Tallis factors aside, why are the Broncos attracting so much attention?
For starters, there has been an all-star line-up over the years, from Bennett, Lewis, Allan Langer and the Walters brothers to Tallis and Darren Lockyer and the current group led by Walsh and Haas, drawing packed crowds to Australia’s premier rectangular stadium.
They have also conditioned their legions of fans to be wildly successful, winning six premierships under Bennett between 1992 and 2006 and supplying dozens of players to representative teams.
Most importantly, the Broncos had obsessed Brisbane with rugby league for most of the club’s existence.
The Broncos fought so fiercely to retain that status that the formation of a second Brisbane team, the South Queensland Crushers, in the 1990s was one of the triggers for the Super League war.
Following the Crushers’ demise, nearly a quarter of a century later, the Dolphins were granted an NRL license in 2021, nine years after News Corp withdrew from co-ownership of the game. They entered the competition in 2023.
They now share territory, but the Broncos are still the main show in town, even though their Friday night opponents, the Dolphins, are co-tenants at Suncorp Stadium.
The country’s only publicly traded professional sports club, it is a giant of Australian sport worth $120 million.
Donaghy, a former journalist, admits being in the spotlight so much is “the price of being a big club”.
Ribot agrees and believes there is little point in fighting this. “I think it’s been that way for a long time,” he said. “They are definitely under the microscope all the time.
“At the end of the day we play rugby league, it’s a form of entertainment. You have to take the good with the bad.”
Chris Barrett is senior sports reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald. He is a former Southeast Asia correspondent for the Herald and The Age newspapers.Connect with: X or email.
