Gold Coast president Tony Cochrane is confident the Suns can climb up the ladder in 2022 in what shapes as an important year for the club.
Out-of-contract coach Stuart Dew enters his fifth season at the helm while young trio Ben King, Jack Lukosius and Izak Rankine are all unsigned heading into next year.
After finishing 16th with just seven wins this year, the Suns have appointed Wayne Campbell to the role of General Manager of Football Performance and added senior assistant Steven King to their coaching department.
They also bolstered their tall stocks by acquiring ruck-forward Mabior Chol from Richmond as an unrestricted free agent.
Cochrane is tipping Gold Coast to be the “surprise packet of next year”.
“We think we’ve now got a lot of the building blocks in place and we’ve got a lot of the right people around us,” he told Sportsday SA.
“Everybody who has actually been at the Suns and been working there, particularly in the last 12 to 18 months, can see this firsthand for themselves.
“Yes, it doesn’t show up in the results, but results in sport are a weird thing.
“We finished so close to bottom it’s not funny, but if we had have won four more games, we would’ve made the eight. And we lost two games by under a goal.
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“We were without our number one ruckman (Jarrod Witts) pretty much the whole year. We did have some really bad things go against us, but despite all of that, we weren’t that far away.
“I actually think we’re going to be the surprise packet of next year. I know people are going to say, ‘Of course he’s going to say that, he’s the president of the club’, I get all of that.
“But I think we’re actually going to be a surprise packet next year. I think people are going to be in a bit of a state of shock.”
The Suns are yet to play finals since entering the AFL in 2011.