John Ribot will always remember the day the Broncos announced they had shot Bambi.
After just two years in the competition, Wayne Bennett had sacked Wally Lewis as captain after the 1989 season.
“I had to be the bearer of bad news then. It was the first public hanging in Brisbane for a hundred or so years,” quipped Ribot, the club’s inaugural chief executive, who was in charge when the club won its first two titles in 1992 and 1993.
“That was probably the most controversial thing we did – we had to tell Wally we had to move him on.”
In the background has been a deepening gulf between the Broncos and former captain Gorden Tallis, a sustained detractor of Maguire and the Brisbane hierarchy.
A first win of the season, against Craig Bellamy’s Storm in Melbourne no less, appeared a panacea to the Broncos’ early 2026 woes on and off the field.
But a breakdown in relations between Maguire and defence coach Ben Te’o has kept the blowtorch right on Brisbane, the Reece Walsh-inspired grand final triumph of last year seemingly a distant memory.
In other circumstances, the departure of an NRL team’s assistant coach might not have made such waves.
Te’o’s sudden decision to walk, though, after only three rounds – and six weeks after Haas’ bombshell call – has only magnified scrutiny on Maguire’s intense style and its long-term sustainability.
Te’o has been silent about his exit. While there were reports of a verbal clash about tactics at a dinner in Melbourne last week, observers say the 39-year-old had outgrown Maguire, who he had previously played under at Souths, winning the 2014 grand final.
A strong-willed character and highly respected by the Brisbane squad, Te’o, the former Queensland forward and England rugby centre is regarded by some as a potential future NRL head coach, and he clearly saw breaking from the shackles of Maguire as his best path forward.
Losing him is a setback, and after the avalanche surrounding the Broncos that had preceded it, even Tallis said this week he hoped the news cycle might move on to another team.
The former Test enforcer’s role as critic-in-chief of his former club on television and radio has been an unavoidable aspect of the Brisbane melodrama.
Tallis is known to be a friend of Lachlan Murdoch, the chairman of News Corp, the Broncos’ majority owner, but there has been tension with the club where he was a legendary figure, which stretches back decades.
He was famously benched in his final game in 2004 by Bennett, who he fell out with a year later when the coach sacked his assistant coaches Kevin Walters, Gary Belcher and Glenn Lazarus.
More recently, Tallis and other former Brisbane players also resented the way Walters was axed as head coach in 2024 and replaced by Maguire, a year after taking the Broncos to the grand final.
Tallis, who has become a minority stakeholder in the Gold Coast Titans, also has history in a roundabout way with Maguire. He was the forwards coach at Souths before Maguire arrived to take over at Redfern in 2011 and brought in his own coaching staff.
It is not Tallis’ fault that Haas and now Te’o are going, but eventually Broncos officials decided they had had enough of his commentary, taking his name off one of their meeting rooms at their headquarters in Brisbane’s inner west.
While it wasn’t as if they had torn down the statue of Lewis outside Suncorp Stadium, the message was clear.
“I don’t think a lot is going wrong with the club,” Broncos chief Dave Donaghy said this week. “To be fair, I think a lot of external perceptions and views don’t marry up with what’s happening internally.
“If you look at our results, they’re very strong. Look at our member numbers. We’ve almost hit 70,000 members. We’ve got a really strong stable of sponsors.
“Let’s not forget [last] Friday night. For the first time in 10 years, we beat Melbourne in Melbourne. So if that’s a club going wrong, I think you’d have many people sign up for it.”
It is also less than six months since the Broncos broke a 19-year title drought in Maguire’s first season as coach, but you wouldn’t have known it.
So, aside from the Maguire and Tallis factors, why do the Broncos attract so much attention?
For starters, they’ve had an all-star cast over the years, from Bennett, Lewis, Allan Langer and the Walters brothers, to Tallis and Darren Lockyer and the current crop led by Walsh and Haas, drawing bumper crowds to Australia’s leading rectangular stadium.
They also conditioned their legion of supporters to them being wildly successful, winning six premierships under Bennett between 1992 and 2006 and providing dozens of players to representative teams.
Most importantly, the Broncos have had rugby league-obsessed Brisbane to themselves for most of the club’s existence.
The Broncos fought fiercely to protect that status, so much so that the inception of a second Brisbane team, the South Queensland Crushers, in the 1990s was one of the triggers for the Super League war.
After the Crushers’ demise, it was not until nearly a quarter of a century later, in 2021, nine years after News Corp withdrew from co-ownership of the game, that the Dolphins were granted an NRL licence. They debuted in the competition in 2023.
They now share the territory, but while the Dolphins, their opponents on Friday night, are co-tenants at Suncorp Stadium, the Broncos are still the main show in town.
The country’s only publicly listed professional sports club, they are a colossus of Australian sport, valued at as much as $120 million.
Donaghy, a former journalist, concedes that being the subject of so much focus is “the price of entry for being a big club”.
Ribot agrees and believes there is little point in fighting it. “I think it’s the way it has been for a long time,” he said. “They’re certainly under the microscope all the time.
“At the end of the day, we’re playing rugby league, it’s a form of entertainment. You’ve got to take the good with the bad.”
Chris Barrett is a senior sports reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald. He is a former South-East Asia correspondent for the Herald and The Age.Connect via X or email.
