Former Sydney Swans coach John Longmire has used his newly released autobiography to express deep regret over his handling of the Adam Goodes booing saga, writing that he should have threatened to pull his players off the ground in protest.

Longmire, who led Sydney for more than a decade before resigning in 2024, described the treatment Goodes endured from opposition fans as "diabolical, almost unforgivable." He won a premiership in 2012, his second season as head coach, and oversaw some of the club's most successful years — but the Goodes chapter, he now writes, is one he would handle differently.

The book, simply titled John Longmire and published by Penguin Books Australia, arrived in the week of August 5, 2026. In it, Longmire reveals what he learned from working with champions including Goodes, Lance Franklin and Isaac Heeney — but the most striking passages concern the darkest period in Goodes's career.

Adam Goodes, a dual Brownlow Medallist (the AFL's best and fairest award) and Indigenous Australian of the Year in 2014, called out racism from a 13-year-old Collingwood fan during a match in 2013. What followed was sustained, targeted booing from opposition crowds every time he touched the ball. Longmire writes that the booing intensified again after Goodes was named Australian of the Year in 2014. Goodes retired at the end of 2015.

Longmire wrote that in hindsight he should have threatened to walk his players off the field if the booing did not stop, according to The Guardian, Nine News and the Daily Telegraph. He also detailed his anger at the AFL's handling of the situation, the Daily Telegraph reported.

The AFL apologised unreservedly to Goodes in 2019, four years after his retirement.

Longmire also revisits the infamous moment when then-Collingwood president Eddie McGuire suggested Goodes could be used to promote the musical King Kong — a remark widely condemned as racially loaded. In the 2019 documentary The Australian Dream, McGuire described the comment as "just a mistake, it was a misspoken moment."

The former coach was also critical of media figures he believes used the Goodes fallout to stir controversy, rather than confront the racism at its core.

For Longmire, the reckoning has been a long time coming. The book's publisher describes it as a story about what he learned from champions. The lesson he keeps returning to is the one he wishes he had acted on sooner: that some things matter more than the result on the scoreboard.