THIS is the first published picture of the new Gold Coast team. It is, we admit, blurry. At the back, we can make out a few grizzled veterans, bald heads glinting in the Surfers Paradise sun, scars glowering on their kneecaps. We can't see their faces, but they are familiar none the less, from other seasons and other clubs. One of them could be Alan Didak, another Joel Selwood. And is that really Nick Riewoldt?

In the foreground, there are many tousle-haired youths, their legs and arms seemingly still too skinny for the job. Some are jangling keys to new cars. One has the build of a volleyballer. Another looks to be wearing soccer boots; apparently, just a couple of years ago, he was.

To one side lounges a tall figure who, by his disposition, is saying that he is happy to be there, but a little surprised, too. He could be Tom Williams. Really, it is more silhouette than portrait, an outline of numbered grey figures, the kind that acts as a key to a painting. None the less, it is a first. He's not bad, that John Donegan.

There is another character just out of shot; you will have to take our word for it that he is there. He is noticeably older than we last saw him, still strong-shouldered as he was when playing football for Fitzroy, still commanding as when he was working for Brisbane and later the Bulldogs, but greyer, more stooped and more lined.

He is Scott Clayton, the man who put this team together. And right now, he's reflecting on one daunting and sobering fact: he will really have only one go at filling in this picture. It doesn't leave much margin for error.

Sure, he has a handful of likely Queensland lads now, but they are shop window dummies. Sure, he will gain a dozen more 17-year-olds in next year's draft, but the AFL is not an under-age competition. Even the AFL acknowledges that it takes at least four years to turn a promise into a footballer, and that nearly three-quarters don't last as long as 100 games.

Sure, the AFL's work in drawing up the development rules is elaborate and sophisticated.

Sure, the other 16 clubs have been generous in recognising the needs of the new club, much more than they were when off-loading a collection of chancers, dilettantes and superannuants on to the Brisbane Bears all those years ago. Sure, the AFL has been adroit in codifying the compensation for clubs who lose players.

But the AFL's own modelling says it takes five to nine years to build a club. Clayton will have a week or two, at length really only a day, the day of the 2010 draft. On that day, he will have four picks in the first five, nine in the first 15, all tradeable. By then, he will have had to identify and rate the talent in that year's draft, assessed in an early bulletin yesterday as "average". He will have to decide which picks to keep and which to trade.

He will have had to find a core of capable 25-28-year-olds, which AFL studies say — and in any case Geelong demonstrates — are the heart of a successful football club.

He will have had to size up and win over uncontracted players from other clubs, woo them and win them, knowing already that if they are any good, their clubs will be working like crazy now to sign them up long-term. He will know all the tricks; he has pulled most of them himself.

He will have had to try to work the "go-home" factor, notionally negligible in Queensland, which provides only 5% of AFL players, but counts among them Riewoldt. He will have had to fit them all into a salary cap. In a stroke, Clayton will have had to etch in a team good enough to win five or six games in 2011, with a percentage of around 80, which the AFL would consider competitive.

It doesn't sound like much, but it is more than Melbourne could manage this year. And the Eagles, and they were premiers two years ago.

He will have to do his work quickly because by the next year, except for the right to quarantine a few Queensland youngsters, Gold Coast will be just another team in the draft pecking order.

The next year again, it will not even be that, because the other clubs will be lining up for the early draft picks bartered to them by Gold Coast in the first instance.

Clayton will know that it cannot be any other way. Because next to that fuzzy Gold Coast team photo, there is another, still more indistinct, an abstract, really no more than a frame and a few shadows, but there none the less. It is of West Sydney.

At least now we are in the picture.