Over the past two decades, the AFL has been a relative beacon for Indigenous Australia – which, as the Prime Minister's bleak Close the Gap report confirmed on Wednesday, remains mired in a depressing litany of disadvantage.

Partly as a consequence of the stance of Long and others, racial abuse is less tolerated on the field and in the stands, while the proportion of Indigenous footballers in the AFL stands at a tick under 10 per cent, with 72 players owning Aboriginal heritage - an average of four per club. On the field Aborigines, who represent 2.7 per cent of the national population, have more than closed the gap.

Alas, the same cannot be said when perusing the coach's box, club board rooms and administrative offices. Of about 180 people employed on AFL club coaching panels, only two are Indigenous - Fremantle's Roger Hayden and the Gold Coast's Andy Lovell. Lovell, who will coach the Indigenous All-Star team against West Coast on Friday, did not have much competition for the gig.

Of the dozens of executives employed by the 18 clubs, only one — Richmond's Belinda Duarte, who runs the government-funded Indigenous institute at Punt Road — has Indigenous heritage.

AFL club boards, which brim with liniment-sniffing businessmen, lawyers, former players and have gradually enfranchised women, have the worst record of all. The number of Indigenous club board members is zero.

Meanwhile, the AFL Commission, which lost former Family Court judge Linda Dessau to the governor's mansion last week, has never had a single Aboriginal/Torres Strait Islander on the nine-member board that runs the game. It has one senior executive in its management team who is Aboriginal, Jason Mifsud.

At a time when "Closing the Gap" has become heavily hashtagged, the AFL has presided over an embarrassing gap between what happens on the field for the first Australians and the outcomes everywhere else. The numbers speak for themselves - Indigenous people play the game brilliantly and are encouraged to do so, but they do not coach, administer or lead clubs in any other way.

The AFL and the clubs are entitled to be proud of their achievements in fostering Aboriginal footballers and even in shifting community mores on overt racism (despite the primal screams against Adam Goodes). But the game has failed to make progress in gaining employment — particularly in coaching panels — for capable Aborigines.

The AFL suffers from a missing generation of Indigenous coaches/officials. This is not anyone's particular fault, and the gap is only an issue because of the Indigenous playing success. Yet the facts also suggest some collective complacency. Playing the game is only one measure. Gillon McLachlan and the AFL Commission need to investigate — and make a higher priority of — how this discrepancy can be redressed.

As with so much of our sporting culture, this racial chasm between playing and coaching/management is following a script from the US, where African-Americans have long made up a significant majority of the top-level basketball and football players, but only a minority of its coaches and head office shot callers. Not so long ago, there also was a prejudice against black quarterbacks, also dominant decision-makers, in the National Football League.

African-Americans were consigned to being actors — permitted to run, jump, shoot and wrestle — rather than directors. Needless to add, they were not — and still aren't — prominent in the ranks of "franchise" owners either (Michael Jordan, who owns the Charlotte Bobcats is listed as the only NBA majority owner).

But they've made inroads in the coaching fraternity. In the NBA, the proportion of black head coaches was 43 per cent in 2014, assistant coaches nearly 47 per cent. In the NFL, there are a more modest five head coaches out of 32 teams.

In 2002, the NFL introduced "the Rooney Rule", which mandated that any team with a head coaching or general manager vacancy had to interview a minority candidate. This opportunity mandate was an innovative variation on affirmative action, which typically sets quotas for employment.

Mifsud, the executive responsible for the AFL's Indigenous portfolio, views promoting Indigenous people to leadership roles within the game - particularly at clubs - as "the next frontier" for Aboriginal involvement in the AFL.

"The last 20 years we've made unbelievable progress," he said. "This is the next frontier."

He said the AFL was seeking to create a second-tier coaching pipeline — having set up an Indigenous coaching academy last year — rather than adopting the Rooney Rule approach.

Mifsud says the starting point is to pose the question: "What role should Indigenous Australians play in the game?"

He viewed Michael O'Loughlin, the Swans great who runs the club's academy, as a role model in that he was employed to look after all the kids in that program. He said the hope was to have coaches employed "not because they're Indigenous, but because they're the right coach ... there's a lack of [Indigenous] role models in the coaching fraternity".

There are Indigenous welfare officers with Aboriginal heritage at a number of clubs, but Mifsud said only two - West Coast's Phil Narkle and Essendon's Matty Whelan - were full-time, while Port Adelaide's Paul Vandenbergh had an all-encompassing role as Aboriginal programs manager. Port's focus on Indigenous programs and culture played an important part in the Power securing Paddy Ryder from the Bombers.

Clubs recruited Indigenous players, not out of social responsibility, but to win games. Mifsud viewed the "next frontier" off the field as having a similar logic – clubs that hired the right Indigenous coaches et al stood to gain. But Mifsud also suggested there was a "mutual obligation". The clubs needed to provide more opportunities, and the Indigenous candidates had to pursue them. "There's an obligation on Indigenous people to see that as a possibility as well," he said.

Mifsud reckoned Xavier Clarke, the former Saint now coaching the Northern Territory Thunder senior team, would be "an exceptional coach" with senior AFL potential. The last senior coach with Indigenous credentials was North Melbourne's Barry Cable (1981-84).

"Why has it been 30 years since we've had an Aboriginal coach?"

Why indeed?