Paul Little's failed presidency of the Essendon Football Club can be traced back to its earliest days – to the last dire days of David Evans' rule, in fact.

That was when it had become clear Little and his shortsighted supporters on the board were disenchanted with Evans' decision to fully co-operate with the AFL. Evans' decision might have been political, but more crucially he believed the strategy would best prioritise the welfare and the careers of his players. This did not sit well with Little and his cronies, nor with James Hird and his football department supporters. Hird was worried for his players, but his priority was to save himself.

So Little took over and immediately went to war with the AFL. His failure to read the play has run along parallel lines with Hird, although they have not always been united.

Now, almost two years after Little assumed leadership of the crisis-torn club, it looks as if both his and Hird's days are numbered.

The prevailing view before the World Anti-Doping Agency appeal was that Little would step down at the end of the year. The decision was reportedly his and came with the strong support of his family. He had his sights on other ventures and, if you'll pardon the pun, the entire Essendon exercise had taken its toll.

Now, with Little due to return in the coming days from Europe, there has been no suggestion that this has changed, although Little would not be the first football club president to undergo a change of heart. There is strong support from significant club power brokers for former federal MP and recently installed director Lindsay Tanner to assume leadership, although Tanner has never publicly declared he wants the job.

Either way, it is time for Little to go. How many more bad decisions can one club leader make? How many times can he fail to make the tough ones?

It is true Hird should not be sacked now his team is struggling so badly. He should have gone last year and it should never have come to this. To coach an AFL team, to be put in charge of the welfare of 40 or so young men, is a privilege Hird lost any right to in 2012.

And Little kept him for all the wrong reasons. Perhaps he applied business principles to a game that is so much more than sport and so much more than business. Even so, on most KPIs that count, Hird has failed.

Hird was signed to a wildly irresponsible two-year contract by Little as an expedient exercise. The AFL, too, was guilty in 2013 of fast decision-making for the sake of expediency, which is why doctor Bruce Reid went unpunished and why the competition allowed Hird to be handsomely rewarded while suspended. Little re-signed Hird largely because Hird would not have accepted his suspension otherwise.

Little's handling of the appointment of Mark Thompson as interim coach played a big part in the loss of Ray Gunston, who had proved an impressive caretaker club chief and has now been seconded by the AFL. He chose an inexperienced young insider, Xavier Campbell, to run the strife-torn club.

Still, Little promised that Hird had learnt from his mistakes and would return a better man from his exile. When Tania Hird and other Hird camp members went rogue the chairman threatened them but failed to make them see contrition was mandatory.

My belief is Little was contrite over the club's welfare failings – or "governance" failings as he calls them – but still believes the shocking experimental program had been exaggerated.

The president cost the club again when he joined forces with Hird in his failed legal challenge against the Australian Sports Anti‑Doping Authority, which was thrown out of court. As Hird hung out his dirty linen legally over those dark days, he failed to land a punch, only further slinging mud upon the competition. Both he and Little were laughed out of court. Again we say: if Essendon had nothing to hide, then why waste time trying to avoid a trial?

Hird was almost sacked again at the end of last season, when he went against the wishes of club and players and lawyered up again.

He was saved again for all the wrong reasons. Because of Little's botched legal manoeuvring, to sack the coach would have cost Essendon a threatened millions of dollars. Plus, the members threatened a revolt, plus Little became concerned about the reliability of Hird's obvious successor Thompson.

The clear impression was that Hird remained because he had outsmarted the board, that the club remained hostage to a messiah mentality going back decades – a mentality that every other AFL club would have overcome long ago if its favourite son had failed his players in the manner that Hird did.

Instead Little and Campbell loaded up their threadbare coaching panel with big names, but not necessarily big reputations. Essendon lurched from one public relations exercise to the next, but no amount of spin could hide the disenchantment of Paddy Ryder – disenchantment that now seems to have spread among other players who want out from the damaged football club but thanks to the WADA appeal now fear themselves damaged goods.

When the AFL's anti-doping tribunal found there was insufficient evidence to find the players guilty of taking performance-enhancing drugs both Hird and Little rightly claimed victory on their behalf, but Hird went further and made it clear he believed he had been wrongly suspended. He thanked his family. He wrongly saw the decision as absolution. He said he was "so sorry" for what had happened at the club, but never quite managed to draw the link between himself and that damage.

Hird alone is not to blame for WADA's decision to prolong this agony for the club, but his ongoing survival, rich financial rewards and refusal to truly come clean certainly didn't help his players in the eyes of the anti-doping authorities.

And Little? He has repeatedly failed to stand up to Hird and instead thrown money at the problem. He has kowtowed to his members. The president was an inexperienced football person, but he should have seen that the club could not move forward with Hird, the man so pivotal in the hiring of Steven Dank and who encouraged and supported the dangerous and risky drugs program; the coach who could not see that what took place on his watch was his responsibility; the one-time hero who pointed the finger in so many other directions.

If Little follows through and rightly steps down at season's end, and Hird, as he should, goes too, then perhaps Hird will do the right thing by the club and forgo next year's six-figure wage that he has not earned.

That is the least he can do to help his club rebuild. And the president's key executives, Campbell and Justin Rodski, should move on as well. Both are young enough and talented enough to rebuild their careers at other clubs or in other sports or industries.

Little and his team's failure to rebuild Essendon was apparent long before last weekend's on-field capitulation. The current visible evidence is that Hird has lost a significant amount of player support, but who can truly prove that? Either way, he didn't deserve to be coaching them in 2015. They deserve a chance of renewal whatever the WADA outcome.