From the outside, it has looked like another tumultuous off-season for Melbourne.

The playing list has been overhauled and the ongoing AFL investigation into claims the club had deliberately underperformed three years ago finally came to a head.

And all of this at the end of a campaign that began with the death of club legend and president Jim Stynes.

But while Melbourne might have again been under the microscope, for Mark Neeld it was business as usual.

The second-year coach continued on his path to rebuild the Demons’ list, educate his young side and deliver an honest assessment of what his team will achieve in 2013.

“You have to be honest – we are in a development phase,” is Neeld’s frank declaration of where Melbourne is at on the dawn of a new season.

“Our list status says that, we are really excited about our list.

“We are really excited about the young boys that have come through the draft, they are showing lots of skill and they are showing a terrific appetite to learn and train hard.”

But Neeld does not want to use lack of experience as an excuse for lack of professionalism.

He has demanded his players work and train hard.

“We are aiming to be far more competitive, far more competitive for longer,” he told AAP.

“We are fully aware we have all these people who throw statistics at us, we have a young group and they say: ‘You can’t do this and you can’t do that’.

“But we are going to see if we can do some of that.

“That is our lot in life, we are after medium- and long-term progression.

“We can’t click our fingers. We have eight players who have played over 100 games, those players are crucial to our short-term competitiveness but we are not going to sit on our hands and wait for time to march on, so that we are an experienced group.

“We are going to demand a lot of our players.”

The highly-rated Jimmy Toumpas and Jack Viney, the son of former captain Todd, are expected to make an immediate impression, although Neeld is loath to over-burden them.

After a 2012 season that yielded just four wins, Melbourne shed a wealth of experience, with former captain Brad Green retiring, and Jared Rivers (Geelong) and Brent Moloney (Brisbane) finding new clubs.

The big-name replacements were headed by two premiership-winning forwards, Chris Dawes from Collingwood and Shannon Byrnes from Geelong.

Melbourne’s lack of experience is underlined by the fact that both Dawes and Byrnes were voted into the leadership group by their teammates after just a couple of months at the club.

The Demons have 29 players on their list with less than 50 games to their names, 11 of whom have yet to make their senior debut.

Neeld believes most of those untried players will get their chance in 2013.

“That is the pure nature of where our list is at,” he said.

“We do need to find a balance between making sure there is a value placed on senior selection, while at the same time finding a balance to make sure they are playing senior games.”