A long line of incompetence and running away from their own heritage. Going off a sourced statement from Wikipedia, the WAFC deliberately tried to avoid any South or East Fremantle people being involved, because they wanted the club to appeal to people outside Fremantle too. This resulted in them being run by hockey players, politicians and Cameron Schwab, who you might recall had already been mediocre at Richmond. And as mentioned above, the coach and captain were from Claremont.
To this day I don't think they've had a single coach from South or East, and I think Bell is the first administrator to be from one of those clubs. And now they're based in Cockburn and chose to align with Peel Thunder over either South or East. So it seems to me they've never really had a big connection with the Fremantle identity outside of playing at Fremantle Oval. Ironically the Eagles probably had a bigger influence from South and East (John Todd, Worsfold, Mainwaring, Sumich, Matera, Jakovich).
Cockburn is smack bang in the middle of South Freo's zone. Its well and truly on the way of becoming the central hub of south metropolitan Perth.