Week 7 2025

This Week In Football is a collection of some of the best in football currently outside the walls of AFL clubs or broadcasters. Each week a curated grab bag from regular contributors and special guests will provide insight into and beyond the game on subjects of their choosing. For more about our contributors, click here.

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Banner images by Polly Porridge of the True Bloods Podcast. Check out her other design work.

Before the bounce

This weekend in football tends to get dominated by one topic in particular – war.

The round containing ANZAC Day tends to feature more attention to the intersection of war and football than all other weeks combined.

There are some real connections between the game we love and the fighting we hate. Hundreds of footballers – amateur and professional alike – have served in wars over the years. Some of the game’s greats have arrived in Australia displaced from war-torn regions (either directly or via their families).

That includes footballers lost to the horrors of war. According to AFL records, 155 V/AFL footballers have died on the battlefields. Two of those men died in the Boer War, 94 in World War I and 59 in World War II.

The great Russell Jackson wrote an insightful piece on this subject for The Guardian in the past, reflecting on the broader point and a more personal journey.

So before you get hooked on the emotion this weekend, just remember football is a game, and war is horrific.

This Week In Football we have:


Matthew Nicks’ Plan B

Joe Cordy

Every year since the top-eight finals system was introduced, at least two teams have made finals that weren’t there the year before. Recently, it’s been a common sight to see a team slingshot from outside the eight into a double chance. Adelaide have established themselves as one of the favourites to complete this maneuver and play their first finals games of the Matthew Nicks era. 

The composition of the Crows list during Nicks’ tenure has never leant itself to defence, and they’ve hovered as an average to below average defensive side since 2020. To compensate for this they’ve leant heavily on outpacing their opponents in attack: Nicks’ Crows invite the opposition onto them, waiting to intercept the ball and play on the counter, getting it to their talls in isolation like a Sean Dyche Burnley team.

This tactic has made them both the most damaging team in attacking from turnover, as well as the most improved team from 2024. 

The Crows are #2 in intercept possessions, #1 in points from turnovers, #3 in marks inside 50, #1 in points from the defensive half, and are one of only four teams to average more points from chains beginning in their defensive half than their forward half.

This deep-sitting, counter-attacking style of course has the obvious issue of always allowing the opposition plenty of looks at their own goal. At the end of Round 5 they were conceding 48.0 points from forward half chains (4th highest in the league), and their Round 2 victory against Essendon was just the third time in the last 10 years that a team has managed to record a 10-goal victory while conceding at least 100 points.

After a 3-0 start they hit successive road bumps against fellow top-four aspirants: a controversial 1-point loss to Gold Coast, and a blown lead to Geelong. The cracks in Nicks’ gameplan were showing across these two games, as they allowed 18 shots from front half chains in each match for 58 and 63 points respectively.

Chris Scott identified in the post-match presser that his plan to nullify the superior firepower Adelaide have in the forward line was to turn the game into a shootout, exposing Adelaide’s backline and levelling the talent gap up forward through sheer number of opportunities. 

Even with their spearhead Jesse Hogan missing, the GWS game threatened on paper to be a similar affair. The two teams came into the game as 1st and 2nd for points scored from the back half, putting similar emphasis on rebounding attack but with GWS showing more defensive grit. Instead living up to its potential on-paper of a high-scoring end to end affair the Crows came in with a gameplan to completely shut the game down.

The two sides combined for a score of 11.20.86, a total that wouldn’t have been enough to beat Adelaide in any of their first five games this year. Even though the total score of 34 was assisted by the Giants inability to put it through the big sticks, the underlying metrics such as only allowing 15 shots (nearly half of the Giants per game average coming into the round) and handedly winning post-clearance contested possessions 97-83 paint a picture of a team that was able to find a totally different path to victory to what they’d previously been using.

Instead of getting brought into another basketball game, they slowed the pace down, clogged up their opponent’s opportunities even as it cost them their own, and turned the game into a slog. 

It may have been ugly to watch, but it showed a tactical adaptability typical of top-end teams. In a week where other ladder climbing aspirants like St Kilda had their front-half stoppage game picked apart, and Gold Coast’s transition game was stopped by a roof, it was a good time to avoid headlines.

Sometimes instead of digging your heels in and declaring “it’s who we are, mate” it’s better to find the most effective way to four points.


Dayle Garlett – A personal reflection

Jack Turner

This piece was first published on The Back Pocket.

Everyone who grew up playing enough football has that one player that they believe with all their heart could have torn apart the big stage if only they had applied themselves.

I have multiple. Some had kids young and decided not to nominate for the draft (a decision that still makes no sense to me to this day), others who were approached by AFL clubs when we did our School footy 16s Melbourne trip but decided that the footballing life wasn’t for them. 

And then there’s Dayle Garlett.

Dayle is the single most naturally gifted footballer and athlete I have ever played with or against. Which is fair praise, as I played junior football with names like Nathan Broad (who I also played a lot of one-sided backyard cricket against), and Murray Newman, and against the likes of Stephen Coniglio, Rory Lobb and Charlie Cameron.

He was the type of player who could tear you apart in minutes, all the while barely looking like he was even trying. He could outpace the average player gracefully, could kick the ball 50 meters with both feet, and had the arrogance to make it all work confidently.

Garlett wasn’t selected in the 2011 AFL draft, mostly due to the already evident behavioural issues. He wasn’t welcome on the aforementioned Melbourne trip – despite being listed as an underager in the Under 18s All-Australian squad that same year. He was also selected for All-Australian honours again a year later, but once more was overlooked in the draft.

In the 2013 AFL draft, finally an AFL team was ready to take a risk on this clearly elite talent, and Hawthorn took him as a 19-year-old at Pick 38 and their second pick overall. He spent the pre-season living with then-captain Luke Hodge, but already signs were there that he was going to be unable realise his full potential.

After a few months of late appearances and missed training sessions – despite reports his professionalism was on the improve – Garlett was given permission to return home to Perth to obtain his drivers’ licence. 

Just one day after Luke Hodge assured the media that there was nothing more to see here, Garlett told Hawthorn that he was quitting football shortly after landing in Western Australia.

“Unfortunately this situation hasn’t worked out as the club or Dayle would have hoped, and while we’re disappointed we understand his decision. Despite the club’s efforts over the past six months to help him adjust to an elite lifestyle, Dayle has found the regimented systems and standards of a professional club challenging,”

then Hawthorn football boss Chris Fagan in 2014

We acknowledge that Hawthorn Football Club places high expectations on all of its players, but it is equally supportive in working with each player to help them meet our standards and behaviours if they are committed to doing so.”

Later it was learned that his feelings of isolation had reportedly led to erratic and spontaneous behaviour, resulting in Garlett getting mixed up with criminals in Melbourne’s drug industry, leading to a habit he was unable to shake on his return home.

In late September 2015 – just weeks before his former teammates celebrated a third consecutive premiership – Garlett was charged with a series of theft and driving-related charges dating back to just weeks after his return to WA, and sentenced to five years in prison.

As is sadly the case with many who end up in the system and mixed up with the wrong people at such a young age, he has consistently reoffended since then, spending most of the last decade in and out of prison.

Shortly after his first sentencing, his lawyer requested a suspended sentence for Garlett, stating that the jail term was “manifestly excessive” and would be “crushing,” arguing that there was only a “small window of opportunity” for his client, whom he said had “a very promising career prospect”.

“He is worth another chance and he’s a good bet to succeed,” Mr Giudice said.

Now a man who has spent the vast majority of his adult life in prison, Dayle was once a prodigiously talented teenager who was charged with – amongst his more serious offences – stealing a pair of trousers to wear to court because he said he “wanted to show respect for the magistrate”.

When I think about Dayle now, I feel only sadness. Mostly for him, but also for his mum and his stepfather, who from all of my interactions with them seemed to be truly lovely people. It was his mum who once suggested the interesting strategy of getting me to tag Dayle’s tagger. He was such a good player that despite putting one of our worst players (me) in the midfield, it worked.

I think that as much as Dayle’s is a cautionary tale, it is one of how we could be doing so much more for our troubled young people – both as a sport and as a society. 

Compassion and care is often an afterthought when publicly discussing the fates of teenagers and young adults. This doesn’t condone the behaviour, but such attention may not do much to rehabilitate the individual or improve the safety of society. It is important to remember that – while public figures – these players are just people who are figuring out who they are and their place in the world.

The near-constant media harassment of players who take time away from the game or who have minor slip-ups in the public eye (like almost any twenty-something) does nothing to improve the quality of the game we love, nor make it any more attractive to the talent it wishes to attract.


We have all the time (on) in the world

Lincoln Tracy

This is an excerpt of a longer piece I’ve written over on my blog, so check that out if you’re interested in this topic.

Earlier this month The Age’s Scott Spits wrote an interesting piece about how the average length of each quarter has been slowly increasing over time.

Based on data for the first six rounds of the season, quarters were lasting more than 32 minutes each, meaning the average AFL match took almost 130 minutes to complete. 

I won’t go back over the entire article – including his exploration of some of the potential reasons as to why games are longer than ever before – but my eye was drawn to one particular section.

The part in question related to a social media post made by Geelong skipper (and then AFL Players Association president) Patrick Dangerfield earlier this year. 

I found the timing of Spits’ story and the reference to Dangerfield’s social media post interesting, as less than a week before the story was published Geelong had taken full advantage of longer quarters in their Gather Round clash with Adelaide.

This series of events got me thinking about which teams benefited most from longer quarters this year – by scoring more heavily in “time on” compared to the “actual” quarter (the first 20 minutes).

Geelong have registered 54.42.366 in regular time and 33.25.233 in extra time, which translates to 37.9% of their points scored beyond the 20-minute mark. This ranks them sixth, behind Carlton, Hawthorn, Richmond, Port Adelaide, and Brisbane. 

However, scoring points is only half the battle. Having a high-powered offense in the dying stages of a quarter may mean little if your defence leaks like a sieve. This is where looking at the net difference in points scored versus points conceded comes into play.

Credit to James Ives for the chart inspo

Hawthorn and Carlton remain the top two teams (albeit the positions have switched) in terms of dominating scoring during time on. The Hawks score 44.5% of their points and allow their opponents to score 31.1% of their total during time on (+13.4%), defending slightly better than Carlton (47.3% versus 36.1% for their opponents, +11.2%). 

Similarly, Essendon and the Western Bulldogs find themselves at the bottom end of the scale, conceding a greater proportion of scores in time on compared to what they can put forward themselves. 

And while St Kilda are slightly below league average in terms of the proportion of points scored during time on (35.6%), they are ranked third in the above chart due to their impressive ability to not concede scores during the same period. To this point in the season the Saints have allowed opponents to register 27.5% of their score in time on – clearly the lowest in the league. 

It will be interesting to track the breakdown of when teams score over the rest of the season, as a series of poor performances late in quarters could be the difference between playing finals or starting the off-season early.


Marking Out

Emlyn Breese – CreditToDuBois.com

Just a snapshot from me this week, but one I intend to build on as the season goes.

Reading through James’ analysis of Melbourne’s forward entries last week put F50 marking opportunities even more front of mind for me than it has been for the last few years.

To paraphrase Scott Steiner (and more recently his nephew Bronn Breaker), they say all marks are created equal, but you look at Melbourne, and you look at Gold Coast, and you can see that statement is not true.

A noticeable element of Melbourne’s forward line for a long time has been when they do generate marks inside 50, it often seems to be from lateral leads deep into the pockets generating low quality shots.

A quick look at WheeloRatings.com seems to back this casual observation up – they have been bottom 2 for the average xScore from set shots every year back to 2021.

To enable some quick analysis we’re going to define a “hot zone” – within 40m of goal and at no greater than a 30 degree angle from either goal post. Any time you draw a line it will cause some arbitrary inclusions and exclusions, but to me this seems like a pretty solid feel of what a really high quality opportunity looks like.

I’ll also break down the marks in those zones into three categories – Contested, Marks On Lead, and Uncontested.

Here’s how teams in 2025 are performing generating marks in the zone.

Unsurprisingly, Melbourne are dead last for marks in the most valuable area, and with a particularly bad return from contested marks. This is despite them generating the most offensive 1 on 1 contests in the league (16.3 per match, Carlton being the next on 13.2) and tracking at just below league average win rate for those contests.

It’s also worth looking at how teams are conceding marks in the zone.

West Coast and Melbourne being bottom 4 on both tables really illustrates some of the problems they’re having. West Coast are off the charts on conceding high value uncontested marks, which probably speaks to the kind of entries their midfielders and forwards are allowing opponents to set up through lack of pressure. I was somewhat surprised to see North with a relatively modest return here – not good by any stretch, but not catastrophic. 

To finish up we’ll combine the two tables for a net differential which again shows Melbourne and West Coast as two laggards. The numbers don’t lie, and so far they’ve spelt disaster for both teams. 


I’m Leo DiCaprio, he’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and this Wednesday night it’s footy from every angle but the ones that matter*

Ryan Buckland

I watched today’s Adam Yze pre-game press conference so you don’t have to. 

Yze generously, earnestly, and very strongly, answered questions which all had something to do with Noah Balta for the first half of the session. 

Questions which included:

Question: “The $45,000 paid to the victim, was that paid by the club or by Noah?”

Yze’s paraphrased answer: What a strange thing to ask, I can’t comment on that anyway. 

My paraphrased thoughts [lol, c’mon man].

Question: “Are you personally comfortable with how the club has handled [the situation]?”

Paraphrased answer: Really? Yes 

My paraphrased thoughts [lol, c’mon man].

Question: “Is he locked in from Round 16 onwards?”

Paraphrased answer: We’re worried about Round 7 

My paraphrased thoughts [lol, c’mon man].

It was revealed later that there was a moment scrubbed from the Tigers’ official release of the media conference where Yze and a Tigers staffer told the pack there would be no more questions answered about Balta.

This wasn’t enough for some. 

I watched this clip from AFL360 last night so you don’t have to.

“Come and field all the questions, in the suit… let them punch out, then bring the coach in… that’s what should have happened today,” said erstwhile host Gerard Whately.

“You can’t naively front up, you choose who the spokesperson for the club is, they chose the coach. You can’t then complain that the questions of the news media are about the story of the day.”

A lot of words were spoken in performative outrage, all to chasten a club for not being a willing participant in the manufacture of some soundbites to lead a 6pm news bulletin.

Gerard Whateley spends at least 30 seconds more or less laying out what he thinks should have happened. He does this by playing out what predictably would have happened: bunch of questions about process, decision-making, reaction, hindsight, what happens next, answers given, footage gets clipped up and sprayed out later that evening. 

Nothing which happens in that version of reality is different to what actually transpired; the difference is it’s some guy in a suit rather than Yze in the clips.

It’s 2025 football media writ large. A particularly vapid and pointless form of Inception where a broadcast partner spends time on its flagship panel show moralising are about how a club managed a weekly press conference.

Shit. Does that mean this missive is the Hotel, or the Snowy Mountain Hospital? I’m not in Limbo am I? 

Actually, that would help explain the bleak, soulless, depressing state of ~football~ from Sunday evening to Thursday afternoon.


An ANZAC Day Watch

James Ives

Essendon ranks 17th in D50 to score and 18th for scores from kick ins – highlighting their challenges in transitioning the ball from the back half. 

On the other hand, Collingwood ranks 1st  in % of intercepts generated i50 – indicating that much of this game will be determined by Collingwood’s ability to win and own territory vs Essendon’s ability to transition from deep in their own half. 

Looking at Essendon’s kick ins, their profile appears much more diverse than the competition leaders, Hawthorn. 

Which raises the question, is it better to be selective and pick your spots or take territory with predictability? 

Against the best front half teams, it might be the latter. Let’s see if Essendon modify their approach on Friday. 


Kick Retention and Threat

Liam Crowhurst

Kicking efficiency is dead! Long live kick retention ratings! 

No longer are we bound by the archaic and poorly designed metric of kicking efficiency. Long ago, a line was chosen at 40 metres. This serves as the core of the definition of an effective kick.

A 39m kick to a contest is judged “ineffective”. A 41m kick to a contest is judged “effective”. Surely there’s a better way to judge Australian Football’s most fundamental act. Kicking efficiency served its purpose, and now it’s time to move on.

Kick Threat and Retention Ratings was first created by myself in 2023 as a way to more accurately judge a player’s kicking abilities. This project has now graduated and is now publicly available for all to see on Andrew Whelan’s fantastic site Wheelo Ratings.

What goes into these ratings? There are two main outputs to generate ratings across around 320,000 kicks over the last five AFL seasons:

Retention Outputs: “Retention” is split into three groups: “Retain”, “Contest” and “Turnover”.

Retain looks if the player’s teammates get first possession (or acts first) after their kick. Contest finds if the next action is a spoil or a stoppage. Turnover is similar to retain, except the opposition gets first use or possession after the kick.

Threat Outputs: “Threat” looks at whether the kick generates a shot at goal later in that possession chain or not. As a guide, roughly 23% of chains result in a scoring opportunity.

Those two outputs are classified using location, angle, context and distance:

  • Kick location: this is measured by a x-y coordinate of where the kick took place. Shots at goal have been excluded since I consider goal kicking a completely separate skill to field kicking. There’s already a great metric for shooting performance called xScore.
  • Context: This looks at how the player received the ball.This acts as a proxy for implied pressure on the kick. Context is split into three types: Contested, Uncontested and Set. Contested is a grouping for all loose and hard ball gets, crumbs, and gathers from hitouts. Uncontested contains all handball receives, gathers, bounces and advantage frees. These all imply a level of control from the ball carrier, compared to a contested possession. The last group is Set, which includes all marks, and kick-ins and free kicks. This group implies there is no pressure on the disposal.
  • Angle: Angle is a continuous variable from -180 to 180 degrees. For the statistically inclined, this is the arctangent of the kick start and next action (i.e. a mark) location. This captures the angle from the kick location relative to the parallel direction forward.
  • Kick Length: This groups kick distance into two categories – short and long. The end location of kicks is difficult to precisely determine due to dataset limitations. I’ve chosen to take the kick intention of short v long rather than the actual distance. This group is split at the 32m mark, which is the midpoint of the two distance peaks.

The next table looks at base rates of each of these groups. Also included is a “defensive” or “offensive” half identifier for kicks that were taken in the each half of the field.

Here’s a more plain language explainer.

A player who kicks the ball short and backwards from a set play in their defensive half should expect to retain the ball 98% of the time.

This is considered the easiest kick in football, and a player that hit their target 98/100, with the other two going to a contest/turnover. As a result the player would finish with a retention rating of 0, and gain no benefit from exclusively taking easy kicks.

However, they would have nearly 100% Kicking Efficiency! Wow what an amazing player! Alas, they have kicked at the AFL average for that situation.

A player that kicks straight and long from a contested possession in the forward half is expected to hit their target 32% of the time. If they hit their target more often, they would be kicking above AFL average and would receive a positive kick rating. Hitting tougher kicks more often does more to boost your retention rating.

The crux of this model and analysis is that it takes into account the situation in which the disposal took place. These contextual pieces give us a broader understanding of kicking effectiveness, divorced from an arbitrary line from the early 2000’s.

These features are then modelled using an XGBoost classifier to generate expected retention and threat rates for every kick in the AFL. From here, we can generate ratings and find out who truly performs.

The actual kick rating formula is as follows:

For each player or team we can use this formula to generate the respective rating by comparing their expected output to actual output.

You can see the final outputs on my twitter:

Access the freely available data here:

This is just an introduction to my ratings, next week I’ll analyse the outputs for players and teams.


Staying wide in Sydney

Cody Atkinson

Last weekend I went to Sydney. This in itself is not newsworthy. It might be the opposite of that actually.

I saw the sights, went to galleries and museums, even went to a couple of gigs. I may have even had a drink or two too many (according to my bank account at least).

And I went to the Swans, mostly to watch the game but partially to talk with Dean Cox and Ken Hinkley.

For those who didn’t watch the game was almost a classic comeback before it wasn’t. The Swans fell short, and the Power continued their surge up the ladder.

Then the explanations began.

Some may think the post game media scrum is a perfunctory exercise to provide praise, health updates and placate fans. But with the right questions – or more importantly the right answers – they can shed as much light on the modern game as any other source.

Here’s an example from a (slightly edited) question I asked Cox post game:

“It seemed like in the first half both teams tried to defend the corridor very hard and it seemed like you guys were going more and more direct. (Is) taking more risk something that you want to see going forward?

“I think there’s times where you can test and use the corridor and try and open up the corridor. But if Port use it you don’t want to force it,” Cox replied.

“And that’s probably one thing I do want to make clear to our players. Port they’re the number one D50 to corridor team in the comp…so they got a couple of goals early we sort of knew that… to the boys credit they had 29 front half turnovers so the ability to be able to stop that – they went at 15% rebound 50 to inside 50.”

There’s a few things from Cox’s brief response that are worth looking into.

Firstly – Port love to hit the corridor. All teams do, but Port are particularly corridor heavy. Instead of D50 to corridor, I’ve use the defensive third to centre square for a couple of reasons. Before round 6 Port used the corridor as much as any team in the league.

Against Sydney, Port managed to hit the centre square for chain disposals from the defensive third (behind the centre square) just *three* times. That’s massively down on their season to date.

One of those examples is likely what Cox was referring to in his statement.

Cox’s statement also hints at their strategy through the game – to wall off the corridor and induce chip kicks down the wings and long kicks down the boundary line to force stoppages.

Teams generally wall off the corridor by pushing their outside mids, wings or high half forwards near or on the “skinny” side of the square. This creates the appearance that a  kick into the square will be contested at best. It’s like a puffer fish at its fullest expanded state – protecting territory through the idea of danger.

Ball is in the air in line with the three circled Swans.

That strategy played off to some degree – Port finished way ahead in marks and contested marks, and the Swans won the predominance of ground balls.

Sydney also largely decided to eschew their own corridor game – partially due to similar tactics by Port. In the capture above from a D50 set ball, no Sydney players are leading into the corridor. Opening up the corridor is often a mutual decision – one that can end in mutual destruction (on the scoreboard).

There’s a lot of jargon there, I understand. More simply, Port like to chance playing in the middle of the ground to open up their post-Dixon forward line. They aren’t the most efficient team in the league when doing so, but that isn’t critical given how valuable the corridor is.

So how valuable is the corridor? This year all defensive possession chains starting in the defensive third score, on average, 0.44 points. If you get, say, 50 of them a game you should score about 22 points from them.

But if you can use the ball from the square, the scoring rate increases dramatically. For defensive third chains that hit the square teams score at just over a point per opportunity. Across the same 50 (roughly how many chains teams average from that part of the ground) that’s 52 points per game, or six goals more.

Six goals is probably the difference between the best and worst teams in the league. Six goals in a game is a lot.

Why is getting the ball in the square so important? It makes the ground bigger, and harder to defend. Spare defenders, and third men up, can be effectively defanged due to the sheer variety of targets from the middle.

As a result, every team ideally wants to get into the corridor – sans ramifications – and wants to stop the opposition from doing the same.

That’s why Cox was clear that the green light was faint for his attacking ball users, and why his own directness was only dialed in when the game needed rescuing.

And that’s why you go to the media scrum.


Assessing the “AFL Power Index”- who are the financial heavyweight clubs?

Sean Lawson

“The numbers have been crunched, and the verdict is in: Richmond is the most powerful club in the land” reads this recent article at Codesports.

It’s a grab bag of financial and fanbase measures, but it doesn’t quite hit as an assessment of the “biggest” or richest or most powerful clubs. I’ll try and do better using annual reports collected by Jason Lassey’s amazing Sports Industry AU website to drill into what makes a club financially “big”.

Here’s what we’re working with:

The list of measures they used is a mix of financial and soft fanbase indicators as follows:

I’m not going to argue against social media and surveyed support, both seem reasonable enough tests of future growth potential.

Rather, my focus is the financial measures which I think overlook key features of the economics of football clubs.

To illustrate, I’ve compiled (partially estimated) the revenue sources for AFL clubs in 2024.

The clubs generating the most money from football itself, ie memberships, tickets, merch, stadium hospitality, are shown at the top, but the most important part of this analysis is to note the AFL equalisation distributions. The AFL gives more money to clubs have more structural need due to a smaller fanbase.

This thorough financial equalisation has been a quiet revolution since 2015, and has made club profit and loss statements largely meaningless. All clubs are supported to fund their football operation, and to run at a breakeven level. Unlike many sports, discussion of financial power has mercifully almost nothing to do with the prospects for success in the modern AFL, it’s just a fun little exercise in curiosity.

As we can see. West Coast, Collingwood and Fremantle are the biggest “heavyweights” when it comes to football revenues, with massive crowds and corporate support. Next is Geelong whose stadium deal at Kardinia Park sees them keep a much bigger cut of a smaller stadium revenue pie.

On the topic of Geelong and stadium facilities, you can also forget asset value as a worthwhile measure of club power, since AFL clubs, as a rule, barely pay for their key assets, As Greg Blood at Australian Sport Reflections notes, in nearly every case, club facilities end up on club balance sheets mostly via grants or via concessional transfers from government. That’s successful political lobbying, not financial power.

Readers will note that the likes of Richmond (in a spoon year), Carlton and Brisbane have lower football incomes than the top bracket, but big side businesses that generate high revenue. Brisbane are 4th in the league for revenue thanks to the competition’s biggest pokies operation in Ipswich, but the Tigers with their fitness centres appear to dwarf everything else.

Unfortunately, that is all just gross revenue, and the power index missed its mark in focusing on those. Nothing comes for free, and clubs need to spend money to make money:

The key goal for clubs isn’t revenue, it’s profit. These iinvestments are to provide an operating surplus for reinvestment into football.

At the moment, pokies still reign as the most profitable side business. The Lions with the largest pokies profits and the highest proportional reliance on them, made about $8m in profit last year at their venue.

Meanwhile, clubs looking into diversification into alternatives like gyms and corporate education programs are pushing into lower margin activities.

They would hope for long term profits, but at the moment, that extra revenue is not really helping the bottom line. Clubs with resources to invest are equally capable of just holding onto them and gaining a passive income though interest and dividends, instead – something several clubs like West Coast quietly do.

We can also apply this revenue vs profits question to football income. Clubs generate income from tickets, merchandise, memberships, sponsorships, hospitality, but all those things also don’t come for free.

So let’s isolate club profit from commercial football activity – how much money do clubs actually get out of their football, after they’ve booked the seats to sell to members, bought the merchandise to fill the club shop, paid the corporate comms staff, and so forth:

This chart takes the red “football revenue” figure from the top chart and shows how much of that is actual profit, what I’ve called “net football income” here.

This is probably the most appropriate key indicator for the financial preponderance of football clubs as football clubs. The more surplus a club can extract from footy, the “bigger” the club.

Some clubs have a higher football income but don’t make as big a surplus. Sydney for example has the highest sponsorship income in the league, but this comes with high operating costs, and they pour a lot of money into reaching a somewhat disengaged fanbase. Adelaide by contrast runs a cheaper operation in a quieter city and has a devoted fanbase who don’t take much “activation”.

But a key point here. Only five clubs are even capable of paying their players just from their own commercial football activity. All clubs rely on AFL distributions to fund their on-field performance.

The primary goal for all clubs is to fund their football programs, which in 2024 required 34 million dollars, about 29m for AFLM and 5m for AFLW.

The true “heavyweights”, then, will be the clubs who can reach the mark of funding their football program with just their own football profits, a base AFL distribution, and, if needed, any side income.

That’s the big clubs mentioned above – West Coast, daylight, then Collingwood, Adelaide, Richmond, and Fremantle. Essendon also meets the mark with their pokies and fitness centre revenues. Carlton might be likely to climb into this group if they were to have a run of success, roughly the way Richmond’s dynasty propelled them.

But also remember that with modern equalisation, being a “financial powerhouse” has never been less relevant to AFL success. Just ask Carlton or Essendon or Fremantle about how many premierships their money has gotten them.


Around the Grounds

Here’s some other good looks from elsewhere this week.


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One response to “Week 7 2025”

  1. […] week Liam showed off his updated alternative to the AFL’s kicking efficiency stat, where two values, kicking threat […]

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