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.
Right on the stroke of halftime on Saturday night Isaac Heeney slotted a set shot for his second of what would become a bag of four goals, to push the scoreline out to 2.8.20 – 13.5.83 at the midway point. It’s just one aspect of a complete shellacking for the Eagles, but eyes are immediately drawn to the 1:4 ratio of goals to behinds. Even though it’s a pie in the sky, fans can’t help but picture what the game would feel like if they’d somehow managed 10 straight.
What gets lost when each score is stripped of its context however is that the Eagles weren’t kicking terribly from gettable shots, they were being forced into bad positions by the Swans. Accuracy didn’t move the needle compared to sheer volume of scoring opportunities in this match (if the Swans had missed on every one of their goals they’d still have won 35-41), but it’s often a determining factor between two evenly matched sides. It’s worth considering then who’s taking the most from their opportunities, and who’s creating the best opportunities to be taken.
Expected Scores
Before we get into that it’s worth giving a brief explainer on Expected Scores or xScore, as it’s the foundation I’m going to use to measure accuracy and quality. The simple version is that every shot at goal is given an xScore value based on the average of points scored from all similar shots, grouped by location on the field, whether it’s a set kick or in general play, and in the case of general play what pressure was being applied to the ballcarrier.
For example: if there have been 100 shots from the same situation and 50 of them went through the goals, 40 swayed either side, and 10 failed to score entirely the xScore value of that shot would be calculated as (50 x 6 + 40 x 1) / 100 = 3.4 points.
Since the start of the 2021 season there have been just shy of 55,000 kicks recorded as deliberate shots at goal. Unsurprisingly, set shots are both more valuable and more sought after by teams.
If it were easy to live on a diet of set kicks a stone’s throw from the goal line though every team would do it, but you have to take what the opposition offer you.
The Value of Accuracy
As you might expect from a team with the current Coleman Medal leader, who’s kicked 17.2 from just 21 shots (and only 24 kicks), Gold Coast are so far out ahead in xScore rating (difference between score and xScore) both per shot and per game they’re nearly lapping 2nd place.
Accuracy is a hugely volatile skill however, and four games is still a few shy of a healthy sample size. It’s worth comparing teams against their 2025 selves to get a better baseline. With it we can see what a massive jump Gold Coast have made to begin the 2026 campaign, and get a suggestion of how unlikely it is to be sustained through to September.
Across a full season, most teams sit within +/- 0.2 points of their expected accuracy per shot…
…and approximately one goal per game.
Knowledge this regression is coming is cold comfort to a team like Geelong who have already been on the receiving end of a combined six-goal swing from xScore in an Opening Round loss to the Suns, but it’s still worth considering that everyone will regress to the mean in time. Who then are keeping that baseline the highest?
The Value of Quality
In the continued legacy defining search for success this decade, Beveridge’s Bulldogs and Clarko’s Roos picked up where they left off in 2025 – refusing to settle for anything but the highest quality looks at the big sticks.
What sets Beveridge apart from his one time mentor however is that the Dogs have maintained this level while keeping such a high volume of shots. They led the league for shots at goal per game in 2025, continue to do so in 2026, and are adding nearly 10 expected points more than average because of the combined quality of these attempts.
On the other end of the spectrum, GWS’ early woes can largely be put down to the expected regression from accuracy and an unexpected regression from quality. Even though it moves the needle less shot to shot and game to game than accuracy, the quality of shots is much more stable a predictor, and their decimated lineup no longer seems able to create the same constant supply for Jesse Hogan that he had been enjoying.
Putting it All Together
So far to start the season, Gold Coast sheer accuracy in front of goal has put them more than three goals ahead of the league average score for their number of shots produced, mirroring their coach’s archrival lagging just as far behind.
While there are a glut of teams in the middle of the pack who are dragging themselves in two directions, history tells us these and the Cats’ and Suns’ outliers are irregularities that will be hammered out in the fullness of time.
While there are close to perfectly average teams last year, none of them were being pulled in both directions to a massively significant degree. Similarly, the best and worst of the group sat at +8.3 and -5.2 points per game respectively.
When it comes to sustainability, the Bulldogs know there’s no reason they can’t keep scoring at their current extraordinary rate as one of the only teams to not be facing a significant bump up or down to begin the season. Gold coast and Sydney will both be looking to consolidate their gains, even though Brisbane have proved being above the league average isn’t a prerequisite to flag glory.
Ultimately, nothing will ever be more important in footy than generating scoring opportunities. Kicking 10.0.60 would be impressive and a great bit of trivia, but wouldn’t do you any good against a side putting up 24 goals from 45 shots. Teams are constantly looking for every edge they can get however, in a league where it’s harder than ever for top teams to pull away from the pack. Bad kicking is bad footy, after all.
We are five rounds into the 2026 AFL season, and one thing that people have not stopped talking about since the ball was thrown up for the first time on March 5th is the uneven nature of the fixture.
Only one of the completed rounds to date has featured all 18 teams, and it took until the most recent group of games for all the teams to be back on level footing with respect to the number of games they have played.
And with no further byes scheduled until Round 12 (as well as Rounds 13, 14, 15, and 16), you would think that some of the fixturing chat would die down for the time being – especially with the AFL world descending on Adelaide for the 2026 edition of Gather Round.
You could think that, but you would be wrong.
There have been multiple instances this week when the football media (and plenty of fans online) have been vocal about which teams play at the state’s crown jewel, Adelaide Oval, and which teams find themselves heading out to Norwood Oval or Barossa Park in Lyndoch (or Mount Barker, in previous years).
Ralph goes on to discuss whether the Lions really care about the fixturing for one weekend over the course of a season, which I feel is a completely reasonable view to take.
“As Leigh Matthews would say, don’t complain and don’t explain,” he wrote.
These types of conversations can go on forever and ultimately come back to the fact that the AFL knowing they can maximise ticket sales and advertising dollars by playing certain clubs in marquee timeslots at the Adelaide Oval over other clubs.
Instead of having a slightly different version of this conversation yet again, I want to go in a different direction and really lean into the quirks of the draw over the past few years when all nine games are played in the only state that shares a border with every other mainland state.
Here’s a breakdown of the unique number of opponents and venues each team has played against and at in Gather Round, including this year.
Chris Fagan’s side has drawn North Melbourne for the third time in four years, with Barossa Park becoming the third venue these teams have played at during the festival of football after Mount Barker in 2023 and Norwood in 2024.
These matches, which the Lions won by 75 and 70 points, are a key reason why Brisbane sitting atop the Gather Round ladder with a percentage of 176.85 while North are last, winless with a paltry percentage of 51.36.
The Lions and the Kangaroos, along with Gold Coast and Greater Western Sydney, are the only teams not to play at Adelaide Oval during Gather Round.
Compare this to Collingwood, who play their fourth different Gather Round opponent in as many years when they “host” Fremantle on Friday night, having beaten St Kilda in 2023, Hawthorn in 2024, and Sydney in 2025.
Craig McRae’s men join Adelaide, Carlton, Essendon, Melbourne, and Port Adelaide as sides that have not had to cross the famous footbridge and play beyond the Adelaide Oval.
Essendon and Melbourne will also face off for the third time in Gather Round but still both played at the Adelaide Oval in the one year they weren’t drawn to play each other (2024), being fixtured against Port Adelaide and Adelaide respectively.
Geelong may also be a bit miffed with the draw this year. After three years on the big stage, they will head to Norwood for the first time to play the Eagles, their opponents from the inaugural Gather Round, in the early Sunday game. It’s also the first time the Eagles will run out at the narrow suburban ground, having played at Adelaide Oval in 2023 and 2025 with a trip out to Mount Barker in between.
The Dockers are one of five sides who have experienced the most variety in terms of who and where they have played, along with the Suns, Giants, Tigers, and Swans.
But despite all this variety, no side has played at all four of the venues used over the history of Gather Round.
Six different sides played at Mount Barker in the first two years (Brisbane, North, West Coast, Sydney, Gold Coast, and GWS), yet each of them has a venue they haven’t visited.
As mentioned before, the Lions, Roos, Suns, and Giants haven’t played at the Adelaide Oval, while Sydney and West Coast are yet to feature at the Barossa.
Perhaps this will happen next year, when the AFL and the South Australian government agree on terms for an extension to this initiative.
On a more serious note, I hope everyone who is attending Gather Round has a great time. I attended in 2023, driving over from Melbourne with a carful of mates on the Thursday. Things got off to a rough start when Carlton got rolled by Adelaide, but we still enjoyed ourselves immensely. Travel safe!
The game has never been in worse shape and people are abandoning it in droves. At least that’s the overall picture you might get if you listen to the vast array of people who are paid to comment on the sport despite appearing to actively despise it and wishing they were back in the 1990s.
Some stark numbers, but do they actually add up five rounds in?
Looking at the raw numbers mean figures are up on last year while median figures are down. Neither reach the 2023 peak but both are still healthy.
However, attendance is heavily influenced by the teams playing and the venue, so can we get more of a like for like picture?
For each match occurring in rounds 0-4, I’ve looked to see whether there are matches in other years also occurring in rounds 0-4 at the same venue with the same teams.
Where there are multiple matches to compare, I’ve calculated the percentage increase of a matchup against the mean attendance for that matchup.
Across a season I’ve then calculated the median and mean percentage increases across all shared matchups.
In doing so we can see that comparing like for like matchups the 2026 season is performing extremely well. It has the highest mean and median increases. Crowds are well up for the fixture we have had so far.
In the Margins
We’ve got the people, how about the games?
We currently have the highest recorded final quarter lead changes (score progression data goes back to 2001) and the third highest total lead changes per game.
You’re more likely than ever to see the lead flip in the final quarter.
How about margins in general? We’ve never had a higher proportion of games decided by 2 goals or fewer, only one season (2024) where more games have been decided by one goal or fewer, and only one season (2019) where more games have been decided by four goals or fewer.
If we look at the mean figures we see that margins have climbed over the past couple of seasons but still relatively low, total points continues to grow post-covid (the decline started pre-covid), and the ratio of margin to points scored is in line with figures over the century – the notable exception being consistent low values through 2003-2007. I for one am happy to accept slightly higher margins to avoid the football terrorism waged by Paul Roos and John Worsfold in the mid ‘00s.
Keep ‘em separated
Lastly, there’s been a lot of discussion over at Fox Footy about the idea of this being a season of two divisions – a clear bottom 6 and then the rest. The bottom 6 haven’t landed a punch on the top 12, with a record of 0-8 and an average margin that once Sydney had dealt with West Coast sits above 10 goals.
Sounds pretty bad, right?
I wanted to at least add a bit of context to it though. I’ve used the 15 seasons with an 18 team competition. For each season I’ve found the group of 6 teams that had the most losses against the other 12 teams before having a single win.
At the moment we’re not in a historically bad place. The only season that has taken fewer than 8 cross-division games to notch a win for the bottom six was 2020. Gather round will be telling. There are no internal matchups within the bad division so we get six rolls of the dice to notch a win. Port beating St Kilda seems the most likely chance, although Melbourne has horrendously underperformed against Essendon in recent years, particularly at Gather Round.
If all six of the bad teams lose we’re then starting to get to the upper end of things but would still be a full 7 losses short shy of last year’s performance.
What if we take the idea of divisions a step further and classify teams using a similar method at the end of each season.
I’ve first grabbed the group of six teams with the best combined win-loss record against the remaining 12 and called them the top division.
I’ve then defined the bottom division as the six remaining teams with the worst win-loss record against the remaining 12. Unsurprisingly the middle division is what’s left over.
The top 6 win around 75-83% of their games against the remaining 12, the bottom win around 13%-22%, and the middle hover around the 50-56% range.
We can also see there’s more variation within the bottom division than the others. In all but 2021 and 2015 there has been at least one team with an 80% win rate against their fellow bottom sixers. By contrast this has happened only four times in the middle division and three in the top.
Overall I think there’s a compelling case for footy being in really good health. There are bad games, but there always have been. The good games are as good as ever and being played by more teams.
Many commentators harken back to the 80s and 90s as a golden age of football. The vast majority of it is absolute unwatchable dross by comparison. The skills are negligible and pressure non-existent.
In addition to the normal rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia, our views on the past are informed by the fact that we simply didn’t see the bad games as much. For many people their exposure to the game was going to your team’s game on Saturday afternoon then catching a curated three quarters on replay and a ten-minute highlights package of the rest of the round. They never even saw the equivalent of Port vs Richmond.
As for the media landscape that’s a whole different kettle of fish. Maybe we should try something really radical like TWIF’s own Joe Cordy suggested?
I think we should explore the idea of giving media jobs to people who like watching footy. https://t.co/KgaAc3DOa9
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.
Geelong proved you can win on sheer volume of looks at the goal, GWS showed everyone regresses to the mean eventually, and Fremantle showed bad kicking can still be 10-goal winning footy.
There’s also a new era of cellar dwellers.
After spending most of the decade battling each other for the right to first pick, North Melbourne and West Coast won in the same weekend for what feels like the entire history of the league.
Not to be outdone though, Carlton set up the laziest content creator you can think of with a slam dunk April Fool’s post.
In November last year Fremantle went riffling through other clubs’ discarded players, and fished out the last remaining and arguably only successful product of a long forgotten push to open a new frontier in international recruitment: the 211cm 34-year-old former Division I NCAA basketballer and OSU alumni Mason Cox.
Despite putting up his most lacklustre season since recruitment, battling injury and being right near the typical expiry date for professional athletes, Fremantle saw enough in him to offer Cox a 2-year deal.
The reason for it is pretty simple: Cox is one of the few players in the incredibly slim venn diagram of those willing to accept a contract knowing they’ll never be called on without an injury or suspension to a player higher up the depth chart, and who has proven he can actually fulfill the role of a ruck at AFL level to any capacity.
With Luke Jackson and Sean Darcy at the core of their current build towards an inaugural flag, the footy department felt they needed to avoid the exact situation their Round 3 opponents found themselves in: a selection panel so bereft of ruck options you’re forced to play two 195cm players in the role. But how did Richmond find themselves in this position, and how big an advantage was it for Fremantle?
great gear to have a game where we really needed our ruck to silence the critics and have a bit of a confidence booster, and our opponents just didn’t play a ruck
– Fremantle fan and Frenemy of the Newsletter Mimi Birch
Height Distribution in League
I’ve never once bought into the idea of there being not enough talent to distribute across the league, an argument we’re now seeing again with the looming spectre of Tasmania and the high likelihood of a 20th team. The one exception to this might be in finding genuinely good rucks, or even just athletes tall enough to fit the bill.
Let’s say you’re searching for a new ruck from outside the league or the national draft to bring onto your list. Australia in 2026 has an estimated population of approximately 27,000,000 people; of that, just over a fifth are in the typical professional athlete age range of 20-34, and just under half of them are male. If you then screen for just those men who are at least as tall as the shortest established AFL ruck currently in the league (198cm), you’re putting a line through 99.98% of potential candidates. Some development and investment into them as a player is to be expected, but you’d ideally like them to be currently playing footy in any capacity, which the ABS estimates is just 1 in every 50 men.
After filtering for just those that meet the minimum height requirement, are in the right age range, and have at least basic understanding of the game, you’re left with a pool of approximately 1200 potential recruits in the country, or 0.004% of the population. Despite this, every club in the league finds space for at least two rucks on their list, even if there’s never space for more than a pair of best-23 capable players.
It’s for this reason that rucks are especially sticky on lists. They typically take years to make it from being handed a jumper on Draft Night to one on debut, and are virtually the only players list managers don’t cut after 30 when you’re not getting regular time in the seniors.
The Efficacy of the Ruck Tap
The hit out numbers were, as you might expect, a completely one-sided affair. If Richmonds Campbell Grey and Mikelti Lafau had managed to combine to win as many as they have thus far in their career, they’d still be behind what Darcy and Jackson won individually on the day.
Even though they were soundly beaten around the ground and in the ruck contests, the other metrics we typically use to measure stoppage attack didn’t reflect the same uncompetitiveness.
In 2022 Cody Atkinson and Sean Lawson, friends of mine and yours, published an article in the ABC focusing on Port Adelaide’s ruckless setup with Jeremy Finlayson taking the hit outs. They showed that through the previous five seasons there had been little correlation between hit out margins and the score, but a rather large one when it came to clearances. Updated for 2023-2025 numbers and the numbers look extremely similar.
Hit outs have strong diminishing returns…
…while dominating clearance has significant positive returns.
The issue is how few hit outs won go directly to the advantage of a teammate. In 2025 the AFL average was 10.4 from 97.8 ruck contests a game. Even Fremantle’s twin towers were only able to combine for 12 per game.
Teams, even bad teams like Richmond currently are, are simply too sophisticated to let anyone create them in high volume. Most rucks at AFL-level can at least put enough pressure on their opponent to stop them putting it perfectly into the hit zone, or if they can’t their teammates learn to read it off the opposition’s hands.
If you’re familiar with Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, you were probably immediately aware the answer was “No.” Rucks are still valuable, good rucks especially, but ironically it’s for everything outside of the ruck contests. You need them to be able to provide a presence post-clearance, whether it be aerially like Gawn or at ground-level like Grundy; there’s no point to having some lumbering running around the ground if he’s not providing any follow up. If you’re fresh out of the non-lumbering kind, a pair like Gray and Lefau are as good a solution as any.
There’s a lot of ways to measure how old a club’s playing group is. This week I came across one of the more unique methods – just removing the three oldest players (each important contributors) from one club and comparing it to the raw figures for the other clubs.
Yes, it turns out that if you exclude the oldest players from one teams list and include the oldest players in every other team’s lists your rankings will change. If you apply the same logic across the league however Collingwood is still the oldest.
Now three is an arbitrary number but even so it produces some interesting results, just not with Collingwood. By excluding the top three players in every list’s mean age Geelong go from ranked 2nd oldest to 10th! That’s a massive change and shows that underneath Dangerfield, Stanley, and Blicavs they’re around the competition average. In the other direction Gold Coast have an even bigger change going from 4th youngest to 3rd oldest, despite taking 6 players in last year’s National Draft. In between Witts, Collins, and Holman at the top and their academy crop at the bottom they’ve got a mass of prime age players at their disposal.
One criticism of looking at mean (what people are most commonly talking about when they say average) is it’s susceptible to outliers. We can also look at lists by median – if you line the players up by age, how old would the player in the middle be. If a team has a pretty even distribution the mean and median will be similar. If a team has a handful of super-veterans you’d expect the median age to come in lower, while if they’ve got literal babies crawling around on the park the median will bring it up.
There’s a lot more variation in how old you can be in the AFL than how young (minimum draft ages), so by using median we’re usually controlling for the impact of a group of particularly old players and we’d expect the movements to be similar to excluding the top three. The big exception here is Essendon, by mean they’ve got the 3rd youngest list, by median they’ve got the 6th oldest which leads us to a quick diversion.
Checking out the distribution of ages we can see a gaping hole around their 22 year olds, between Archer May (21.35 years old at the start of the year) and Liam McMahon (23.67 years old).
If we look at Essendon’s list build chart (each team covered in Round 0’s edition of TWIF) we can see why. Nic Martin (Supplementary selection period), Elijah Tsatas (Pick 5) and Lewis Hayes (Pick 25) are the only players still on Essendon’s list from the 2021 and 2022 draft periods.
Ben Hobbs (Pick 13), Alastair Lord (46), Garret McDonagh (50), Alwyn and Jayden Davey (Picks 45 and 54), Tex Wanganeen (SSP), Jye Menzie and Jaiden Hunter (Mid-Season draft), Anthony Munkara (Zone selection), and Rhett Montgomerie (Rookie Draft) are all gone from the AFL now.
Patrick Voss (Rookie draft) was delisted and subsequently recruited by Fremantle, while Massimo D’Ambrosio (Mid-season Draft) was traded to Hawthorn.
Their other list additions from those two years are Jake Kelly (Free agent), Will Setterfield and Sam Weideman (Trades). Only Setterfield is still in the AFL, although after being delisted and picked back up through the SSP.
Aside from Ben Hobbs none of the players gone cost a lot to bring in individually. You can’t guarantee a star or even a solid role player from those picks. When you’re throwing that many darts though you need at least a few to hit, otherwise you end up with holes in your list.
The next way we could look at ages is based on selected sides. Having a few 30+ year olds on your list that act as useful depth and provide leadership off-field (Tom McDonald) is very different to your game revolving around them (Max Gawn).
Using mean the big mover is Gold Coast – expected as they’ve got a mass of young players dragging down the list average, while the sides they are picking week to week are relatively mature.
If we move to median Hawthorn jumps out, going from the fourth youngest median list to the 2nd oldest median selected team. Essendon and Melbourne move down quite a bit by this measure too, as do Fremantle fielding the second youngest sides.
Finally looking at how things stack up historically, I’ve taken a look at ages of selected teams across the first 3 games of a season.
It’s unsurprising that Collingwood’s median age across the first three games is the oldest it has ever fielded. Another nine teams have been in the 80th percentile or above for oldest teams they’ve fielded, with Carlton the oldest they’ve been since 1944.
League-wide it’s the 7th oldest and a trend emerges with 2023, 2024, and 2025 coming in between 8th and 11th oldest. We haven’t had a particularly young season since the introduction of Gold Coast and GWS in 2011 and 2012.
And inspired by Max Gawn’s milestone game on the weekend I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how the rate of players achieving milestones has changed over the years.
An important note, this last chart excludes players who never played a career game. I don’t believe there’s a convenient long-term listing of team lists year by year, so I’ve used the game stats from AFL Tables to capture anyone with at least one career game.
There should be no competitive advantage in teams having played a game before they play another team [that hasn’t]
Justin Longmuir following his team’s Round 1 loss to Geelong
It’s been a fortnight since the entirety of the football world espoused their views on Justin Longmuir’s Opening Round comments, ranging from affirmation to condescension to whatever it was that Caro went with. Through all the noise and hyperbole, there seemed to be lacking anyone able to assert in empirical terms whether JL was accurate. Fortunately, we live in a world of clever people and big data sets. Unfortunately, those clever people have better things to deal with, so here I am to have a go instead.
The validity of Longmuir’s position is of tepid interest to most people, including myself, however it does provide a nice segue into a more general discussion regarding the extant ‘Competitive Advantages’ in the AFL. This is a meatier, far more interesting conversation, and one that I’ll look to expound on throughout the season in TWIF and elsewhere. For now, let’s peruse the supposed advantages enjoyed by participants of the now maligned Opening Round.
The general assertion made by Longmuir alludes to the disparity in athletic capacity experienced by teams in their first game of a season and their second. Throughout the media, most ex-players seemed to concur that the first game of the season is more challenging on an aerobic level, before berating Longmuir for saying so.
GPS data going from 2017 is summarised below to show the following increase in athletic output from a team’s first game to their second. I’ve highlighted four measures of athletic output; total distance ran, high speed distance, total sprints and repeat sprints.
Teams do not seem to cover any additional distance in their second game of the season as compared to their first, but the explosive work does experience an uptick. On a ten-year data set, a marginal but persistent increase in high-speed distances of 5.3%, sprints by 4.5% and repeat sprints by 5.7% are evident.
Round one of 2026 saw six opportunities for this statistic evidence to play out. Six Opening Round participants played their second game against a side supposedly still blowing off high-speed cobwebs. Dropping total distance, the results on our three remaining measures are below.
Sprints
High Speed Distance
Repeat Sprints
In round one, every team playing game two more distance at high speed than their season-opening opponent. Total sprints exhibit a similar disparity, with the average brought down by a woefully unathletic Carlton. Interestingly, repeat sprints seem to exhibit no real correlation for the 2026 games.
Fourth quarter data provides a similar overall picture, with teams in their second run outperforming opponents across all athletic categories. The difference certainly doesn’t inspire a royal commission and again, Carlton provide a distinct athletic outlier. Shown below, teams seem far more capable of repeat sprints in fourth quarters in their second game. The other measures show slight overall upticks from game one to two.
Sprints
High Speed Distance
Repeat Sprints
Although marginal, GPS data does support Justin Longmuir’s claim to a competitive advantage in round one games where an Opening Round participant opposes a non-participant. The advantage enjoyed by the beneficiary has not shown itself to be definitive in 2026, with results falling in favour of Adelaide and Melbourne, however in both of those games the team with the supposed athletic advantage were ascendant in the final quarter.
The benefit at hand for Opening Round participants is not wholly captured by athletic data. Although harder to quantify, decision making and skill execution is clearly done under more duress by teams in their first few games compared to later in the year.
As if they were intentionally doing so, the AFL have managed to elaborate on the advantages gifted to Opening Round participants by instituting a subsequent early round bye. The deformity made to the schedule with the inclusion of “Round 0” has managed to bleed as far into the fixture as round four, with GWS and St Kilda’s enjoying a week off. The rest is significant, almost all Opening Round participants are nursing significant injuries, with GWS the most afflicted of any team in the competition. How would Adelaide enjoy a week off now, reducing the games of actual football they would have to endure without some key personnel. Instead, injuries to the likes of Petracca, McCluggage, Taylor and Heeney will impact their respective teams less than injuries at the same stage of the season to Dawson, Young and others.
In short, participation in the Opening Round is a narrow but real advantage to those teams over the rest of the competition. With the expansion to include two standalone Victorian teams, the AFL has undermined their ability to justify such an arbitrary distribution of competitive advantage. With the best teams from the season prior selected to play Washington Wizards to the northern states Harlem Globetrotters, the stratification of the league is institutionally endorsed by the AFL in order to satisfy strategic goals that are no longer entirely clear.
On Saturday Morning, the Brisbane Lions ran out onto the turf of Docklands Stadium wearing a crisp and aesthetically pleasing retro jumper – a redesign of the Fitzroy kit worn by club legend Kevin Murray through the majority of his 333 game career. A beautiful deep maroon and navy blue with white monogram, in a style the club hasn’t worn as their retro kit for nearly a decade. The only problem is they chose to wear this much darker and redder kit against St Kilda, a team who wear predominantly black jumpers with red and white.
Former captain Dayne Zorko even spoke to 3AW after the game about the obvious confusion it was creating for players and fans alike: “We will start with the jumper clash. I don’t know how they approved that? Early on everyone was coming off saying, “We just don’t know who to kick it to?” Thankfully we had the white shorts on and as the game slowed up and opened up a bit you could identify it but, I tell you what it was difficult.”
The key question here is “I don’t know how they approved that?”. A question that gets asked many times throughout the season, as the main difference clubs typically make to differ between their home and clash kit is a colour inversion and swapping between dark or white shorts – sometimes, confusingly, even for clubs without white on their jumper.
Remarkably, despite being more than 100 years into being a distinct standalone competition and more than 25 years into the AFL era; AFL House didn’t even have a clash policy until 2007. The AFL now technically has the final say on approving the playing kit that teams run out in every week, but as we saw on the weekend this system clearly isn’t particularly effective.
The feedback from … many different stakeholders has led the AFL to mandate, as part of its rules, that all clubs must have an alternative clash guernsey for the 2007 season onwards.
The AFL has informed clubs that the final design of an alternate guernseys, which are to be used only in the event of a clash when the side is the away team, need to be completed by May 31, to be ready for the following season.
The key consideration for the AFL before any design is approved is whether the guernsey design provides a clear visual difference to the uniforms of other clubs for people at the game and watching at home on television.
The guidelines they released seem good in theory, but they are rarely – if ever – strictly enforced.
Part of the problem of course, is that the game is faster than ever, so players are making split second decisions, and fans are also trying to follow the rapid rate of ball movement amongst dozens of moving players. In a time of plumbers and accountants moving at weekend footy pace, this was less of an issue. So what’s the answer?
The first solution here would be to have someone employed by AFL house – preferably an expert on colour theory, and not a former player or executive – whose job it is to assess the jumpers proposed by each team to be worn on that weekend for both on camera and in person contrast, and make a final decision on if the away team needs to change their preferred strip.
The second would be to ensure that each club has a third, completely distinct jumper as part of their standard rotation that they would wear when they are the away team and their standard away kit would still create too much of a clash. Ideally the key guideline here would be that it could be completely distinguishable from both the team’s home and away jumpers if worn in a game against them – think how Carlton’s all-white kit and all-navy kit might both create a clash with Collingwood or Geelong, but their infamous yellow M&M jumper would contrast with both.
A great example is this three-kit setup from the Queens Park Rangers that I stumbled upon recently that they have as their standard issue uniforms for the 2025/26 Championship in England. There is almost certainly no team whose kit would clash with all three of these shirts, meaning there would be no risk of a clash regardless of opponent.
In a league where there are a near-endless number of jumpers being produced and sold, from Gather Round “stealth” guernseys, to ANZAC guernseys, Sir Doug Nicholls Round guernseys, Retro guernseys, and other one-off promotional guernseys; why wouldn’t clubs take the opportunity to design and sell a third style of jumper each year?
It would also give complete creative freedom to clash with other teams home colours, meaning the natural flow on effect of this would be that Port Adelaide would be free to wear their Prison Bars jumper for home games if they so desired, and Fremantle could wear their South Fremantle or East Fremantle heritage guernseys without drawing the ire of Sydney or North Melbourne.
In a league where we have seen numerous rule changes, interpretation tweaks, and medical policy changes to adapt to the increasing speed and demands of the game, it is well past time that we developed a strict clash policy that ensured we no longer have to endure matchups like we witnessed last Saturday.
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.
Round 2 of the season, so naturally four teams had a bye this weekend and there won’t be a full slate until Gather Round. The teams that get out onto the park though put on some great displays, only leaving us with two undefeated and three winless sides and half the competition sitting at 1-1.
The Hawks, Dogs and Suns all firmed their premiership credentials displaying three distinct archetypes of wins that hearten the faithful: straightening your kicking for goal when it matters, wrestling back the lead late on in tough away conditions, and completely dispatching cellar dweller opposition.
At the other end of the ladder the Giants, Bombers and Roos all had three variations of disappointing losses: the complete absurdity of losing 29 seconds of game time to the void and going on to lose by a single goal in a late charge, cementing yourself as wooden spoon favourites after being unable to fire a single shot against a fellow bottom four team, and giving up a five goal lead to a team you sold the reverse fixture hosting rights to.
Finally in the middle of the pack, maybe now called the Wildcard Zone, Fremantle showed they learned how to hold onto the most dangerous lead in football: 5+ goals at QT.
Footy – or Australian Football to give it its government name – has been around a fair while.
But the game as created wasn’t perfect. The first rules were more a rough sketch than a considered masterpiece.
That’s not a shock – they were literally bashed out on a lazy arvo at the pub by whoever was keen enough to show up. Had they considered continuing through kick-ons they might have had something bulletproof on their hands, but c’est la vie.
Since then there has been an obsession with fixing football. As something created broken, the obvious response has been to repair. When the little mark took over the game, they removed it from the rules. Holding the ball has been an issue for over a century, as has the throw. The shirt front is no more, and now the ground has a lot more lines than before.
There are three general types of fixes that are generally enacted.
The first is safety related changes, and are pretty essential for any sport to continue (i.e. no shirtfronts anymore). The second is loophole closing – think the little mark. That occurs where a team or teams exploit a poorly written law to reign supreme (and ruin the fun of the game).
The third type is a bit more nebulous – it’s to make the game better. In recent years there have been several changes to attempt to improve the game. That’s also the case this year.
That last type of change rumbled around my head when I read this tweet from the Herald Sun’s ‘Ralphy’.
Enjoyed the article and your thoughts. Don’t disagree that the changes are very artificial. I think we can’t forget how congested, how stoppage heavy lots of footy was for so, so long. We used to have weekly Monday meetings in at our office for years – how do we fix footy? Being…
Imagine being a fly on the wall in those conversations. Imagine thinking that a bunch of journos with a questionable grip on the sport knew the levers on how to fix the sport.
Most importantly – imagine thinking those trade-offs were something real.
So is the game actually improved this year?
It’s far too early to tell, but almost certainly not.
Most of the baseline numbers that indicate style are basically unchanged this year, especially when considering that early season (and year) footy is usually faster and higher scoring due to conditions. Most club analysts generally think that a month to six weeks is the earliest period you need before trends are analysed in a footy context – we aren’t close to there yet. Some even suggest to wait until after the league-wide bye. That’s because the bye is the main opportunity teams have to install new looks with extra time on the training track.
As we’ve (Sean Lawson and I) have investigated in the past, most rule changes see a short term bump to scoring (or other relevant factors) before settling. Time is needed for the full impact.
But let’s be bold and take one short term example anyway – mostly because of the consensus view that there has been a dramatic change. In Mateo’s latest One Percenters newsletter, he highlighted some numbers from TWIF’s own Emlyn Breese:
Play on rates – often cited as the big outcome from “stand” – haven’t shifted dramatically. Likewise, transition of the ball from defensive 50 to attacking 50 is actually a touch down. Scoring from centre bounce is down as well. Scoring is up overall (see Lincoln’s piece for a discussion there), but the game looks (with the commentary on mute) largely the same as last year’s sport.
Yet still most people would observe the opposite. They would see a game dramatically sped up, perhaps artificially so. So far that’s just not the case.
A large chunk of this would be down to what we are watching for – a filter on how we watch the game through the narrow lens of the television screen. If we are looking for overlap run (and commentators likewise) then we will see it.
So “why”? Why are these rule changes being made if not for the big two reasons above?
Well, without detailed research, my best guess is to serve the nostalgia of journalists like Ralph and the footy administrators in charge. They want a game like the one they remembered growing up, with hormones racing through their veins. They want to see the loose, carefree, energetic footy that matched their outlook in life that the time – when things were as good as they would ever be.
This absolute tune from Hot Tubs Time Machine probably explains it better than I ever could.
People want goals, action, marks. They want bags of goals – journos in particular want this because it’s easy to write about. More importantly, they want to relive the heroes of their youth and what they did to make them so, well, heroic.
Marcus from Hot Tubs unintentionally touches on one of the major factors in why we don’t – the professionalism of the sport. As the sport has become more of a going concern the tolerance for racism, sexism and homophobia has significantly reduced.
So too has the tolerance for losing, especially if your career depends on winning. That’s a reason why there has been such a rapid tactical evolution, alongside the impact of other sports. That drive for professionalism and improvement drives both aspects. Perhaps there’s a way to make the game as open as the 1980s or 1920s (yuck in both respects), but “stand”, ruck jumping, 6-6-6 and last touch out of bounds don’t scratch the surface.
Unfortunately, the march of time is as unrelenting as the receding of the hairline up the scalp. If you actually go back and watch old football (as I often do) you’ll be quickly reminded how barely watchable it is. The conditions are often bad, the skills often lacking and the strategy oft rudimentary. It’s the emotions that are worth remembering, not the actual footy sometimes.
But old footy is simpler to understand than the modern game – an output of the professionalism forced on the game, influenced by those who communicate it to the masses.
That’s not really an issue – especially when more fans are watching the sport than ever before, and when more people are playing at a grassroots level. If the game was truly in dire straits these numbers would have dropped off.
Footy always needs fixing, but maybe not in the way people have been thinking they need to.
Marks are a central component of the beautiful game of football. While there have been minor increases in marks per game over time, going back to 2012, the total number of marks per game have hovered between 88 through to 94 per game. Total marks have also remained quite stable as a ratio to disposals per game, shifting slightly from 24% up to around 25% post stand rule.
However, not all marks are created equal and it is important to look at different types of marks. In a game where the importance of maintaining possession and transitioning the ball quickly has exploded, the craft of getting open and providing an easy marking target out on a lead is a precious commodity that is growing in prominence this season.
With the caveat that it is extremely early, this season there is an interesting spike in the marks being taken on leads by teams. For the first time since 2014, teams are averaging more marks on leads than contested marks. This is partially because marks on leads are up to the highest they have been over the last 15 years, and partially because contested marks are at the lowest rate that they have been over the same period.
The increased speed and openness of the game could be contributing to both factors. For contested marks per game, with the ball more in motion, there are fewer instances where players are looking to put the ball into contested situations. On the flipside, there is also increased space to lead into when the ball is moving quicker, creating more opportunities for players to lead effectively.
Even so, last year contested marks were still more common than marks on the lead. St Kilda and Sydney were the only teams that took more marks on the lead than contested marks. For both teams it was more about being poor at contested marking than being leaders at marks on leads, and both teams raided Carlton to try and improve their contested marking in the offseason.
This year though the ratio of marks has flipped, and teams are taking more marks on the lead than they are taking contested marks. There are 12 teams averaging at least 10 marks on leads, a number which hasn’t been reached by a team since Collingwood did it in 2021.
Given the small sample size it’s hard to work out how much of Port Adelaide’s total up the top is due to a change in play style under Carr, and how much is due to totally dominating a poor Essendon defence this last weekend. Essendon conceded 7 marks on the lead to Mitch Georgiades alone, and is averaging 21 per game conceded to opponents.
Only two teams are getting more of the ball from contested marks than marks on the lead. Creating easier ball movement remains an issue for Carlton, who are one of the two teams continuing to get more from contested marks rather than marks on the lead. However, Sydney taking more contested marks is a bit of a surprise, given they were the worst in the competition at it in 2025.
There are a few contributing factors for Sydney. The first factor this week was the loss of Gulden and Heeney, which certainly hurt both the run and the ball movement of the Swans. The other has been the relatively low output from star recruit Charlie Curnow. Sydney recruited Curnow to help provide aerial support and fill their need for a key forward, but following on from a down year last year, he continues to be down on his peak output, with his worst marking numbers since his rookie season in 2026. Curnow might look to the man from the other end of the field last week if he wants to return to form.
Last year the renaissance of Jack Gunston was one of the more surprising stories in football. Gunston has always had a knack for finding space and working to the right areas in the forward line. But last year’s resurgence came in part off the back of leading the competition in marks taken on the lead, with Gunston being the only player to average more than 2 per game. Gunston was able to translate his ability to find space into significant scoreboard impact, trailing only Jeremy Cameron in Goals per game last season.
In the first few rounds Gunston has continued on from where he left off last season. He has been a joy to watch plying his trade in the front half of the ground, continually working himself into dangerous areas and testing the concentration of his defender. He was pivotal in the win against the Swans last week, and is once again second with 4.3 goals per game and averaging an impressive 2.7 marks on the lead per game.
Whether it is the stand rule, or just pulling insights from what worked last year for Hawthorn and Gunston, it seems teams are looking to get out on the lead more. It means that Gunston’s got a bit more company with 25 players who are averaging 2 or more marks on the lead so far. Those numbers will certainly come down as defences adapt to the increased speed that we have seen early in the season, and as Essendon’s porous defence improves from historically bad levels. However, the early numbers suggest a genuine shift in how teams are working and using space that it will be interesting to see if teams look to clamp down on in the coming weeks.
The Early Season Spike in Scoring isn’t as Big as you Think it is
“While not all teams have played three games, the bump in scoring is obvious,” Pierik wrote. “When comparing the average scores across the first three rounds of this season and last, there’s an increase of five points per team, to 90 points.”
And that’s true, if you round up.
If you compare the average team score across the first three rounds of this season compared to the first three rounds of last season (excluding the rescheduled Geelong/Brisbane and Gold Coast/Essendon games from Opening Round, as these weren’t played until Rounds 3 and 24, respectively), things have increased from 90.2 to 94.98.
(Pierik may have made a typo at the start of the article when saying the average for this season is 90 points – the figure towards the end of the story says 95.)
The first point was that with so few games played across the first three weeks of the season, it’s important to acknowledge that four of the six teams that have played three games (instead of two games, like the other 12 teams) are in the top five for average points scored at this point of the season.
Gold Coast (384 points, three games, average of 128 per game) have the highest average score, ahead of Hawthorn and the Western Bulldogs (339 points, three games, 113 per game), Fremantle (218 points, two games, 109 per game), and Sydney (318 points, three games, 106 per game).
The second point is that it would be better to test whether scoring (and some of the other offensive metrics) have improved on last year by taking an average of the team averages, rather than simply dividing the total number of points scored by the number of teams that have played.
Emlyn’s suggestion removes the bias of some teams playing more games than others by using an average of averages approach. This accounts for the fact that teams who have played more games will inflate the total number of points scored, which in turn will affect the overall average.
So, let’s apply the average of averages method to the original question from the start of Pierik’s article: have the AFL’s rule changes worked?
Using the latter approach, we can see that the average of each team’s points per game across the first three rounds of the season has increased from 91.86 last year to 93.40 this year – a year-on-year increase of just 1.67% (compared to the 5.22% increase seen in the former method).
The results from 2021 to 2023 are the same for both methods because the same number of games were played across the first three rounds. The somewhat contentious introduction of Opening Round in 2024 has meant teams have played an uneven number of games until later in the season. As a result, the average of averages method is more accurate.
Inside 50s, which remained relatively consistent in Pierik’s analysis, do not change drastically using the average of averages method.
It will be interesting to check in and see how scoring changes once teams play more games and are back on level footing with respect to games played. But in the meantime, it’s more accurate to say that the spike in early season scoring isn’t as large as everyone thinks it is.
There’s been a lot of talk this week about the spate of hamstring injuries and whether this is due to the running loads taken on by teams. I wanted to dive into the data that is available to us at a team level and see if we can corroborate some of what has been said.
Firstly, this data is derived from the tracker found in the AFL App. It surfaces both team and individual data. Individual data however is only surfaced for the top five players for a given metric in any match. With that limitation it’s not really possible to get a proper season trend for any given player. They may run the same amount two weeks in a row, be captured in that top five one week, and be missing the next simply because five other players ran further.
It’s also important to note that there are some games where there’s clearly been a GPS error so there are some weird outliers. I haven’t had the time to go through and weed them out unfortunately.
The metrics we’ve got at our disposal are:
Total distance covered (metres)
Distance covered at high speed (18+ km/h) (metres)
Number of sprints (Occasions running above 24km/h for at least 1 second)
Number of repeat sprints (Total sprints within 60 seconds of each other)
Average speed of movement while team is in possession of the ball (m/s)
Average speed of movement while opposition is in possession of the ball (m/s)
We can see that across our 6 metrics things have either plateaued or slightly decreased from last year.
However, as Cody and Lincoln have each written about this week March football is not indicative of a full season. What happens if we restrict our focus and look at just games played in March?
We can see a modest increase. It’s not earth shattering, but if players are already loaded up to capacity every bit on top of that will have a greater impact.
If the metrics change substantially during a season, what does that actually look like?
We can see that pretty consistently distance covered at high speeds starts slow and peaks mid-late season. Sprints over the past three seasons have also climbed from a low base. Other metrics have a more limited variation and it’s harder to determine a trend as opposed to just noise.
Given we’re starting from a higher base it will be interesting to see if and where the high intensity metrics peak this season and what impact that has.
It’s also worth considering what these metrics actually mean for winning and losing.
The eye test tells us that for most metrics there doesn’t appear to be much of a link. This is backed up by a quick spearman correlation coefficient. This isn’t too surprising, different game styles require different running loads so the lack of strong overall trends makes sense.
The exceptions are teams that win tend to run slower on offense and faster on defense.
If we look at team by team we might be able to find some more interesting features.
Since we’re going off a smaller population size (70 – 80 per team as opposed to 800 games across the entire league) we’d need to see stronger correlations to take note of them. This is admittedly pretty rudimentary analysis, but a ballpark figure would be that we should start to take notice at above 0.25 (or below -0.25, with negative values indicating a positive differential is correlated with losing).
Sprint differentials for a number of teams start to climb into meaningful territory. Melbourne and Essendon also benefit from a high repeat sprint differential.
Brisbane’s wins are correlated with distance covered (both high speed and total) more than other teams, while Collingwood are edging a meaningful correlation to total distance covered.
A final thing we can look at is the profiles of individual teams quarter by quarter.
We should note that the running a team does is very dependent on the context of a game, but we can still note a few interesting observations (from a small sample size):
As you would expect, across most metrics most teams workload drops off during a game – players tire out and run less or run slower.
Fremantle’s speed on attack has risen through the game, as have Carlton and the Giants to lesser extents.
Port Adelaide’s speed with and without the ball falls off a cliff in the second half, Carlton’s speed on defence has cratered in the third term and recovered slightly in term 4 – but still is in stark contrast to their speed attacking.
A few teams have a secondary peak in Q3 after the long break, Adelaide and Sydney fairly pronounced in this for distance total and distance high speed.
Carlton have the reverse of the typical profile for repeat sprints – peaking in Q2 and Q4
Essendon and Port are done by Q4 and this is most evident in the sprint figures – averaging almost 10 fewer sprints than the next lowest team for the quarter.
Thursday night’s Hawthorn vs Sydney clash was my first opportunity to attend a live game this season, but more importantly it was my five-month-old son’s first opportunity to attend a live men’s game ever. Sat up in the fourth tier just to the south-side of the punt road end, he let the full breadth and majesty of the MCG wash over him and listened patiently while I explained how both teams set up their structures on each line to best exploit their own strengths and their opponent’s weaknesses.
The first step in a long journey
I explained to him that aside from the sense of community, the energy of the crowd and the feeling of being part of something bigger than just yourself, one of the reasons I’ll always prefer attending games live is the ability to all 36 players at once and how they’ve been organised.
The Sydney Setup
I never completely resign myself to losing before a game’s begun but when Sarah Black confirmed Heeney’s absence, meaning the Swans would play for the first time since the end of 2020 without him or Errol Gulden in the side, I lowered my expectations. When a player is removed from the top of the talent pyramid you don’t just wipe however many potential points off the scoreboard like a tower getting shorter; the effect cascades downwards throughout the playing group. “Who can fill their roles? Who can fill the roles of the people filling their roles? Who can fill the roles of the people filling the roles of the people filling their roles?” reverberating ad nauseum throughout the list.
After a season that felt like building and repairing a plane while it’s in the air, Cox understandably opted for stability. Caiden Cleary and Corey Warner would come in to provide general forward presence and stoppage support, Justin McInerney would move closer inside the contest, but he wasn’t ready to shift other major pillars like Callum Mills on-ball from his defensive position. While nobody besides Brodie Grundy had attended more than 70% of CBAs throughout the first two games, this matchup saw a much tighter rotation of Rowbottom, Warner and McInerney all getting 70% each with nobody else attending more than a third.
Knowing the deliveries wouldn’t be as clean or as frequent as they normally enjoy, the Swans forwards were spread in a way that tried to maximise their 1v1 capabilities. When setting up for a mid arc stoppage they’d typically form into a 1-2-1 wide diamond formation: a player one-out in the goal square (typically Curnow), a skinny side tall in the pocket ready to come in and overlap (typically McDonald), a fat side general forward playing a rest defence role to cut off the Hawks’ counter attack should they try to switch the play (typically Lloyd), and a final tall one kick out from the stoppage ready to wrestle under a floating dump kick (typically Amartey).
While this setup worked well for periods, its efficacy quickly waned as they were forced into long dump kicks that lacked the precision of Gulden, or ground-level follow up of Heeney. Many kicks came from long range and wide angles trying to find a target in the central corridor that Hawthorn quickly mopped up.
When Sydney were able to retain possession from these entries were the shorter, more controlled kicks from the corridor in instances where the talls could halve the aerial contests for players like Papley and Rosas Jnr to run onto.
While hindsight is 20/20 and most things are easier said than done, it seems clear now that what the Swans lacked was the composure to create more of these situations rather than bombing in hope.
The Hawthorn Setup
Even with their undeniable scoring power, the Hawthorn forward line isn’t one that’s typically thought of as having an overwhelming amount of tall talent. Despite this they’re currently a top four team for marks inside 50, in both the total number and relative to the amount of entries they generate.
Their ability to maximise the output of their forwards, many of whom are still young or have been moved on by other clubs, comes from a system built on emphasising their individual strengths.
Unlike Sydney’s diamond formation with their four forwards all ready to use their size and strength, Hawthorn choose to line up in something closer to a 1-3 T-shape for mid-arc stoppages. One isolated deep tall, and then a line of three others closer to the source with acres of space behind them. Unlike a lot of other sides, including their opponents on the night, that would have their tallest target as the one out the Hawks were at their best when Mabior Chol was further up the field and Jack Gunston running out of the goal square. The Hawks rely on footspeed and beating their opponents horizontally to create uncontested marks, and deployed like this they were able to create set shot opportunities from every angle.
Even though the winning goal came from a moment of brilliance with Gunston kicking across his body at a stoppage, they were a mirror image of the Swans – at their best when creating an uncongested forward line to take marks on the lead. Cox was eventually able to clog up some of this space by conceding an extra at stoppages to let Mills wander loose in defensive 50, but without their usual on-ball talent to cover this deficiency in manpower the Hawks were able to score on volume rather than quality of entries.
This ability to spread and stretch their opponents across the entire width of the MCG is all about putting their players in positions to succeed. During his one year stay in Brisbane, Jack Gunston’s shots and goal tallies hit career lows alongside his marks on the lead; now he’s hitting career highs in what should be his twilight years. In fact, no Hawthorn player was in the top 20 for offensive 1v1 contests in 2025, but had two in the top 20 for marks inside 50 including Gunston leading the league.
Controlling the Controllables
It’s impossible to ever completely unpick exactly what parts of a team’s performance can be attributed to a coach’s tactical system, innate talent of the players or their skill execution on the day.
Sam Mitchell’s decision to move Barrass onto Curnow in the second half worked well not least of all because Tom Barrass is a brilliant player, but it was close to not having mattered because of a double swing in each team’s scoring against expectation.
While footy pedants like myself love getting into long arguments distinguishing who is each club’s best player, who’s their most important, and whether or not they’re the same person, the only two possible answers to either of those questions for Sydney were both unavailable to Dean Cox. While it’s far from a guarantee the Swans would have flipped the result had they played, it’s impossible to imagine they wouldn’t have performed better.
Coaches though are in the business of controlling the controllables. Much to their dismay players aren’t chess pieces that will be reliably available performing identical functions week in week out, and so the best coaches are the ones who can identify what’s within the range of possibilities and adapt to what their players are offering them on the day.
I don’t know if my boy fully understood any of this, but he seemed to enjoy himself all the same.
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.
Last weekend inexplicably saw the first full slate of games prior to gather round. Between opening round and the subsequent byes, the start of the season takes on a very disjointed feeling.
You’d be forgiven for feeling similarly disoriented watching some of the football.
Tom Lynch pulled off a herculean effort in denying Carlton a 0-2 start. Melbourne of all teams put forward some of the most electric ball movement we’ve seen, with Latrelle Pickett setting a new record for most bounces on debut.
The 2-0 Swans received a massive blow with Errol Gulden out for months for surgery to repair a dislocated shoulder. While there were other personnel issues compounding things last year, the difference between Sydney with Errol and without was stark. The style of football being played right now seems tailor made for him. Ultimately though it seems a necessary call, it’s hard to see them going all the way in September without him so they’ll be hoping they can amass enough wins in the meantime to qualify for finals in good order.
Justin Longmuir answered a direct question about opening round’s impact on fixture equity. His answer, while still utterly sensible, aged poorly over the following 24 hours as underdogs Melbourne and Adelaide overcame teams that played the week prior. Unfortunately the tune-up game advantage proved too much for the Eagles to overcome on their trip to Carrara.
In Round 24 last year Melbourne fielded the most experienced and oldest side it had in 14 seasons. It became one of just 6 teams to go into the final game of the season unchanged while finishing 13th or lower.
4 teams have gone into last game unchanged and finished bottom of the ladder RIC 1960 [12th] MEL 1978 [12th] CAR 2002 [16th] WCE 2010 [16th]
6 finishing 13th or worse SYD 1990 [13/14] MEL 2025 [14/18] FRE 2009 [14/16] STK 2002 [15/16] WCE 2010 [16/16] CAR 2002 [16/16] https://t.co/7M6TXCXdVj
Last Sunday Steven King rolled out his new look Demons. Even with the additions of Brody Mihocek, Jack Steele, and Changkuoth Jiath it was the second least experienced Melbourne team since mid-2022 (2025 Round 1 was a touch fresher driven by five debutants).
Many faces were new, but the biggest change was game style. Initially Simon Goodwin brought an innovative and attacking gameplan. By the premiership year of 2021 he had transitioned the team to a ruthless and effective focus on contest and defence (covered in my reflections on the Goodwin years here.)
In the 121 games Melbourne have played since Round 1 2021, Sunday saw them record their 3rd fewest intercepts, their 6th fewest contested possessions, and their 5th fewest tackles.
If we dive a bit deeper, Melbourne recorded their 5th lowest expected chain score from turnover. This represents what the average league team would be expected to score based on where they were able to generate intercepts. It was the basis of the old Melbourne gameplan. Keep generating turnovers in dangerous positions, and trusting sheer weight of opportunity to overcome the inefficiency that accompanied it.
For most of the previous five years these numbers would represent an utterly miserable afternoon at the footy for demons fans. They would be lucky to score 40 points.
Sunday was different. Very different. The ball use on display by Melbourne was electric. They had their 6th highest ball use equity (see Joe’s piece last week for a discussion on this metric), 11th highest post-clearance equity, and 3rd highest ball use equity per disposal.
It was their 3rd highest xScore, 4th highest shots at goal, 5th highest rate of scoring from chains and 8th highest rate of scoring from the defensive half.
Now, as the more observant Melbourne fans will tell you this wasn’t purely a Steven King initiative.
Simon Goodwin had clearly moved to transition the gameplan to a more outside and attacking one in 2025 (arguably to a lesser extent in 2024 too). There was a critical mismatch between intended style and the players available though, and potentially too much baggage off-field to allow a full reset of the gameplan without a broader reset of personnel.
On the St Kilda side, Sunday was the 5th most disposals Melbourne has allowed an opponent at the 6th highest disposal efficiency. St Kilda recorded the 9th lowest intercepts of Melbourne’s opponents, the 5th highest shots at goal, the 8th highest expected score, the third highest rate of scoring from chains and scoring from the defensive half. It was the 18th highest ball use per equity, but the 18th lowest turnover xChainScore.
What does it all mean? The stats met the eye test. The ball ricocheted from end to end all day, more often than not ending in a scoring shot or an intercept possession under immediate pressure. The teams combined for 34 uncontested marks inside 50, the 3rd highest from 2017 onwards.
JVR and Mihocek were targeted 11 and 9 times for eight marks and another two ground gathers by Mihoceck. Melbourne only kicked four times into 50 without an identifiable target, two of those resulting in a contested mark by Mihocek and a free to Sharp. St Kilda entered without a target eight times yielding three turnovers and no marks or frees.
There are clearly questions over how Melbourne will defend, but I don’t think the openness of Sunday’s game should be seen as a weakness. Melbourne were challenged numerous times, but were never challenged on tempo. St Kilda were happy to allow a shoot-out, Steven King didn’t seem eager to change things up. My best guess is he thought we were taking advantage of that type of game better than St Kilda.
Lever’s credentials are impeccable, I highly rate Turner, and Petty has the opportunity to be a very good defender if we abandon the idea of making him a forward. A good smaller lockdown defender is still a bit of a question mark. I think the hope is Andy Moniz-Wakefield might fill that role when ready, and Bowey can do a decent job too (although you want to maximise his footskills).
If the players and system can put a reasonable amount of pressure on opposition disposal (harder this year than ever), I think Melbourne has the players there to take on a more defensive approach when required.
All of the above comes with a gigantic disclaimer: It’s one match, the opponents were bedding down a new team, and it was in near-perfect conditions. Who knows what happens next week against a more settled Fremantle, or when winter sets in.
For all the Melbourne fans I’ve talked to though the result was never the main concern on Sunday. We wanted to see evidence of a coherent game plan. We wanted to see how Jacob van Rooyen would benefit from another legitimate tall forward to work with. We wanted to see moments from the likes of Latrelle Pickett.
I was lucky enough to get my own moment. We took three generations to the footy on Sunday, my dad and I with my two kids. All day my youngest was asking when Max was going to kick a goal, but he was generally hanging behind play. At one point he was in good position before we immediately turned it over.
We’d made it to three quarter time and the kids had reached their limit despite having fun. The fourth quarter had just started and the kids decided they wanted to head back up the steps to take one last look before we left.
They had a look and were halfway down the steps again when I heard a roar. Max had taken a mark deep in the forward pocket. I called my youngest up and said she might want to take a look at this while trying my best to manage expectations (“it’s a pretty hard shot”, “he doesn’t always kick it”).
I should never have doubted it, a beautiful drop punt split the middle. I asked her three days later what her favourite part of going to the footy was: “When Max kicked a goal for me”. Sometimes footy is incredible.
Anchoring the Defence
Joe Cordy / @JCordy37
When Leicester City completed their fairy tale run to their first ever Premier League title, the rest of the football world immediately started picking their squad apart for pieces. While they’d make hundreds of millions of pounds from sales of players like Riyad Mahrez, Harry Maguire, Ben Chillwell, the player who brought in a lower transfer fee than any of them would also prove to be the most difficult to replace. After his move to Chelsea the defensive midfielder N’Golo Kante would go on to immediately win another Premier League with the blues, shortly thereafter a World Cup with France, and was immortalised by the meme phrase “70% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water, the rest is covered by N’Golo Kante.”
What made Kante so valuable, and every team he played on so strong, was his unparalleled workrate making him akin to having two players on the pitch. Though he was limited in possession, he was the kind of elite defensive stalwart coaches dream about being able to rely on, even across codes of football.
The Elites
Similar to the rare air Kante existed in, there are only a handful of such players in the AFL. Of the 253 players classified as either key or general defenders by Champion Data, only 17 are rated “elite” (in the top 10%) by CD’s own Player Ratings system. Even of those 17 only a small handful gain that rating through a combination of defensive prowess and rebound attacking ability.
The first defining trait of these players is how their teams can rely on them as a one-man last line of defence. Even as team defensive 1v1s decrease year-on-year, with more and more leaning on cohesive support systems to avoid being caught out in individual duels, many contending teams have a single defensive general they can rely on to at least halve these contests and cover the ground necessary to support their teammates.
What sets the best of the best apart is in the next phase. Possession has been won, the threat neutralised, now it’s time to attack. Where Kante would make a simple pass here to a player whose skills more suited progressing the ball, some are more like an Aussie Andrea Pirlo in their passing range and accuracy.
Whether that be through direct, high risk and reward transitional footy…
…or the safer approach built around maintaining possession.
The two greatest proponents of this dichotomy are both in the new powerhouse region of the AFL, South-East Queensland. Gold Coast’s Sam Collins ability to unlock opposition’s high lines complimented the Suns’ attacking style that would often see his forward counterpart in Ben King isolated in F50, while Harris Andrews’ patience and precision made him the safest kick in football in 2025.
The Hole Left Behind
The other edge of the blade for teams lucky enough to have one of these players is what life looks like trying to adapt without them. Due to both system familiarity and cap space as a resource, it can be a jarring adjustment to teams trying to recreate them in the aggregate either in the short term through injuries or suspensions, or in the long term as their skills inevitably wane.
Never was this clearer than in the Round One Sydney vs Brisbane clash when Brisbane went to the SCG with not just Harris Andrews missing, but also his second-in-command Darcy Gardiner (as well as McCluggage, Bailey and Morris through injury). While their replacements put in a strong effort, containing star recruit Charlie Curnow to zero goals from four shots, they were ultimately unable to cover the depth of the Swans’ tall stocks with Joel Amartey and Logan McDonald enjoying five and two goals respectively. More importantly though was their inability to successfully counter-attack when they did wrestle control back for periods in the third quarter.
An attack built on clean transition between the arcs was completely thwarted, going coast to coast at nearly half of their 2025 rate and turning just one of 46 rebound-50s into a score. Despite their clear dominance in the clearance battle, without the safety of their defensive anchor they were unable to penetrate the Swans’ rest defence and move the ball quickly in a league where it’s increasingly becoming the name of the game.
Two of their three recent Grand Final opponents are facing similar issues not through single-game absences, but a longer term decline and need to lift the burden from their one-time defensive talisman. Coming off of some of their career-best form in 2022 and 2023 respectively, form that played a major role in leading their sides to those year’s premierships, Tom Stewart and Darcy Moore are losing the inevitable battle to father time. While they’re still incredibly talented players who would comfortably fit into the best-23 of most, if not all, teams in the league, both of their systems-based coaches are tinkering to figure out what life looks like after they hang the boots up.
Chris Scott is having the much easier time of it, with the Geelong conveyor belt of talent delivering him new options like Sam De Koning and Connor O’Sullivan, but his former teammate Craig Macrae seems poised to split the defensive and attacking duties of the Collingwood captain as they push for a record-breaking 17th premiership. The Magpies move the ball now more through traditional rebounding half-back flankers such as Josh Daicos and last year’s recruit Dan Houston, while the defensive contest work is left to players like Moore and Frampton in the air and Maynard and Quaynor at ground level.
…and the Have-Nots
This of course isn’t a particularly novel approach. Given there are significantly less of these Swiss army knife defenders than there are teams, the majority of coaches and list managers find ways to recruit specialised players and built systems to get the most out of them. Whether it’s Sydney using the bigger bodies of Melican and McCartin to wrestle opposition forwards while Blakey floats loose and finds the space to attack, or the Bulldogs’ use of their elite midfield line to press high and simply not allow the opposition a look at their significantly weaker defensive group, there are good teams who can put in strong seasons without having one of these Aussie Rules equivalents Kante or Pirlo.
It is undeniably true however that when you review the lineups of recent premiers, they do consistently stand out. Between the likes of Andrews, Moore, Stewart, May and Lever, it may well be argued that the absence of these first-class bulwarks excludes a team from true premiership contention.
Nick Daicos famously lost two awards last year that he was heavy favourite to win – The Brownlow Medal and the Copeland Trophy – and the surrounding footy world seemingly lost their minds about it.
Craig McRae even confirmed in an interview as recently as last week that the Copeland Medal voting will be altered for “extreme games” as he put it. When queried he did not deny that it was specifically a Nick Daicos rule. None of this is Nick’s fault of course, and I want to acknowledge that at least before moving on.
Regardless of the number of accolades on his Wikipedia page (of which there are already many) being at worst the second or third best player in the league at just 23 years of age with less than 100 games under his belt – and having been for at least two seasons – is credit and reward enough in and of itself.
The inner goings on at Collingwood – while disrespectful to very deserving winner Darcy Cameron – are none of my business as a general footy fan, but the fallout to the Brownlow Medal count certainly is.
Craig McRae presenting the 2025 E.W Copeland Trophy to Nick Daicos Darcy Cameron
It would be fair to say that for the past two seasons, Nick Daicos and Marcus Bontempelli have been the two best footballers in Australia without either taking home a Brownlow medal. It would not be fair to say that this is without precedent or that we need to make drastic change to the voting – but that is what AFL House have decided to do.
At the end of last year – in maybe the first and last ever move made that doesn’t please the sports betting lobby – the AFL announced that they would allow the umpires to view certain stats before casting their votes in order to avoid wrong or missed votes.
The only problem with this is not only the issue of “lies, lies and damned statistics,” – for starters, the umpires won’t have access to the Player Ratings system that the AFL specifically commissioned to be a stronger indicator of performance than available data – the idea that umpires can look at stats cheapens the Brownlow Medal significantly.
We already have the AFLCA MVP, Players Association Award (and TWIF Player of the Year) and countless other media awards that typically go to the statistically-most-correct best footballer in the country, we don’t need football’s night of nights to blend into the melting pot of boring predictable awards.
Part of what makes the Brownlow Medal so fun (and so profitable for the AFL and its many gambling partners) is the possibility of an upset. A player who might unexpectedly storm from the clouds. Some of the most iconic and memorable Brownlow nights have been upsets. Think Adam Cooney, Matt Priddis, Shane Woewoedin, etc.
It’s also not as if a Brownlow Medal is a required legacy piece to cement you as an all time great. If Bontempelli and Daicos never win one, they’ll join the likes of Gary Ablett Snr, Luke Hodge, Leigh Matthews, Joel Selwood, Wayne Carey and Scott Pendlebury as some of the best to have ever played the game without winning the game’s biggest award.
One of the biggest arguments in favour of this has somehow been how high second place (but only when it has been Nick Daicos) has polled, despite not winning the award. But this isn’t a freak event, second place – and even third place – have been trending higher the longer the AFL era has gone, as umpires tend to look for stars to give their votes to more often. On that note, now for some numbers.
In 1990 the Brownlow Medal winner polled just 18 votes – an outlier for sure, but one that would be repeated just three years later in 1993. From 1990 to 1999 the top three players in the Brownlow Medal combined for an average of 64.2 votes. By 2009 the rolling 10 year average had grown to 67.5 votes, and by 2019 it had exploded to 83.2 votes.
The current rolling 10 year average excluding 2020 has grown again to 90.8. Even 2020 in its truncated form saw the top-three poll higher than sixteen of the twenty years from 1990- 2009.
In the long and storied history of the Brownlow Medal, there are 327 players with more than 50 Brownlow Votes and zero wins, 70 with more than 100, 12 with more than 150 and somehow – remarkably – three with more than 200. Marcus Bontempelli joined Joel Selwood and Scott Pendlebury in the elusive 200 club last season.
Of the players without a Brownlow Medal but who have polled 100+ career votes, Nick Daicos sits comfortably atop this list as the only player averaging better than a vote a game – just ahead of 1940s St Kilda centreman and World War II veteran Harold Bray. Bray also was runner up twice in his short career, but one can only hope and anticipate that Nick Daicos will have more than 120 career games to win his elusive Brownlow, and is less likely* to have the middle of his career interrupted by the biggest war in history.
*less likely but by the current state of things unfortunately a non-zero chance
Of the Brownlow-less footballers (not to be confused with Brownless footballers – shout out Billy and Oscar – or Brownlees footballers – shout out Tom – though they also don’t have any Brownlow Medals between them) with the best average votes per game over 150+ or 200+ eligible career games; Marcus Bontempelli tops both lists, just ahead of Joel Selwood and fellow current A-grade stars Christian Petracca, Max Gawn and Zach Merrett.
Daniel Kerr also a notable name on this list considering how much lower players polled when he was at his peak, and that he was having votes stolen from him by Cousins, Judd, Cox and even Embley and Fletcher.
So we can’t take back this year – in which there is equal chance the AFL gets what they want and Nick Daicos wins, or even Marcus Bontempelli, or that we see it awarded to a player padding stats off the wing or half back – but for future years; Greg Swann, Andrew Dillon and the entire AFL Commission – yes even Matt De Boer – consider this article a plea to revert this cynical and beige change to the voting.
The unpredictability of the Brownlow Medal is what makes the night so special. What use will our Bingo sheets be if there is no chance a player will get 3 Votes for a 9 disposal game. What of the roughie inside midfielder at a club with a good record or series of close losses (shoutout to Patrick Cripps, Matt Rowell and Ollie Wines, and apologies once again to Marcus Bontempelli) who you tell your friends is a chance and then get to gloat about on Tuesday morning?
The umpires – despite making the odd mistake every now and then – are best placed to see who the most impactful player on the field is even without their statistics. Despite the “upset” victories in high-polling recent seasons, the winner has been top five in the AFLCA award in all bar one year, and that was Patrick Cripps in 2022; perhaps considered to be the least surprising of the lot, and definitely the more expected of his two brownlow wins.
I say this as one of the nerds who obsesses over football numbers in places like this newsletter, and the back rooms of football clubs and tv studios: don’t take away the one little part of our beautiful game that has not yet been ruined by over-analysis and boring numbers.
Disclaimer: While the code to interpret the data was written by me using R, I’ve used Claude to assist with building the visualiser in Javascript.
In pulling it together I’ve got a bunch of underlying data on inside 50s so here’s a few early observations.
Tim Membrey has the highest mark or free kick rate of any player targeted in the f50 10+ times, while teammate Jack Buller has not yet registered a mark from 13 targets.
A quick look at the other end with the kickers. Ed Richards clearly on top with his kicks ending in a mark or free kick 47% of the time.
I’ll come back to this as the season develops, but in the meantime if you’ve got feedback on the visualiser the easiest place to contact me is on twitter.
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.
Bill James, the baseball analyst whose data driven approach shaped modern baseball, once said about analytics
If you have a metric that never matches up with the eye test, it’s probably wrong. And if it never surprises you, it’s probably useless. But if four out of five times it tells you what you know, and one out of five it surprises you, you might have something.
Despite being the default sort option for the league, AFL Fantasy points leave me completely cold, and most of the basic counting statistics like disposals and metres gained aren’t more revealing than simply watching the game. Equity-based Player Ratings have always intrigued me because of that one time in five however. For 2026, friend of TWIF and in my opinion the greatest resource available to footy fans, Wheelo Ratings, has estimations of each player’s Rating Points gained from equity in both ball winning and ball using actions.
A Brief Explanation of Equity
In its simplest terms, equity measures each player’s impact on the game by attempting to extrapolate their actions on the ball to potential points on the board. Inspired by Expected Points Added in American Football, it looks at a given situation on the field and gives it a value based on the average next score, with opposition scoring being assigned negative values. Ball winning is measured by wrangling possession off the opposition, and ball use is measured by both progressing the movement towards goal while retaining possession.
How the exact numbers are arrived at defies simple explanation, and while a full breakdown can be found in the AFL’s official Player Ratings document, it suffices to say that winning possession and clean use is rewarded more heavily (as well as losing possession or poor disposal punished more severely) at the extreme ends of the ground where scoring is more likely to occur.
For an example of what this looks like across a game, we can refer to Wheelo Ratings’ breakdown of Christian Petracca’s Opening Round performance for Gold Coast, which incidentally was his highest rated game on record.
The vast majority of actions only have an incremental contribution to his running total, most less than one full point of equity per action. His three goals however contributed more to his overall score than all of his ball winning actions combined, because they turned good field position into tangible points on the board.
With that in mind we can begin to explore who’s moving the the needle the most for their teams.
The Winners
Analysing the best ball winners follows a strong, largely predictable trendline.
In the top left we find the low volume but high impact key position players, with the standouts being a handful of exceptional aerial-contest winning forwards. Ben King’s propensity to stay firmly within one kick of the goals impacted his ability to get his hands on the ball (6.1 of his 7.5 possessions per game for 2025 were in the attacking 50), but he made his limited opportunities to influence the game count during the Suns’ first ever top-8 season.
As we look across to the high-volume possession winners the level of impact predictably begins to wane. To be able to get hands on the Sherrin upwards of two dozen times every game, a player has to chase and overlap through the inter-arc sections of the ground where equity values transitioning the footy towards dangerous areas more than just holding onto it. While there are a couple of exceptional players like Fremantle’s Caleb Serong and GWS’ Tom Green who are able to find the ball at a staggeringly high rate both in dispute and from a teammate, the majority of players far to the right on this chart are the outside runners. Players whose key talents are their acceleration and ability to read the play two seconds ahead, so that they can receive the footy in time and space after their teammates have secured it.
In the middle of the pack we see that scarce group of rucks who show what the position can give at its best. A true hybrid position that provides the aerial duel winning ability of a key position tall, and aerobic capacity and constance presence of on-ball players. Due to the scarcity of athletes who can provide both that football talent while meeting the height requirement, a lot of the names pulling away from the trendline are the same ones you’d expect to see any time this decade; Darcy Cameron leaning more towards the key position marking side, Brodie Grundy playing more like a tall on-baller, and Max Gawn out on his own on his way to an eighth All-Australian Jacket. It’s all well and good to win the footy however, but arguably much more important is how it’s used.
The Users
The spread of volume and impact per action is much wider when it comes time to put hand or boot to ball.
Per Bill James’ earlier piece of wisdom, you can still easily find the four things you already know to be true: Nick Watson’s ability to tear the game open on less than a dozen disposals is strongly reminiscent of Cyril Rioli at his peak, Marcus Bontempelli is one of the most complete players in the league, Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera is overdue a reclassification to midfielder, and even the best ball winning rucks aren’t or shouldn’t be trusted to do much more than a lateral handball.
The real intrigue of course is in the fifth thing that surprises you.
Coming into 2026 Harry Sheezel is in a very similar position to his contemporaries Wanganeen-Milera and Daicos. A high draft pick who first found his way into the senior side on the half-back flank for his kicking and overlap running ability, shifted now not only into the engine room but being trusted with the bulk of responsibility for his team’s ball movement. All three players led their clubs for handballs received and disposals last year, but where the latter two were also club leaders in ball use equity Sheezel was only fourth off the bottom at North Melbourne, narrowly beating an overall negative score.
Where equity measures can get tricky is trying to disentangle exactly how to distribute responsibility for action and outcome. Sheezel is obviously responsible for his own decision making and skills execution, but equity measures put the full weight of the difference on the disposing player except in the case of marks on the lead where it’s split between teammates. North Melbourne ranked 14th for marks in 2025 and 17th for marks on a lead; when they have the ball they’re not working to create space and keep clean possession like Brisbane, or surging and overlapping like GWS. This is a major contributor to why less than half of Sheezel’s 352 metres gained per game are retained by a teammate.
He’s far from the only player in a similar situation – Bailey Smith will need to be more damaging with the possession fed to him if Geelong are going to keep him as the primary first receiver in transition – but he does stand out as having the lowest ball use equity from anyone with at least 25 disposals per game in 2025. While his skills, and hopefully level of talent around him, will continue to develop as North Melbourne climb their way off the bottom of the ladder, something will have to drastically change for him to get to the levels shown by Wanganeen-Milera and Daicos, who’ve both been floated as the possible best player in the competition.
What it Means for Teams
Looking at 2025’s numbers gives a strong profile for each team in attack
…and defence
The Bulldogs tore teams, particularly in the bottom half, apart with their possession and movement but were about average running the other way; Carlton were a top four team around the inside layer of stoppages, but couldn’t attack efficiently or put up resistance post-clearance; Brisbane never profiled as more than an above average team until they had to turn it on for September; and West Coast were simply bad at everything.
Overall, however, most of the efficacy of the metric is found in identifying those outlying players for their team or the opposition. If you know it’ll be hard to get around the brick wall Max Gawn builds in defensive midfield, but that he’s liable to give it right back if he tries to kick it, you can spend the week ahead of playing Melbourne focused on your rest defence.
There are obvious limitations to equity and what it captures – it’s totally blind to off-ball movement and actions outside of the immediate moment – but it’s extremely good at doing what it’s trying to do, and it’s always helpful to have another tool in the toolbox.
We’re 5 games into the season so there isn’t a huge amount we can draw on in terms of trends and patterns. As a result I’m zooming in a bit more than usual for the week.
Christian Petracca and Clayton Oliver departed Melbourne in very different ways. Petracca came at a premium for the Suns. They ultimately handed over three first round picks and took on the entirety of his sizable salary.
The Giants got Clayton Oliver marked down for clearance. Despite being one of only two players to win the AFLCA MVP award multiple times (Gary Ablett the other), Melbourne got just a future third round pick as well as the privilege of paying him a sizeable amount to play against them.
The on-field context for the two in their debut games for their new clubs was also very different. Petracca entered a team which, while missing the reigning Brownlow medalist Matt Rowell, was still absolutely stacked with powerful and talented midfielders.
Oliver on the other hand found himself no longer a nice bonus or a speculative trade, but a vital replacement. Tom Green was out for the season with an ACL, while Toby Bedford and Josh Kelly were also set to miss time. Brent Daniels, who potentially would have taken a bigger midfield share given those outs was also missing.
Oliver had the equal highest centre bounce attendances for the Giants, while Petracca continued a trend that had started at Melbourne of being used increasingly as a forward who rotates through the midfield, rather than the reverse.
Using some new stats surfaced on WheeloRatings we can dig a bit deeper. Andrew Whelan has recreated the player rating point methodology to be able to separate the value a player creates through winning the ball and using the ball, as well as in pre-clearance and post-clearance situations.
The main criticism of Petracca has been that while he is excellent at winning the ball, and can have moments of brilliance, he doesn’t always make the best use of it. For every bullet to a forward’s advantage there’s a handful of high forward 50 entries that are easy to counter. For every dribbler from the Perth pocket there’s more than a handful of very gettable set shots that fade wide.
On the goal kicking front Petracca’s game was his 4th most accurate from 2021 onwards (when we have the data to calculate expected score). He kicked 3 goals from 3 shots, against an expected score of 9.8 – scoring 2.7 points above what the average player would expect to. From 2021 through 2025 he was averaging 0.41 points per shot below the league standard.
He also generated 72% of his equity from using the ball (as opposed to winning the ball) with only Round 9 2024 against Carlton being higher (84%). This comes back down a little if we exclude his goal kicking but still is the 6th highest of the 111 games we have.
To put it another way, Petracca generated a total of 24.4 equity points through his ball use. His next highest game is 18.5. He has more games where he generated negative equity from ball use (19) than where he generated 10 or more points from it (18). It’s opening round, it’s a one game sample size, but if this is the new Christian Petracca three first round picks may have been unders for him.
Who else has gone up a level joining a new club?
We may be getting slightly ahead of ourselves here. After all, Petracca won’t be fronting up against easy beats like last year’s grand finalists every week. If he continues at this kind of pace though he’d be well in the conversation for end of year awards. What kind of company would he be in?
Winning individual honours in your first year at a new club is a relatively rare occurrence.
Only four Brownlow winners have done it. Ian Stewart won his third medal the year he moved to Richmond from St Kilda in 1971. Greg Williams won the first of his two Brownlows in 1986 having moved to Sydney from Geelong. Brian Wilson won was victorious in 1982 with Melbourne having left St Kilda. Finally, Patrick Dangerfield’s first year with the Cats saw him win the 2016 Brownlow.
The AFL Coaches Association Most Valuable Player Award has only been awarded since 2003. Two players have won it the year they moved to a new club – both with Geelong. Bailey Smith last year and Patrick Dangerfield in 2016.
The AFL Players Association Most Valuable Player Award was first awarded in 1982. Just once has a new arrival won it and yes, once again, it is that man from Mogg’s Creek.
Dangerfield’s 2016 debut with the Cats is one of only four seasons that has captured the Brownlow, Coaches Association award, and Players Association award. The other three being Lachie Neale in 2020 (a year after he transferred to the Lions), Martin in 2017 (which also saw him claim the Norm Smith medal), and Ablett in 2009.
If we lower the bar just a notch we can look at players that achieved their career best season after swapping to a new club. I’m using average rating points across the season as the basis of this and excluded players who debuted prior to 2012 (2012 being the earliest rating point data I have, so the earliest I can be certain it actually was a personal best). I’ve also only considered averages from seasons where a player has played at least 10 games.
Last year saw James Peatling, John Noble, Jaxon Prior, Matthew Kennedy, Francis Evans, and Bailey Smith all set new PBs for average player rating at a new club. Matthew Kennedy was the most experienced to do so, doing it in his 10th season playing.
While he’s certainly not old, relatively few players lift the bar again as far into a career as Petracca. This is his 11th season playing (12th in the AFL system if including his first year missed due to an ACL injury). There have only been 8 instances (again in our sample size of careers starting from 2012 and onwards) where a player has set a new season average PB in their 11th season or later – Lachie Neale in 2024, the Bont in 2024 and 2025, Jack Crisp 2022, Aidan Corr 2023, Nick Vlastuin 2023, Patrick Crippps 2024, and Bailey Dale 2025. Christian’s level of professionalism puts him in good stead, but the odds are still against him. Given Melbourne hold the Suns first round pick this year, I’m hoping that whatever success he has isn’t accompanied by team success (at least not this year).
As a bloke who has spent most of his life being pretty unfit and frankly incapable of running out a full match of whatever sport I play, I was very interested in how clubs used the extra spot on the bench this last weekend. To work that out I looked at the players with time on ground below 61%, excluding those who were injured. There were a few different archetypes that teams went with in terms of how they used the final spot(s) on their bench, to varying levels of success.
The main grouping was midfielders who played a reduced game time, with Collingwood (Pendlebury), Sydney (Sheldrick), Gold Coast (Davies), Geelong (Clark), the Western Bulldogs (Davidson), St Kilda (Macrae), and GWS (Rowston) all using the spot through the back end of their mid/wing rotations.
Despite playing only 55% of game time Pendlebury was a major factor in the Pies win over St Kilda, particularly forward of the ball with 10 score involvements and 5 goal assists (no one else had more than 1 in the game). Most teams don’t have a players with the talent and football IQ of Pendlebury sitting there ready to play in a reduced minutes role, but one wonders if there are more players who could benefit from a less is more approach – either to manage injury risk and load across the season, or because they might be of greater benefit later in quarters as defensive structures start to break down. Will we see Dangerfield in this type of role, with a regular souvlaki on the bench? Much to consider.
Out of the other approaches, Carlton (Reidy) and Brisbane (Zakostelsky) adopted the tall boy method, using the final spot on an extra ruck and keeping the time on ground for the main ruck down as well.
Sadly for the prospects of low gametime big plodders like myself, Carlton didn’t get much out of their second ruck, with Reidy the lowest ranked player in the low TOG% crew. He was ok at the ruck contests, winning 17 out of 32, but only 2 of those 17 went to his teammate’s advantage. Given that Hudson O’Keefe has replaced Reidy this week in Carlton’s squad, they may want more versatility from the second ruck that they are using this week. It will be interesting to see if Brisbane persists with the second ruck option, as Zakostelsky at least managed to hit the scoreboard with an early goal. However, with the Dogs running over the top of Brisbane, the Lions may be wishing they had someone who could have contributed more run to the match post-clearance.
The Swans (Papley), and Hawthorn (Maginness) also had a low % spot in their forward rotations. For the Hawks, Finn Maginness only played 56% TOG, which seems to be something of a continuation with how Hawthorn has used the sub in previous years; Maginness was the starting substitute 10 times, including 3 of the last 5 matches he played last season. The result was relatively ineffective – Maginness only managed to have 8 disposals, 6 pressure acts and a single tackle for the match.
Another notable usage of the low time on ground player was the way that Sydney brought in an underdone star in Papley, who only played 57% of game time. While he didn’t have a big game overall, he had 5 score involvements for the match and produced a much needed spark when injected into the game late in the first quarter.
As we move through the season we might see more of this approach blending with the way Pendlebury was used for Collingwood, and which we may see happening more throughout the season as the inevitable cycle of injuries and return from injuries starts to occur. I will be interested to see if there become players who persist as short (time on ground) kings, and whether some positions end up looking like they are not as viable (like the second ruck only type might be).
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.
Last year we had the idea to bring together This Week in Football to collate a lot of disparate analysis. It was fun to put together – highs, lows and bits in-between.
But all good things have to come to an end. We (Sean Lawson and Cody Atkinson) are stepping away from the editorial side of the site/newsletter, and handing it off to a group who will make themselves familiar to you throughout the year. We will pop in from time to time as the season goes, but it’s time for fresh blood to pump some life into this place.
We can’t wait to see what the team does across the year.
Before the Bounce
The pre-season has culminated, the rules are being interpreted, injury lists are growing (with varying degrees of specificity and truthfulness), and if you’re thirsty for men’s football we’ve got good news for you because it’s back earlier than ever.
Provided you’re not wanting to see one of the eight teams who start their year with a bye that is.
There’s also the outside chance of a tropical storm disrupting the Queensland-based games (again).
These are excerpts from the season previews I publish on One Percenters. Writing these is my favourite project each year. I try to go beyond just an expected win-loss range and look at what each club is actually trying to do with the year and how.
For the first time I’ve also compiled the full previews into an e-book. You can download it here for whatever price you deem fair, in either epub or pdf format.
Each slide below also contains a link to the full preview on my site.
[Editorial note from Emlyn: For length, I’ve sliced up the game style summaries to what I thought were the most salient points. Any shortcomings are almost certainly a case of poor editing on my part rather than Mateo’s analysis. I can’t encourage you enough to click on through to the full previews.]
Football for premiership points in the first week of March, how did we get here?
Last week it was reported on multiple media outlets that the AFL was facing a “major scheduling headache” ahead of the 2027 fixture, thanks to the Sesquicentenary (that’s a fancy word that means 150 year anniversary) Test Match against England.
Naturally this test match between two of sport’s oldest and fiercest rivals is going to be scheduled at the MCG – much like the Centenary Test was back in 1977 – as the MCG is seen as one of the two major homes of cricket, and the weather in Lords is far from reliable in early March.
But the issue is that the second weekend of March is now seen as the AFL’s window. A window that spans from the first week of March to the last week of September (or on a rare year, the first week of October). So how did this happen? And why do we feel increasingly unprepared for the football season to begin with each passing year?
The last time that Test Cricket hosted a Centenary Test between its two founding nations was in 1977. A simpler time for Australian sport, but notably the year that Australian Rules football began its invasion into summer sports territory.
In 1977 the Centenary Test began on the 12th of March – 99 years and 362 Days from the starting date of the first ever test match – and wrapped up on the 17th of March. At the time, there were still a little over two weeks between the 17th of March and the first game of VFL footy to be played at the MCG between Melbourne and South Melbourne in front of just 22,049 fans. Plenty of safe room between the summer of cricket and the football season.
But also in 1977 the AFL introduced the Night Series, what would eventually become the pre-season competition, starting a few weeks before the real season and giving clubs a chance at practice matches and fans a nice warm up to sink their teeth into.
In 1985 football crept back with the introduction of Friday Night Football, but was still traditionally beginning in the last weekend of March or first weekend of April. But now that the VFL was played across three days, it was clear that the Football Commission was becoming more flexible with their scheduling.
This became even more clear the following year when it was announced that West Coast and Brisbane would be joining the competition in 1987, closely followed by the Adelaide Crows joining the newly renamed “Australian Football League” in 1991.
This coincided with many clubs abandoning their suburban home grounds in favour of the MCG and later the purpose built Docklands Stadium, starting with Essendon in 1991 until eventually all Victorian clubs bar Geelong would play their home games at one of the two major stadiums. With anywhere between two to four games played at the MCG on any given weekend, this makes it more difficult to relocate matches if the stadium is unavailable.
While the Pre-Season Competition would continue in some format – Wizard, NAB, Ansett – from 1977 to 2013, it was never seen as the main event, and was eventually abandoned altogether due to neither fans nor teams taking it particularly seriously.
In 2016, thanks to what some might refer to as a knee jerk reaction, the AFL introduced a pre-finals bye. This one week without football in late August/Early September was the first sign we saw of the AFL season moving towards the Summer without the influence of an Olympic or Commonwealth Games.
In 2023, the AFL introduced Gather Round; a football festival to be held in South Australia with all eighteen teams playing on one weekend in the one state. To avoid fixture imbalance, this round was included as an additional neutral round, pushing the season one week earlier.
With the introduction of Gather Round, the AFL was now firmly cemented as starting its season in “Early March,” but they weren’t done yet. That same year, the NRL announced that in 2024 they would be playing the first two games of their season in Vegas, leaving a one weekend opening where League would not be played in New South Wales or Queensland – now just one week before the AFL happened to schedule its first round.
So now here we are in 2026 – much like we found ourselves in 2024 and 2025 – with five (previously four) games of football in the first weekend in March. This time for the first time with the last of those games to be played at the MCG. A stadium named and known world wide for a totally different sport to the one that now dominates it locally.
So we do find ourselves in a conundrum of sorts, but one of the AFL’s – and the MCG’s – own making. Were the Centenary Test held this year and starting on the second Friday in March the AFL would have to reschedule a minimum of four games. Likely another two if the centre square wasn’t up to scratch by round two.
It is of course very likely that the MCG would be back in perfect condition by the last weekend of March, just in time for the once traditional start date of the V/AFL season.
The previous earliest day was March 7 in 2024 and 2025, when the Swans played Melbourne and Hawthorn, respectively. The old record would have been March 6, had Cyclone Alfred not forced last year’s match between the Brisbane Lions and Geelong to be postponed to Round 23.Provided there are no unforeseen interruptions for the Swans/Blues and Gold Coast/Geelong games over the next two days (note: I wrote this before I saw reports of another topical cyclone heading towards Brisbane and the Gold Coast), we can now say that 228 different days of the year – ranging from March 5 to October 24 – have seen at least one game of football over the years. April 25 has seen more games of football than any other day on the calendar (141, which will jump to 145 after the four Round 7 games next month).
We can see from the figure above that May through to August have hosted the majority of V/AFL matches over the life of the league. The season started in late April or early May from 1896 through to the 1950s. But clearly not satisfied with this four-month window, the start of the season started creeping earlier and earlier in the year shortly after that.
The first taste of March football occurred in 1979, when the VFL played the Round 3 game between Carlton and Essendon on March 31, a week before the rest of the season started. Rohan Connolly has previously reported that there was no real reason as to why the VFL – in their (in)finite wisdom – decided to go ahead with this.
But the people who run the game have never needed anything resembling common sense or logic to justify their actions (see executive general manager of football performance Greg Swann’s comments on AFL360 about the consequences of the new ruck rule for an example of this). So, we push on.
All but two seasons since the strange decision of 1979 have started in March, once again getting progressively earlier into the season, to the point where competitive games now occur in the first week of March.
Games in March accounted for 4-5% of all games each decade between 1990 and 2019. That figure has essentially doubled from 2020 onwards, sitting a shade under 10% for the current decade (excluding 2026 matches). The last five years have seen 18, 19, 20, 28, and 27 matches played in the third month of the year. There are another 28 slated for March this year (cyclones permitting).
There has been a growing chorus of voices over the past decade – fans, players, coaches, and the media – protesting that the season is too long.
And it’s hard to disagree with that sentiment when you think back to 2025, where Opening Round, Gather Round, staggered byes, and a divergence in competitiveness between the top and bottom teams all combined to give us (what felt like) a never-ending season.
I can’t see 2026 being any better, given we had the State of Origin game last month and have the wildcard matches (which simultaneously are and aren’t finals, depending on how the boys and girls at AFL HQ are feeling).
Don’t get me wrong – I love footy and everything that comes with it. But we all need a little break from time to time. And at the rate things are going, perhaps we’ll be playing for premiership points in February before I shuffle off this earth.
For the start of the season I’ve prepared some charts on how each club’s list has been assembled. For the main split I’ve simply gone with whether a player was on an AFL list prior to arriving at their current club.
There’s a surprising number of ways players come into the AFL system, and I’ve compiled this across three different sources trying to match as best I can. It’s possible a couple of errors have slipped through, if you spot one let me know about it.
The faded bars indicate where a player had not yet debuted for the club. The years labelled indicate the player’s first season on the list. So someone drafted at the end of 2024 would show as 2025, as would someone who joined in the 2025 mid-season draft.
A couple of things jump out to me:
GWS and Carlton sit at polar opposites. GWS has just five headhunted players compared to Carlton’s 19.
Richmond only have 6, but that makes more sense for where they’re at in the cycle. They’ve clearly set out to get a critical mass of young talent to develop together.
Collingwood’s homegrown recruits from 2023 onwards have just 58 games between them. The next lowest are Port Adelaide (75) and Fremantle (78).
West Coast are way in front with 353 games already from those three draft classes (and another 7 new players coming in this year, as well as 5 more arrivals previously on a list elsewhere). St Kilda, North, and Brisbane all break 250.
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.
After a long and grueling season the final men’s AFL game for 2025 is at our doorstep.
While there’s still a lot of great AFLW games left this year, a granny is special regardless of the level.
The match-up is a mouth watering one. In one corner stands the reigning premiers, the other the best team across the course of the year.
Just four quarters to sort out who will be crowned the champions of the year. Just four quarters of the most important footy of the year left to enjoy.
So make sure you are around the people you like watching the game with, in the place you like doing it the most (except if that place is the MCG if you don’t have tickets). Let’s hope we have a classic like 2018 or 2023 on our hands.
This week in football we have:
This will likely be the second last edition of TWIF this year. Closer to the end of the year there will likely be a TWIF Year In Review edition compiling the best of 2025.
Thank you sincerely to all those who subscribed, read, share and most importantly wrote for TWIF.
Grand final preview
Images – James Ives. Words – Cody Atkinson and Sean Lawson
This preview will contain excerpts of items Cody and Sean have written about
Similarities present themselves between the two sides. Both have a kick preference, and work best in the kick-mark game. Both press high for intercepts, and like to try to dominate territory to instead of maximizing efficiency.
In the qualifying final, the Cats went to a lot of effort to not only stop the Lions going through the middle, but to avoid the corridor themselves. When a side uses the guts of the ground it can also open you up for a quick counter attack the other way.
In every game of modern footy the turnover game is critical. About two thirds of scores come via turnovers. And no team is better at playing that game than the Cats.
The Lions need to get their clearance game working to get an edge.
Across the course of the year getting first possession — and the territory from it — has been key to how the Lions have succeeded. The Lions sit second throughout the season for clearance differential behind only the Western Bulldogs. Almost all of this advantage comes around the ground, with the Lions deep midfield group benefited by being able to deploy additional numbers around the ball.
In addition, getting reward from clearances is critical to their success.
Zac Bailey leads the league in scoring out of forward stoppages, but is far from the only contributor. Brisbane runs deep up forward, with a wide variety of first receivers and deeper targets.
Both sides have players that step up in the big moments.
For the Lions their captain stands tallest of all, anchoring the side to (usual) victory. There are quite a lot of names prominent in the front half of the ground alongside the attacking Zorko. If the Lions are to win, one of these six will have a large part in the result.
Mark Blicavs still doesn’t get the credit he deserves much of the time. The Cats are a much more even team against both good and bad sides. Noteworthy in this list is the presence of Tom Stewart who will miss the Grand Final with injury.
Now all that’s done, bring on the big game!
A Brief History of 129 years of the Cats and Lions
Given the upcoming Grand Final this week it’s worth taking a look at the cumulative results of our two grand finalists over the last 129 years of A/VFL competition. Instead of breaking down every match, this is a look at the result of ever game.
Think of it as a score worm like you’d see on the AFL Match Centre, but one that uses the endpoint of one match as the starting point for the next.
The Lions have been represented as a continuation from Fitzroy to the Brisbane Lions for the purpose of the main chart, but there’s a supplementary Brisbane Bears v Cats chart as well in the carousel below.
The history of the match-up has been broken into four eras with a very brief summary of each. To see each you can scroll through the interactive graphic to follow the history, or you can access at a separate standalone page here.
How the Grand Final lists were built
Sean Lawson
Brisbane and Geelong have been perennial contenders in recent years, but there’s a strong contrast in how the two grand finalists have built their lists.
There are broadly three ways clubs can acquire players.
The national draft is the primary conduit, where the most well regarded players must be selected in an orderly competitive process in their 18th year or later (overlooked players from previous drafts can be selected as well as some other caveats).
The second method is recruitment from other clubs. These are trades and free agency moves where there are conditions and reciprocal agreements required for a player to move are met. This is, again, a competitive process among clubs, who generally don’t like losing many of the players who request moves.
The third method is the various “freebies” pathways. These are for players who were basically available without much external cost having already been discarded or passed over. This includes the rookie draft, delisted free agency, international players and players “not from a football background”. These players could have been taken by anyone, with the challenge for clubs usually just identifying who is worth taking.
List formation is always a combination of recruiting pathways, but the Cats and Lions have done it very differently.
Geelong
If we can answer why Geelong have stayed in contention for two decades in a phrase, it is talent identification.
Geelong only have four native high draft picks in their grand final team, and only Jhye Clark was taken in the top ten.
They’ve also got a high quality trio of players pinched from other clubs in Patrick Dangerfield, Jeremy Cameron and Bailey Smith. All were arguably recruited partly for lifestyle reasons as well as due to the club’s sterling reputation. Rhys Stanley and Jack Bowes also came via trades – with the Bowes one particularly controversial as a generous Gold Coast salary cap dump.
But a few stars don’t make a team, and much of the Cats list, and much of their success, is filled out by players taken from obscure places. They have ten players who anyone could have recruited – six from rookie drafts, two delisted free agents in Stengle and Martin, and the two Irish imports.
Throw in relatively late picks like Miers and Humphries and we can say that nearly two thirds of this Cats team were recruited from savvy recruitment and talent identification that must have list managers across the league looking on with envy.
Brisbane
Before their current period of contention, the Lions languished at the foot of the ladder for most of the 2010s. During that time they stocked up on high draft picks.
The bulk of their team was built from the national draft, including six high draft picks. Rayner and McCluggage in particular are the sort of blue chip selections that paid off handsomely, essential to any good list rebuild.
They Lions have also been lucky enough to have three premium level father-sons, and several later selections came out of their academy in Andrews, Gallop and Marshall.
The balance of the Lions team has been made up of traded players, including Neale, Cameron and Dunkley who cost first round picks in their own right.
Only two Lions players came from “freebie” pathways, with both Reville and McInerney coming via the rookie draft. Reville isn’t strictly a “freebie” – he’s an academy pick who was prelisted by the Lions, but he was still overlooked at the National Draft.
The Lions have tapped many years of premium draft picks, and converted those selections into a formidable team.
Battle of the local talent
This year’s match-up features a number of hometown heroes on both sides, but also players who have crossed the borders too play for the other team.
Nine Queenslanders feature for the Lions, ranging from heavy hitters like Will Ashcroft, Dayne Zorko Harris Andrews to the fringe pair of Ty Gallop and Bruce Reville. Geelong are also fielding Jack Bowes, a Queenslander who began his career at the Suns.
On the flipside, Geelong have managed to secure a few quality local talents through the open draft, principally Jhye Clark and Gryan Miers, as well as rookie selections Tom Atkins and Jack Henry.
There’s surprisingly only one player lured “home” from another club, but Patrick Dangerfield is such a mammoth presence he is emblematic of the “go home” set by himself. Jeremy Cameron is a country boy too, but being from far flung Dartmoor, it’s a stretch to count him as a local.
Tackling the Brownlow
Joe Cordy
Matt Rowell’s Brownlow Medal win came out of nowhere, but with the power of hindsight it was also wholly in line with how the award has been trending.
The Suns’ defensively-minded inside midfielder doesn’t jump off the page in any of the typical metrics people use to predict how the votes are going to fall.
Rowell doesn’t regularly rack up massive disposal counts and he doesn’t make immediate obvious impact by foot with the disposal he does win. Even his highlights packages are pretty sparse for his standing in the game. These things are the domain of the pre-count favourite Nick Daicos, and his teammate Noah Anderson who was widely tipped to be the only Suns player with an outside chance of topping the vote tally.
What Matt Rowell does have is something that isn’t considered much by punters, or even the predictive models that have emerged in the last few years: he is constantly, visually, in front of the umpires.
With 61 free kicks paid against him and 53 paid to him, good for 1st and =4th across the league, Rowell was the only player to be directly involved in over 100 free kicks across the season with a final total of 114.
Australian Football is a physically exhausting sport to adjudicate, with field umpires running approximately 14km per game and boundary umpires 16km. Everybody knows this, but few people take into account the mental exhaustion.
The PGMOL – who are responsible for referees across English professional football – estimate their referees will make 245 decisions per game. In the NRL the estimate has been put around 400 decisions per game, and the NBA quote a range of 500-550.
In 2021 the-then umpires boss Hayden Kennedy estimated that in the 30 seconds of play around a stoppage, where possible infractions are at their densest, an umpire might have to make 10 to 20 decisions.
With a league average of 97.7 stoppages per game, that would put the decision count in a range of 977 to 1,954 decisions just around stoppages before even considering the rest of the game. Even with this mental load split between four field umpires, it’s a total that dwarfs most of their colleagues in other sports.
It makes total sense that when put in the position of having to decide who they thought the best three players were immediately following that gauntlet, while also being put in a Rawlsian veil of ignorance about the statistics of the game just played, the umpires continuously fall back on two main factors:
who did I see a lot of, and
who do I usually give votes to.
In the AFL era this burden has massively increased, even as the system stayed untouched since the early 1980s. Six votes split amongst three players for each game, decided on by the group of umpires on the day.
In 2025 there are more games, teams, players and therefore votes to be spread around the league than at any point in the AFL era. Despite that, the spread of distinct vote winners in a given season has trended consistently downwards over the last 35 years.
2025 had the narrowest field since 1990, with just 181 players receiving at least one vote. The previous record of 196 was set in 2024.
If you took a poll of every fan’s opinion of who the best player in the league was at the end of each season since 2020, I’d expect the most popular answers would be overwhelmingly Marcus Bontempelli and more recently Nick Daicos. Bontempelli’s window might well be closed, and despite having won an individual award every year of his career so far, Daicos was visibly frustrated with the reality of a third consecutive second place finish.
This isn’t because the umpires think either of these players are terrible despite the consensus of the wider footy community, Daicos’ 38 votes in 2024 would have won almost any other year in the award’s history. They’re just not the kind of players whose profile puts them at the front of the umpires’ mind week after week.
There’s been a lot of discussion in light of this and other controversial calls like Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera’s BoG snub to take the votes off the umpires, which I think is completely wrongheaded. Awards are only worth the importance the footy community puts on them, but that importance is built up over decades of history.
What makes it special is that it’s been awarded for over a century, and has been largely unchanged across that time. Even though the voting system has changed (albeit not in the last 46 years) it has always been determined by the umpires; taking it completely off them would effectively end that history, and even an award with the same name would have no real basis for comparison to anything in the 100 years previous to it.
There’s absolutely room for more Player of the Year style awards as the AFLPA and AFLCA have shown, and I believe there’s even room for another American-style MVP voted on by members of the football community from the media, clubs, and elsewhere.
The answer for how to move forward with the Brownlow however isn’t to completely kill it and give something else its name, it just needs to evolve with the sport. Give umpires time to recover from and digest the game they just saw, give them access to statistics and footage, and then ask for their votes in the cool light of day. The Brownlow is the most prestigious award in Australian Football and likely always will be, so there’s no reason to artificially constrain the people voting on it.
The Brownlow Medal is one of my favourite puzzles. The arcane voting methods and the lopsided sample sizes create a data science challenge that I’ve been enamoured with for the last couple years, and the 2025 certainly threw up some curveballs.
There’s a lot of different ways you can work out who will win the Brownlow. Some rely on their eyes, some on their gut and some on the best data available.
My chosen method of modelling the Brownlow is as follows:
Train a XGBoost model on player based statistics. This includes Coaches Votes, SuperCoach, Fantasy, AFL Player Ratings, along with more basic stats like game margin, goals kicked, disposals etc. The model is a classification problem, using the training data from 2015 to 2024 to predict the likelihood of a player getting 3, 2 or 1 Brownlow Votes.
From these outputs, a simulation is used to select players for each vote category per game. Once a player has been picked for 3 votes, they are excluded from the sample. This process is then repeated for the 2 and 1 vote. The entire process is then repeated for every game in every season 10,000 times. This should give us a good sample size for predictions, as each simulation will be independent, but weighted towards the higher expected vote getters.
So how does the model compare to the actual results on the night?
Let’s look at the favourite Nick Daicos as a demonstrative example.
As you can see above Daicos polled exactly as predicted. His actual vote trajectory as the tally went on was well within the simulated range of votes. Across 10,000 simulations the model expected an average of 33 votes against a total of 32. In summary, the model was in the ball park of expectations for Daicos.
However, there was one player that smashed it out of the ballpark. Matt Rowell polled over expectation early and never looked back. The model predicted 25.8, but he polled 39 votes. That’s a whopping 13 votes above expectation.
The highest simulation that the model predicted was 37, outlined in black below. I reckon with another 10,000 or so simulations we could find one with 39 votes.
Two other Brownlow fancies fell within their simulated ranges, Geelong’s Bailey Smith and Adelaide’s Jordan Dawson couldn’t repeat the Rowell effort to overcome Daicos’s implied pre-poll lead.
The big loser of the pre-poll favourites was Rowell’s teammate Noah Anderson with predicted and actual votes of 29.5 and 25. Anderson got a slow start to the count and couldn’t quite make up the difference to crack the top 5.
Notable mention should go to Fremantle’s Andrew Brayshaw, who polled 26 votes from an expected 20.1.
So what are the lessons we can take out of the Brownlow, and trying to work out who will win in advance?
It’s an absolute crapshoot, and in my humble opinion, that’s what makes it great.
I’ve seen people lamenting online that Rowell is a worthy winner, but simultaneously annoyed that he polled 3 votes in outlier games. The thing is, he doesn’t go on to win the Brownlow unless games like that happen!
I’d rather the tradition be kept alive with the current voting format, rather than changing it at the whims of a noisy social media contingent. Or, if you’d prefer, you can go to Wheeloratings dot com and sort by average AFL Player Ratings if you want the “True” best and fairest, but where’s the whimsy in that?
Which umpire put their foot in it when it came to Brownlow voting?
In February this year the AFL attracted scrutiny after giving veteran field umpire Nick Foot permission to appear on a racing program for Sportsbet, the league’s gambling partner.
Foot was one of the four field umpires who officiated the 20204 decider between Brisbane and Sydney. In addition he has been named as the emergency umpire for this weekend’s clash between Brisbane and Geelong.
The AFL claimed they were happy with the arrangement as they felt the role had nothing to do with his umpiring duties.
“He has nothing to do with football, he is not working at or around (football) with Sportsbet. He is doing content on racing, and nothing to do with football. If it (his role) had anything to do with football in any capacity, it wouldn’t have been approved,” a league spokesperson told The Age at the time.
The matter reared its head again this week during the Brownlow Medal count, where multiple group chats that I belong to wondered whether umpire Foot had anything to do with some of the “interesting” voting decisions announced on the night.
But an exploratory analysis reveals that the votes awarded in matches officiated by Mr Foot were reasonably well aligned with the consensus of 20 different predictive models collated by X account QuantPunter. Sixteen matches saw the consensus’ #1 ranked player receive the three votes (indicated by the darker blue squares), with the best on ground in the remaining five matches going to a player ranked in the top three.
And while there was only one match where the votes awarded by the umpires matched the consensus of the predictions, for the most part the umpires in these games were reasonably consistent with the consensus in terms of the top three players – save for a six-week stretch in the middle of the season.
The performance of Foot and his fellow umpires appears to be more “accurate” than that of other umpires, such as Nick Brown.
The quartet of umpires involving Brown awarded the three votes to a player who was not ranked in the top three among the QuantPunter consensus data on three separate occasions, and there were many more misses with respect to the player receiving one vote.
There was even one match where none of the players who received Brownlow votes appeared in the top three among the various models (the Round 7 clash between Greater Western Sydney and the Western Bulldogs). Brown was also part of the umpiring crew that gave the three votes to Jack Viney ahead of Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera when the Saints came from nowhere to beat the Demons at Marvel Stadium in Round 20.
Select examples such as these make me wonder whether there has been a shift in recent years with how umpires determine which players have the greatest impact on a game – a line of conversation that I know has been happening in some circles – which suggests that even the most sophisticated modelling approaches will need more time and data to account for these changes.
But on the other hand, it could also be that the models are already highly accurate, and that there are some umpires who are more reliable at awarding votes than others. This inevitably leads to one of the other major conversations that has been happening this week – whether the umpires should have access to statistics when it comes time to hand out the votes.
Regardless of the underlying cause or reason, and no matter what happens in the future, there will always be arguments about who was robbed of votes and medals for years to come after football’s night of nights. But in this case, it seems that some criticisms might be more warranted than others.
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.
The 2025 AFL season stands on the cusp of conclusion with Geelong, Hawthorn, Brisbane and Collingwood on the precipice of another flag. In an extremely compelling season four well matched sides are set to excite and engage for just two more weeks before top level men’s football goes away for half a year (the Dub is still there however).
One might think that this week would filled be wall to wall coverage about the teams left and how they will win the flag. About the aging Collingwood and Geelong, the resurgent Hawks and the reigning premiers. There’s storylines all over the shop, and plenty of intriguing on field wrinkles to break down.
Unfortunately one would be wrong. Instead the obsession has been on moves for next season and beyond, all delivered from a cloak of official secrecy. Rumours and hearsay are reported with the factual seriousness of match reports. Zach Merrett may not have publicly said anything this week, but everyone else seemingly has.
There’s room to discuss multiple things at once – people can walk and chew gum. But when the attention of the footy media has so incessantly focused on the mouth closing in and out on that gum, we’ve sort of missed that the legs have carried us to the end of the journey.
Geelong came into the season as one of the stronger fancies for the flag, but a mixed run of form heading into the byes paired with some incredible runs of form from Collingwood and Adelaide, paired with a soft run home for Geelong saw them drop back in a lot of peoples’ estimations – right up until their dominant performance against Brisbane in their qualifying final, where they completely flipped the script on their past two meetings.
The Cats have proven to be one of the most dangerous sides this year with ball in hand, moving the ball quickly and by foot, using their elite runners and strong contested marks both in front of and behind the ball to cut teams apart on the turnover.
Geelong are ranked #1 for Marks Inside 50 and #2 for Intercept Marks and Contested Marks respectively, the only team ranked in the top three for all three categories. Once they obtain possession, their run and carry sees them as the hardest team in the game to stop with ball in hand. They are the most effective team in 2025 at scoring from turnover, as well as the most efficient at turning D50 chains into scores, which has resulted in the Cats having more shots on goal than any other side.
Their ability to create an extra behind the ball – something Brisbane prevented back in round 15 – be it Guthrie, Henry, Stewart or even O’Sullivan makes it extremely hard for teams to score, and the hard running of their half forwards who function as pseudo wings mean they almost always have someone over the top. Most of the time that someone is Shannon Neale or Oliver Dempsey. The numbers show that in order to beat the Cats you have to prevent their uncontested and intercept marking game, as well as scoring quickly from stoppages in the middle of the ground.
The last time these two sides met was all the way back on Easter Monday where the two sides played another classic, with Hawthorn winning both the marking game and centre stoppage matchups thanks to a career best performance from Lloyd Meek. A brutal concussion to Gryan Miers slowed Geelong’s run somewhat, and Hawthorn did everything they could to peg back the Cats early four-and-a-bit goal lead.
Where Geelong will likely look to win this game is through their Irish weapons, with Mullin and O’Connor doing vital shutdown jobs all year. It is likely one of the two will head to September Specialist Jai Newcombe, and the other will follow Dylan Moore or Nick Watson. Another crucial match-up is Brad Close heading to James Sicily – Ollie Henry has done this job in the past, but has slipped out of Geelong’s best 22 in favour of Jack Martin.
Keep an eye out for the big men in Geelong’s forward half, as first-time All Australian Josh Battle will likely match up on the Coleman Medal winner in Jeremy Cameron, meaning Shannon Neale will look to exploit Tom Barrass’ lack of mobility and get out the back for some crucial goals from turnover.
Hawthorn
Sean Lawson
Hawthorn come into this as at least a modest underdog in the face of a Geelong side who are statistically near the top of the league in most measures for the year.
Hawthorn’s most notable strengths this year have centred around their potent forward line mix, and some sturdy defenders behind the ball, but their ability to deploy both of those things is downstream of an ability to win enough territory to do so.
That means gaining ascendency through stoppages to avoid giving away too much terrritory in the first place, and it means somehow beating the Geelong high press when they do end up in defence.
Around the ball, Hawthorn’s coalface mix minus Will Day are hardly world-beaters but Jai Newcombe has had some eye-catching form so far in finals, bursting out of packs to set them up to score. The Hawks are near the top of the tree for post-clearance ground ball and handball receives, and feeding the likes of Josh Ward and Massimo D’Ambrosio running into space should prove crucial to Hawthorn’s chances.
Coming out of defence, Hawthorn will surely look to improve on their ability to transition past a high line, having experienced getting trapped in their defensive zone at times through the season, especially in their biggest losses.
There’s not necessarily an easy answer here – that’s why so many teams have drifted towards the “front half team”meta to begin with. Fully scoring from transition in these situations is one thing, but it’s difficult to do consistently and many opponents are content just to make it a territory battle – kick to a lower risk situation, play for a stoppage, work from there.
The Hawks have some forward-line marking power to compete with the Cats’ press in the air, and some elite users if they can find the space to make the right kicks through traffic. However in the end, the heat of a final a lot of the Hawthorn defensive escape plan will likely end up built on halving contests on those escape kicks and then either securing the upfield stoppage or, if possible, finding some ground ball speed and handball receives to launch off the pack before everything resets.
If Hawthorn are to win, the likely word on observers’ lips will be “speed”, both out of contests and coming off the Geelong setup behind the ball.
Collingwood v Brisbane
Collingwood
Cody Atkinson
In many senses Collingwood and Brisbane are polar opposites. Chaos and control, talls v smalls. It’s what makes the matchup so compelling, and often so close.
Since Craig McRae has been in charge at the Pies they have often been the gold standard. They’ve manipulated late game situations better than any other side, and finessed space like few other teams before. They flow into space super effectively – it can be quite hard to follow if you don’t know what you are watching for. They often throw their high forwards on the edge of contest and get them flowing into space, and protect behind the ball with a spare. They run in spaced lines, spreading the defence across the ground and creating space.
If you aren’t prepared, they can really tear you up.
For Collingwood this year it’s all about defence. Early in the year Collingwood flashed some attacking improvements before injuries and opposition adjustment tempered expectations. Jamie Elliott probably deserved an All Australian nod, but it’s a forward set up that works to maximise its talent instead of having it carried by a small group of stars.
Let’s talk about that defence for a second. They’ve been the best at defending across the year in both a per possession chain and inside 50 entry basis. It’s a “bend not break” approach, one that has slightly hurt their transition game as a result. The Pies like to push their running defenders high and hard, banking on a floating spare tall (think Darcy Cameron) can effectively protect space to slow down counter attacks and enable recovery. The return of Jeremy Howe further boosts this unit.
This defence will be particularly critical considering how ball focused their midfield unit can get at contest at times. Brisbane’s midfield is particularly well balanced between attack and defence, and often leaves little room for easy escapes. If the Pies don’t protect space at stoppage effectively it could lead to a long night for everyone in black and white.
Brisbane
Joe Cordy
Brisbane are the consummate professionals of this finals period. With at least one game to go, they’ve conceded the second fewest free kicks this season (17.7/gm) and controlled possession of the footy as well as any side in the competition.
Theirs is a game of keeping off and moving by foot. Their elite fitness and running capacity allows them to play the ground like an accordion, spreading wide to pull apart holes in the opponent’s defensive structure before squeezing back in as they lead up to the kicker.
This makes them unique to other kick-first teams such as Geelong and Adelaide, is their indirectness towards goal. Despite kicking nearly two in every three disposals, they’re well below the league average for metres gained from those.
A typical Brisbane chain of possession involves scanning the field, waiting for a teammate to lead into space, that teammate plucking the ball out of the air and repeating, all while using the full width of the ground.
This patience and execution has significantly lifted the floor on their performances, but combined with factors like figuring out how to play without star key forward Joe Daniher, has significantly lowered their ceiling. They are the only finals side this year to not record a 10-goal victory against any side, and their 54-point win against their local rivals was only the second margin above 45 they’ve recorded this season.
This comparative lack of firepower has hung over the Lions all year, and was doubtlessly the key motivator behind pursuing West Coast captain Oscar Allen for 2026 and beyond, but it’s been compensated for by exerting unparalleled control over their games. Part of that foundation has been effectively ruled out for the season however, with captain and hybrid inside ball winner/first receiver at stoppages Lachie Neale battling calf issues. Combined with the absence of their most veteran key forward in Hipwood, and the season may prove to have gone four quarters too long for the Lions on Saturday.
There’s still a path to back to back premierships and a third grand final in as many years for the Lions, but it will rely on playing outside of their comfort zone and on the dynamism of players like Cam Rayner than the structure they’ve leant on so far.
Oscar Allen is set to leave West Coast, Zach Merrett looks increasingly likely to find a new club, and there are now rumours around Jy Simpkin as well. Three current captains all leaving for greener pastures would be significant, but how does it stack up historically?
All in all, across VFL/AFL and AFLW there have been 50 instances where a player has departed a club as captain for a rival in the same league (including a few instances of mid-year transfers as captain).
V/AFL captain departures
The 1982/83 off-season was the most active with four captains jumping ship – Bruce Duperouze from St Kilda to Footscray, David Cloke from Richmond to Collingwood, and Kelvin Templeton and Peter Moore to Melbourne from Footscray and Collingwood respectively.
Two other occasions have seen three moves. In 2018/19 three captains left from Queensland to Melbourne. Dayne Beams returned from Brisbane to Collingwood, while Gold Coast co-captains Steven May and Tom Lynch both left, for Melbourne and Richmond respectively.
In 2019/20 the AFLW saw Carlton skipper Brianna Davey join arch-rivals Collingwood, Brisbane captain Leah Kaslar move to new league entrant Gold Coast, with Bulldogs captain Katie Brennan joining Richmond’s inaugural list.
The 1970s (9 captains moving) and 1980s (8) were the highpoint historically, however if all three touted moves happen this year it will already place the 2020s in the lead with seven moves already.
AFL and AFLW captain departures and their new homes
These have been some of the most famous player movements in history. The iconic Roy Cazaly moved from St Kilda to South Melbourne and Ron Barassi’s move to Carlton (and the closely connected sacking of Norm Smith as Melbourne coach) is arguably still the biggest news story in the games history.
In 1972-73 Geelong captain Doug Wade and John Rantall (South Melbourne) both moved to North Melbourne and were among six players to exercise an early form of free agency under the short-lived “10 year rule”. It was introduced as a precaution against restraint of trade claims, but rescinded prior to the next off-season.
Under previous transfer regimes, players didn’t even have to wait to the off-season to don a new guernsey. North’s inaugural VFL captain-coach Wels Eicke, Fitzroy’s Jack Casham, Footscray’s Stan Penberthy, Carlton’s Ansell Clarke, and Carlton’s Robert Walls are among captains to have left their clubs for a rival mid-season.
Captains leaving rarely do so on good terms and contract disputes are a common theme. As Collingwood Vice Captain, Len Thompson would join Captain Des Tuddenham in a player’s strike in 1970. After being stripped of leadership roles, Thompson would eventually become captain in 1978 and hoped to become Collingwood’s first 15-year player since Lou Richards. Instead, he was pushed out by coach Tom Hafey and joined South Melbourne. Two of the next three Collingwood skippers, Peter Moore and Mark Williams would also leave as captain, both acrimoniously.
North Melbourne’s Dick Taylor resigned during the 1934 season, disgusted with the team’s performance. He offered to stay on as a non-playing coach so long as he didn’t have to wear the jumper again, but North’s policy at the time was exclusively to use captain-coaches and so his resignation was accepted, returning to prior club Melbourne the following year. His replacement, Tom Fitzmaurice, would resign in similar circumstances the following year, having previously quit Essendon in the belief they tanked a game against VFA premiers Footscray in 1924.
There have been a few instances of players eventually returning to the club they captained, such as John Rantall returning to South Melbourne after winning a premiership with North Melbourne. The oddest of these has to be Tim Watson. Watson announced his retirement following the 1991 season. This didn’t stop West Coast from selecting him in the pre-season draft. The closest to playing a game for the Eagles Watson got was as boundary rider during their grand final win. He would be drafted again by Essendon in the following pre-season draft and lend his experience to the Baby Bombers premiership side.
The captaincy itself, much like the concept of one-club players, is heavily romanticised and possibly held in higher esteem by fans than those inside a club. While the captain may be an external figurehead, leadership is a joint effort.
However, captains have been selected by those within the club (and today generally by playing groups). Having a player in such a position either decide to leave or be forced out can hardly be a good thing. For want of a better word, the vibe stinks, even if it provides interesting list management opportunities (as I think is the case for most of the current touted moves).
Around the Grounds
Marnie Vinall on ABC looked at the true cost of injuries, including some interesting observations about the soft cap limitations on preventative medical spending being a false economy.
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.
Eight finalists have become six just like that. Every game now is an elimination battle as the premiership cup draws closer for each club.
This week James, Cody and Sean will look at what each team will be looking to do – and avoid – in their upcoming Semi Finals.
Brisbane v GC
Image – James Ives. Words – Sean Lawson and Cody Atkinson
Gold Coast Suns preview
Stepping into the Suns shoes is a bit hard. They’ve already achieved more than they ever have before, and they’ll be going up against a side they’ve already beaten this year.
The Suns really want to take away Brisbane’s kick-mark game by getting in their face. That means controlling ground ball and stoppage exits. Gold Coast are a dominant ground ball side and beat Brisbane handily when they were able to turn the game chaotic this year, but were beaten by the Lions’ controlled possession game at the Gabba earlier in the year.
If I’m Hardwick, I’m looking to go head-to-head around the ball. With Lachie Neale out, the Suns will expect to have the edge in gathering and feeding the ball out. The Lions have depth in the middle, but throwing an extra number at the contest could be spreading the Suns too thin in transition down back.
Even with a dominant midfield we probably can’t score 7 goals from centre bounce again like last time, but that would be the easiest way to win.
Otherwise, I’m hoping for raw speed, especially by hand, to work out of contests and get deep forward before Brisbane can fully get back. If the game turns into kick-to-kick, the Suns will be in trouble.
The Suns will hopefully feed it deep to Ben King on his island effectively, getting a few clean marks and otherwise letting Long, Humphries and co go to work in the space he creates.
Brisbane preview
If stepping into the Suns shoes is hard, the Lions are in an even tougher spot. The reigning premier from last year is missing their captain and one of their forward focal points. At some level the personnel is what it is – at this time of year it has to be next player up to get the job done.
The most important thing for the Lions is to effectively control how the Suns use the ball at clearance. If having Neale missing means that we will lose a few more hard balls, we need to be ready defensively to protect the exits. I might want to throw an extra number around the contest and following the ball to clog up the contest – sacrificing a high forward to protect space a little better.
The next most important thing is to get the game on our terms. That means taking the pace out of play, and preventing the surges through the ground from the Suns. Moving the ball carefully by foot will be critical, as will be establishing the contested marking game. Playing Fort and OMac together is a risk from a speed perspective, but it might just stretch the defence and open easier avenues to goal.
Working out how to replace Hipwood is at the front of mind as well. The Suns defence is solid, and are willing to back themselves in without a bunch of extra numbers down back. Making space with smalls deep is key, but also making targets up the ground will be critical.
Creating mismatches for Logan Morris and Charlie Cameron might be key as well – the Lions might try to force some switches and to deploy their unit in different ways to before.
Adelaide v Hawthorn
Image – James Ives. Words – Sean Lawson and Cody Atkinson
Adelaide preview
Last week wasn’t great, but it wasn’t terrible either. If I am the Crows it’s about staying the course about what worked this year.
That means I’m looking first to defence in all parts of the ground as the primary route to victory. A 10 goal to 8 grind sounds like a fine way to win a final and I’m setting up for a lot of stoppage contests. I’m also trying to find spares in defence and protect as much as I can from damaging attacks.
The Hawks get a lot of good ball up forward when given the chance – second in marks per inside 50 – and we really need to limit that given our own difficulties scoring. That means blanketing them in all phases of play, which luckily we’ve done well all season.
The Hawks are a middling deep transition team so in going forward, I’m confident in our strong defence of against transition against me. Two middling transition teams means contest and territory is going to matter a lot and we can lean on our usual kick-first possession profile. I’m probably content leaning on a lot of quick long kicking, with any sort of dirty ball enough to set up to go again.
The Hawks are going to want to move the ball by hand so we need to prevent forward handballs from contest and flowing through the middle of the ground. Jumping lanes is critical, as is holding space and not overcommitting to the player with the ball. If needed, make them use the ball one too many times rather than one too few.
With this contest focus, the quality of the entry inside 50 will likely suffer. The hope is that the weight of numbers will brute force enough decent kicks inside 50 to get to get the chances to score needed.
Hawthorn’s height in defence makes me think there’s a chance to beat them for pace at ground level with my non-key forwards, though it does make me think Thilthorpe and Walker have their work cut out halving contests.
If the Crows lose the territory battle it could be game over – so getting first possessions at stoppage will be critical.
Hawthorn preview
Last week looked great until it didn’t. If I’m the Hawks I’d be starting to get a bit worried about how streaky the play has been against good sides. Resilience is one thing, but consistency is key.
The message for the Hawks would be simple – split the territory battle and trust the forwards to execute. That’s why Lewis has come in – to space the forward line further. Finding chests inside 50 is the pathway to victory. Giving Gunston the room to operate will be crucial – if we can get the Crows to over-adjust the game could be over.
The Crows love to kick the ball, so making sure they can’t find targets is critical. They’ve also got a lot of mobile talls that can move up the ground. Making sure that we are protected deep at all times with a deep spare will be critical to stopping forward thrusts.
They might try to suck us into a number of repeat stoppages, so making sure we can execute blocks for Newcombe and co will be critical. Getting the stoppage set up right will be key.
The Hawks also need to effectively get the ball to at least halfway when rebounding from 50. The Crows kill teams by trapping them up the ground. Everything beyond halfway is a win – because that means their defence will be at breaking point.
Sitting wide might be key to exploiting their high press. Making sure the fat side wing stays wide could make the ground big, and make it easier to counter attack. Rewarding leads will also be critical to making this space.
Age and Experience in AFLW 2025
Emlyn Breese / CreditToDuBois.com
There’s been some commentary in the public about AFLW squad ages this season. Usually, the rule of thumb is that older teams tend to do better than younger sides, but is that stacking up so far this year?
There’s some difference between the age of a squad and the age of sides selected week-to-week can vary a lot so I wanted to have a dive into that.
Three of the four undefeated teams are amongst the youngest sides selected so far this year (Hawthorn – youngest, Sydney – 4th youngest, Melbourne – 5th youngest). Sitting just behind the undefeated sides is the 3-1 West Coast. They happen to be the 2nd youngest selected side this year.
The undefeated Roos are unsurprising as the oldest team so far this year, but the winless Richmond being the second oldest is potentially cause for concern.
The ideal for a future outlook is to be both young and have game experience. The only teams that are both below the median age and above the median experience this season are Melbourne and the Dogs.
On the chart above the teams above the diagonal line have more games of experience than you’d expect for a team at that age profile (based on league average).
For a bit more context, how does this stack up against previous seasons?
Note: Some pre-2024 data may not be 100% correct, but it should be directionally correct due to the use of median instead of mean.
As we’d expect, the experience of selected sides has gone up as the competition has advanced. But, we can see the same isn’t the case for age.
Another note: We’re looking at sides selected from rounds 1-4 compared to sides selected over a full season. Take the same side in Round 1 and play them through the season and the median age will have increased by three months and the median experience by 10+ games.
At the start of the competition the best players were typically either those with extensive footy experience through amateurs, or those with professional experience at the elite level of other sports. We’re now getting players come through who have had elite pathways through footy. I think that’s probably driving the median age staying low – we’re getting draftees who are pushing from selection from the moment they walk in the door.
The same data source I draw on for ages also has heights, so I thought it would be fun to take a look at the tallest teams selected.
Of the 11 tallest teams across a season, 4 of them are from this year, and Gold Coast from Season 7-10 also occupy 4 of those 11 slots including a monopoly on the top 3.
At the other end of things the shortest teams this year are St Kilda, Richmond, and Brisbane, each clocking in at 169 cm, putting them equal 21st shortest (alongside a further 17 teams from previous seasons).
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.
After what feels like near endless football, the men’s AFL finals are finally upon us. The game has successfully made it’s way to another finals series almost untouched.
With the exception of the introduction of a video boundary review system. In response to making 48 errors over 7,500 boundary decisions (or an error rate of 0.64%), the AFL has decided to unilaterally introduce the video review of boundary decisions in finals.
It’s unlikely to have a significant impact on how the finals will play out, and the review may not even be used in anger through the last month. However, there is something odd about introducing new rules for the finals without prior testing inside of the season to look for secondary impacts.
Or: why now?
This week (and for the rest of the finals) TWIF will look at each men’s final and preview what might turn each game. Our own James Ives has created “opposition analysis” style dashboards that provide a brief overview of how each side has played through the year and how they can be beaten.
This Week In Football we have:
Adelaide v Collingwood Preview
Words – Joe Cordy . Image – James Ives.
Since the beginning of the 16-team era in 1995, there have been 15 instances of teams playing each other in the last two weeks of the Home & Away Season and then immediately again in the first week of finals. Adelaide and Collingwood’s Qualifying Final will be the first of the 2020s however, and the first time either club finds itself in such a situation since 1995.
While a trip away to the minor premiers is a daunting task for anyone, Collingwood will be coming into it with the knowledge that they’ve already knocked off Adelaide once, and came excruciatingly close to completing the double in a game they won the Inside-50 count by 34. If they can recreate a similar volume of entries, it becomes a straightforward task of figuring out how to take advantage of them.
The most obvious answer is to incorporate the 211cm Mason Cox, who’s been brought into the side following the injury to Dan McStay, but it seems unlikely the 34 year old American is still up to the level. He’s only recorded 3 or more marks twice in the 2025 season, and only neither of his two in Collingwood’s round 10 victory against Adelaide came inside-50. A much more likely route to victory for Craig Macrae’s side is spreading the space at Adelaide Oval as much as possible to create uncontested marks inside 50, getting the ball into the hands of Elliott and Membrey who are both enjoying massively accurate seasons in front of goal.
For their opponents a much more difficult problem stands between them and a home preliminary final: how to execute their slingshot footy without Izak Rankine. A large part of what makes Adelaide so effective in games they lose the territory battle (currently sitting on a 6-3 record in 2025 when recording less inside-50s than their opponent) is their propensity to flood their D50, and then attack on the rebound with isolated tall forwards, elite kicks and sheer pace.
They’ll still have their pair of All Australians in Jordan Dawson and Riley Thilthorpe available in the early and finishing parts of these chains of possession, but Rankine created a connective tissue between midfield and forward areas that’s not easily replicated by others. In their first game following his suspension for using a homophobic slur, they were nearly caught out by perennial cellar dwellers North Melbourne. Even with two more weeks to recuperate and plan around Rankine’s absence, it may prove even more impactful against elite opposition.
Neither of the two sides are coming into the clash near full health or their best form. While the deciding factor could come from one or two moments of individual brilliance from the remaining stars on either side, it seems more likely it will be found in which of the two coaching groups better adapts their gameplan to compensate for the absence of key figures.
Geelong v Brisbane Preview
Words – Sean Lawson . Image – James Ives
Brisbane have already beaten Geelong twice this year, including a comprehensive defeat at Kardinia Park in June. In both games, Brisbane have been able to get their possession and marking game going, moreso than the Cats. These two teams take the highest number of marks per game in 2025, with the Cats also the best marking side inside 50.
The difference at Kardinia was a combination of Geelong’s well below par goalkicking and Brisbane’s ability to transition on the Cats. A full third of the Lions defensive half chains went inside 50 – roughly average for the season as a whole for them, so holding up against strong opponents on their idiosyncratic home deck is a big positive.
A fun element to watch will be the midfield matchups byplay. Last time around, Lachie Neale was relatively well curbed and the Lions found success through others, especially as they looked to make Bailey Smith accountable with a Hugh McLuggage matchup, while the Cats tried to work their defensive midfielder Mark O’Connor onto him instead.The confusion this created led to a number of solid clearance opportunities for Brisbane, and surely Geelong will have something different up their sleeve this time around.
GWS v Hawthorn Preview
Words – Cody Atkinson . Image – James Ives
Hawthorn and GWS might not be footballing twins, but there’s parts of each side’s game that might cause you to do a double take every now and again.
There’s some elements that look similar. Both like to throw at least an extra behind the ball. Both sides look their best when they transition up the ground with some pace.
Neither side focuses on winning raw numbers of clearances, instead focusing on the stoppage rebound. When both sides win the ball from stoppage, they tend to put more points on the scoreboard than most sides.
Both sides tend to deploy a very tall set up in the forward line, boasting relatively mobile key position players that can cover pressure gaps.
But there are some differences at play.
Hawthorn places more pressure on the ball when they don’t have it, while GWS tends to protect valuable space and folds back a bit more readily. GWS tackles slightly more than Hawthorn, while the Hawks hold space and block escape routes for the opposition.
The Hawks also tend to prioritise raw territory a little more than the Giants, with the Sam Taylor led backline allowing the Giants to soak up repeated entries at will.
Both teams can occasionally look mercurial to the outside, or flaky to critics. They are both prone to putting runs of goals on the scoreboard, or allowing them going the other way. Part of this is down to both sides’ brands of footy.
The last two times these sides played saw these intense swings. In round 4 this year GWS got out to a 35 point lead in the first quarter before Hawthorn wiped out the advantage by halftime. The Hawks held on narrowly there, but it was a close encounter.
In round 22 last year Hawthorn took a 28 point lead into the last quarter before getting run down by an increasingly urgent Giants side.
There might be some fireworks in this match.
Fremantle v GC preview
Words – Jack Turner. Image – James Ives.
Fremantle and Gold Coast enter the finals as the two least experienced teams and the two regarded as least likely to win the flag. Each boast a talismanic veteran and former captain who is set to retire upon their next loss. Fremantle is looking for the fairytale finish for Nat Fyfe and the Suns for David Swallow. Both men needing to at least make a preliminary final to reach 250 games before retiring.
Fremantle have been somewhat of an enigma this year, with inspiring wins against Collingwood, the Suns, and Adelaide, countered by confusing and disheartening losses thumpings at the hands of Geelong, St Kildaand Brisbane, and an equally perplexing close away loss against Melbourne.
The Dockers’ best football is fast and highly skilled, utilising the outside run of Shai Bolton and Murphy Reid to create scores, the utility of Luke Jackson in their divisive two rucks setup, and their well drilled midfield group to make them the second strongest centre clearance team in the finals this year – behind only their opposition in the Suns.
Early in the season, the Suns looked as if they were destined to be a team that beat up on lowly opponents but couldn’t stand the heat when it came to the big boys – with the exception of a controversial win against Adelaide in Round 4 – but this proved not to be the case. They won games post bye – a time they have been historically poor – against Collingwood and Brisbane to sure up their spot in the finals, and despite a loss against an inspired Port Adelaide side in Hinkley and Boak’s farewell match Gold Coast dished out the biggest win in their club history to wrap the season, confirming their first ever finals berth.
The last time these two teams met, Fremantle proved too strong, winning out by just 11 points in a seesawing contest in the wet, where the Suns surged back to within a goal with just minutes to go. If you’re a believer in xScore – or even someone who likes using it as a tool – then it makes this matchup even more interesting to know that Gold Coast won on xScore by four points the last time they met, with a 15 point turnaround from the actual scoreboard.
Keep an eye out not only for the obvious matchups between these two midfields, as names like Serong, Anderson, Brayshaw and Rowell go head to head, but also on Alex Pearce lining up on Ben King, and Sam Collins trying to outmuscle the goliath that is Patrick Voss. That may well be where this game is won and lost. Harris Andrews recently took Voss out of the game and disrupted Fremantle’s forays forward, and we saw Sam Taylor force Ben King high up the ground, ruining Gold Coast’s structure inside 50.
Will either team go all the way? Can either retiring veteran prove to be the spark or motivation their teammates need to find that extra level? Only one team can keep the fairytale alive, and we will know which it is by 9pm AWST on Saturday night.
The AFLW’s Scoring Boom
Joe Cordy
When the final siren went on Gold Coast vs Sydney, the Swans’ 103 points was the third highest score in the competition’s history, and only the fourth to reach triple digits.
Eight days and fourteen games later, it’s not even on the podium for the 2025 season.
It was knocked out of the bronze spot for all-time scores on the same day by Brisbane’s 35-105 victory over Walyalup, before Yartapulti’s 108-40 game against Gold Coast and the Kangaroos’ 14-114 demolition of Walyalup each set a new gold standard less than 24 hours apart.
The Kangaroos’ win was so comprehensive they set three other scoring records: the longest single game goal-streak in AFLW history (15), the highest margin in league history, and the first game to ever record a 100-point margin.
These four games are part of a wider trend of increased scoring across the AFLW. The league has gone through several massively impactful transformations in its first nine seasons, both planned and unplanned, but despite some volatile year to year variance scoring per game has generally trended upwards.
While the lack of location data prior to the 2025 season precludes anyone making an xScore model for the AFLW, a rough approximation of it from points per shot shows that accuracy has remained reasonably stable across the league’s lifetime, typically hovering just under three points per shot.
The bigger indicator in the rise of scoring has come from volume, rather than quality or execution, of looks at the goal.
The 2025 average of 14.5 per game is over a whole shot higher than the previous high watermark set in 2023, and thus far six of the eight highest volume shooting teams in league history have all come about this season.
While this is obviously going to regress back towards the mean as the sample size grows and the good teams play more against each other than bottom of the ladder opposition, it does match the eye test of the dangerous teams looking more co-ordinated than ever.
Gemma Bastiani on Deep Dive broke down how Sydney work as one to create space, thinking two and three disposals ahead in the chain to support each other and pull apart opposition defences. It’s a level of tactical sophistication and cohesion that’s only been able to be achieved with significantly longer pre-seasons and contact hours with the club, which itself is downwind of salaries making footy viable as a full-time career.
In 2023 the AFLPA signed the first ever joint Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) between the players of the men’s and women’s competitions. The joint bargaining power led to a breadth of changes for the AFLW, but the most important was the staggering increase in guaranteed payments for each player.
The AFLW doesn’t have a salary cap, instead opting for a tiered structure where clubs can offer two Tier 1 contracts, six Tier 2 and Tier 3 contracts, and sixteen Tier 4 contracts. Until 2022, the Tier 4 contracts that made up the bulk of any club’s list were below the tax-free threshold in Australia. Immediately following the joint CBA, Tier 4 contracts became worth more than Tier 1 contracts the year before by over $14,000.
While this was still only marginally above minimum wage for full-time work in 2023, 2025 has seen a significant jump within the five-year lifespan of the CBA. Tier 4 contracts are now competitive with starting salaries in most industries, and Tier 1 contracts for each club’s best and brightest have now reached six figures for the first time.
Unsurprisingly, giving all players enough financial security to focus on footy as a full-time profession has given them a strong base to build off for the season, and their newfound fitness and preparation time as groups has created the best footy the competition’s ever seen.
The Race to 100 AFLW Goals
Emlyn Breese / CreditToDuBois.com
We’re in the tenth season of the AFLW and there’s a solid chance this is the season we see someone break the 100 career goals barrier.
The increase in scoring, as Joe talks about above, has lead to individual players kicking more goals.
There are four players who, if they maintain their current 2025 goals average for the rest of the season would hit 100 goals before finals.
We should place an asterisk on Jasmine Garner though, as she’s set to miss two to three weeks through injury so would need to pick up a couple of goals when she returns.
How did we get here?
How many people have held the AFLW career goals record (individually or joint with other players) for any length of time during their career?
There have been a total of 8 players who have held the careers goals record at some point, either jointly or by themselves. From Lauren Arnell sharing it for three minutes in game 1 of season 1, to Darcy Vescio holding it a combined three and a half years.
It is a seriously accomplished list. Darcy Vescio, Erin Phillips, Tayla Harris, and Jasmine Garner are among the most recognizable players in the competition’s history.
Kate Hore is a club captain, premiership player, and three-time All Australian. Danielle Ponter was a key part of Adelaide’s 2019 and 2022 premierships, while Jess Wuetschner is one of the most dangerous small forwards the league has seen.
Lauren Arnell isn’t notable as a goalkicker but is a premiership player, three-time all Australian, and the first AFLW player to go from playing in the league to coaching in it.
Here’s the progression of those eight players goalkicking tallies – goal by goal, minute by minute.
There’s also some worth in seeing who had the goalkicking title and for how long.
If there was a favourite right now for who’s going to get to 100 goals first, Kate Hore seems like an easy choice. Whoever it is it will be a moment for the whole competition to celebrate.
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.
For the last 24 weeks there has been end to end men’s football. This is the last pause in that competition before the race for finals heats up.
This is the last moment of calm before the storm, before the stakes get raised.
Meanwhile, the AFLW season hits starts to hit full stride with clear air for the league to bathe in. The footy is good – probably better than it ever has been before. If you’ve got a hankering for footy, get to a game this weekend (or flick on the TV).
The home-and-away season is done and dusted, which means it’s both finals time, and awards season.
On Thursday night, Nick Daicos was named MVP by his peers, while Noah Anderson and Bailey Smith were joint winners of the coaches award. In a few weeks the league will crown another Brownlow medallist (or multiple). There’s also a bunch of awards handed out by some of the major media companies that cover the game.
And while they all carry a certain level of prestige, they’re also a bit eye of the beholder in terms of how much they mean.
While it’s ingrained in footy to use weekly votes to decide most of those awards, there’s the inherent problem that not all best-on-ground performances are created equal, but the votes don’t know that and can’t distinguish.
When done well, the best awards serve as something of a time capsule. They (should) tell us who mattered most in any given season.
The This Week In Football gang has had a crack at determining who that should be for 2025.
Following NBA MVP voting rules, each voter named their five best players for the season. The top player received 10 points, seven points for second, five for third, three for fourth and one for fifth.
Without further ado …
13th – 1 vote: Matt Rowell, Sam Taylor and Max Gawn
Three very different players each received one fifth-placed vote.
Emlyn Breese said of Gawn: “There are few players I’ve ever seen who have the capacity to shape a game and do so regularly as Gawn still does.”
While James Ives thought the GWS key back was worthy: “By far the best interceptor in the competition. And while GWS get a high volume of numbers back to support, I’m not sure they can get away with their style of play without Taylor.”
12th – 2 votes: Caleb Serong
“It’s almost a 15-way toss up at this point. You can make a good argument for Pickett, Taylor, Green and less convincing but still solid for another dozen. Serong has been impressive, shook tags and stood up when it’s mattered most for a success-struck side.” – Cody Atkinson
11th – 3 votes: Luke Jackson
Ryan Buckland had the Fremantle big man fourth on his ballot: “Can’t help but think without his versatility and skill the Dockers would not be in the position they are in. Underrated aspect to his game: he allows Fremantle to play Sean Darcy as a pure ruck which allows ~him~ to be the best he can be.”
10th – 5 votes: Kysaiah Pickett
Joe Cordy gave the Demon his third-place vote for a “Career season as the best mid-forward in the game, keeping his level while the team falls apart around him.”
Ninth – 6 votes: Bailey Smith
The new Cat and now coaches award winner received fourth-place votes from two contributors.
The Back Pocket’s Jack Turner was one of them: “Has genuinely transformed Geelong’s midfield and run.”
Seventh – 7 votes: Sam Darcy and Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera
Two players from the 2021 draft who had breakout seasons, with Wanganeen-Milera earning his first All Australian blazer on Thursday night.
The Saint featured on three ballots with Emlyn Breese voting him third – “I think he’s the model of what you want in a footballer right now.” – and two other voters placing him fifth.
James had Darcy second on his ballot: “His contested marking is unparalleled. You only have to look at Naughton’s numbers with and without Darcy to see his impact. Nullifying Darcy goes a long way to nullifying the Dogs.”
Sixth – 15 votes: Harris Andrews
James thought the Brisbane key defender worthy of maximum votes: “He’s the best two-way key defender in the competition and his ball use is severely underrated and critical to what Brisbane do.”
Fifth – 20 votes: Nick Daicos
I had Daicos fourth on my ballot – he’s the beating heart of a top-four side – while two others had him third. Ryan, however, had him as the season’s second most valuable player: “ Even in probably his most disappointing year to date … Daicos still managed to be the electrical rhythm that reanimated an otherwise corpse-like Collingwood side.”
Fourth – 29 votes: Noah Anderson
I was one of three voters to have the Suns’ skipper third on my ballot. He’s one of the most complete players in footy.
“It still feels like he doesn’t get talked about enough for how good he is,” said Emlyn, who had Anderson second.
Third – 30 votes: Jeremy Cameron
I had the Geelong superstar second. The Cats are stacked, but Cameron raises their ceiling more than any other player on their list. He’s the biggest reason they’re the team to beat over the next month.
Cody had Cameron first – “The most important player in probably the most complete team. Was asked to do far more than his position suggests. Didn’t miss a game which also helps.” – as did Joe.
Second – 49 votes: Jordan Dawson
I was one of two voters to have Dawson at the top of my ballot. The Adelaide skipper made a habit of stepping up in big moments in leading the Crows to the minor premiership. There might be only one onballer more well-rounded.
Mateo Szlapek-Sewillo had Dawson second, but had similar praise: “He’s the captain (and best player) for the side that just completed the largest single-season rise up the ladder in AFL history. Consistently produces his best football in the most important moments.”
First – 58 votes: Marcus Bontempelli
The Dogs’ skipper will be watching the finals, but that didn’t stop four voters putting him at the top of their ballot. I had Bontempelli fifth, while only one voter left him off entirely.
Voters were similarly aligned as to why the seven-time All Australian should get top votes, but Ryan perhaps summed it up best: “This guy is still so obviously the only answer to the question of, ‘If you could pick any player in the league for your team, who would you pick?’ There’s a gulf between him and the rest.”
While we are only at the squad stage at the moment, there are already some players who fans are shocked to see have been left out. But who were the biggest snubs from this squad of 44 – 22 of whom are set to receive new or updated blazers tonight.
Of the 44 player squad, 28 have never made an All Australian team, meaning at least 10 players will receive an All Australian blazer for the first time. Some of the more surprising players to miss out are also yet to receive an All Australian selection.
While there are cases to be made for nearly a dozen players to be very unlucky, we’ve narrowed it down to three big misses. For any stats referenced below, they will include only players who have played 16 or more games, as this seems to be the unofficial cutoff point for All Australian selection guidelines.
Callum Wilkie – St Kilda
Callum Wilkie received his first and only All Australian blazer in 2023, and was arguably unlucky to miss out on both squad and team last year. In both 2023 and 2024, Wilkie was supported down back by Josh Battle, who left as a free agent to play at Hawthorn this season, and was instead supported by the much less seasoned – though still serviceable – Anthony Caminiti.
Amongst eligible key defenders, Callum Wilkie has the third highest Player Rating, the second most Coaches Votes, and of players averaging 2+ Contested Defensive 1v1s he has the 7th best record. He is behind only Harris Andrews for kicking retention rating amongst key defenders, and inside the top 10 for threat rating amongst the same group. He has also taken more marks than any player in the competition in 2025.
There are only two players averaging 15 disposals, have a less than 25% CDOOO loss rate (2+ avg) and have received 30+ coaches votes in 2025. One is Callum Wilkie. The other is his former teammate and 2025 AA squad member Josh Battle.
Oliver Dempsey – Geelong
This one is a little more complicated than the other two I’m going to write about here, because there is a fair argument to be made that Dempsey clearly has not been in the best 40 players in the AFL this season. But I think it’s also fair to say that players like Lachie Ash, Sam Collins and Josh Worrell wouldn’t fit that criteria either, and have been selected based on their position.
And this is where we face the All Australian team’s biggest issue in recent years head on; the All Australian team simply refuses to pick genuine wings in the team, and this year that seems to be true for the squad. Not a single midfielder in the team has a Centre Bounce Attendance percentage of less than 50% – with the exception of Wanganeen-Milera, who was used as a half-back for much of the year. The main candidates are outside midfielders such as Bailey Smith, Finn Callaghan or Nick Daicos, but none of these players are wings; they are centre bounce specialists. Rovers and receivers.
Of players listed as a midfielder who have attended less than 25% off their team’s CBA’s, Ollie Dempsey has the second highest Player Rating, the most goals, the third highest contested possessions, the most score involvements, the third highest goal assists and has the fourth highest threat rating per kick.
Football is a much more complicated game than it once was, but with the introduction of the 6-6-6 rule, and available starting position and matchup data; it should be easy enough for selectors to add players to the squad from a list of genuine wingers.
Aaron Naughton – Western Bulldogs
I have saved perhaps the most egregious snub – and maybe the one I am most baffled by – until last. Many are quick to point out that Aaron Naughton started the season off slowly from a goals perspective, but he was still averaging 6.5 score involvements across his first ten games – a figure that would see him in the top 10 key forwards had it continued for the whole season.
Another critique is that his form improved once Sam Darcy came back from injury, but I think it’s fair to say that most key forwards clearly struggle without a genuine foil, including the others who have been nominated this year.
Over the season, Aaron Naughton amassed an impressive 60 goals – especially impressive as he had Sam Darcy in there with him kick 48 in the same year – finishing fourth in the Coleman medal, just two goals behind third. He finished behind only Jeremy Cameron and Mitch Georgiades for marks inside 50 and behind only Jeremy Cameron for score involvements by a key forward – finishing 8th overall in this stat.
Furthermore, of the players who kicked more than 50 goals this season, he led the way for the most score involvements that weren’t from a shot on goal that he took, bringing his teammates into the game just as often as scoring himself.
The full list of players with 50 goals and 150 score involvements in 2025 is as follows: Jeremy Cameron, Aaron Naughton, Riley Thilthorpe, Jack Gunston.
The AFLW meta shaping up
Emlyn Breese / CreditToDuBois.com
Note: this article is published during AFLW indigenous round. I have used the names six teams have adopted for the duration of the round. You can read more about indigenous round and those teams here: https://www.afl.com.au/aflw/indigenous/clubs
As a Narrm (Melbourne) supporter it should surprise no-one that I have been absolutely hanging out for the Women’s season. It’s still obviously really early, so the focus will mostly be on the teams that appear to be separating from the pack two rounds in.
As per last week, I’m still building a lot of this data gathering infrastructure as I go, so I’ll have more time to dive into what it tells us as that settles in later in the season.
First I wanted to build upon my very brief look at scoring shots in AFLW last week.
Sydney and Melbourne have very similar profiles for where their scores are being generated and conceded – big positive turnover differentials, and a healthy stoppage differential.
Essendon share a similar, but lesser, turnover differential but they’ve actually got a negative differential on stoppage scoring shots.
Where it gets really interesting though is the Kangaroos. Of their 33 scores they’ve generated 28 of them from turnover, 2 from centre bounces, and just 3 from other stoppages. More broadly, they’re actually in the negative for clearance differential (-0.5 per game). This is a stark difference to the other undefeated sides who make up the 4 best clearance differentials range from +10 (Hawthorn) to +4.5 (Sydney).
Where the Roos are leading the competition is generating turnovers (1st at +9/game) and uncontested possessions.
The Kangaroos have had 55.5 more uncontested possessions per game than their opponents, with Sydney and Narrm inches behind at +55. The next best is Brisbane a massive step back with 19.5. To me there’s a clear meta forming around uncontested possession, and I think success will be driven by harnessing or countering it.
For Narrm this is something of a return to past success. In their flag-winning season 7 campaign they recorded twice the uncontested possession differential of the next best team.
Even among the three leaders there are significant differences though. Sydney and North are finding a lot more uncontested marks, each about 20% above the league average. They’re also two of the top three teams for retaining uncontested possession from a kick (the third being Kuwarna (Adelaide)). Narrm by comparison find themselves in the bottom 6 for kick retention.
Accordingly, Narrm are below league average in uncontested marks, despite leading the league in possession differential. Where Narrm do stand out is their handball use and pressure. 46% of the Demon’s disposals are by hand, compared to a league average of 39%. Sydney are at league average while the Roos are slightly below. Their handball receives are 15% above the next best (Sydney) and 50% above the league average.
Narrm are also leading the league for opposition disposals per tackle. With the stricter interpretation on holding the ball, a combination of quick hands to release and tackling pressure on the opposition bodes well for them.
One other thing I found in my travels leads me to giving a shout out to Georgie Cleaver. Waalitj Marawar (West Coast) have some real problems structurally, conceding a mark inside 50 from 36% of their opponent’s entries. But, they’ve had 17 defensive one-on-ones and are yet to lose one. This is led by Cleaver who is 0 from 7. If they can sort out some of the structures they’ve potentially got an elite pillar to build around and she’s only 20.
Following on from last week’s article on score involvements and score launches, this article will explore score assists.
While there’s no publicly available data on score assists, I wanted to investigate if they could be estimated using available data on goal assists. As score assists include goal assists, we only need to estimate behind assists.
Firstly, here is the definition from the Champion Data glossary:
Score assist: Creating a score by getting the ball to a teammate either via a disposal, knock-on, ground kick or hitout, or by winning a free kick before the advantage is paid to the goal scorer.
The definition makes no mention of disposal effectiveness or the intent of the player getting the ball to their teammate. Champion Data provides an example on their FAQs page which tells us that if the player’s intent was a shot at goal but the kick fell short and went to a teammate who scored, this would be treated as an ineffective kick and would not be counted as a score assist.
As such, the definition only tells us that a score assist is limited to disposals, knock-ons, hitouts, and free kicks, but doesn’t provide enough detail about the specific circumstances that result in an assist being credited.
What does the data on goal assists tell us?
Using data on goal assists since the start of 2021, we can determine how often a goal assist is credited based on how the goalscorer gained possession and the effectiveness of the prior disposal.
If we were to credit an assist for all goals above the line and none below, we would be correct for ~94% of goals. This gives us a reasonably reliable methodology for estimating behind assists, which we can combine with actual goal assists to estimate total score assists.
Score assist analysis
Hugh McCluggage leads the competition with 54 score assists this season, with a clear lead over Brad Close, Ed Richards and Marcus Bontempelli. Richards leads the goal assists with his teammates kicking 35 goals and only eight behinds from his assists. In contrast, McCluggage’s teammates have kicked 22 goals and 32 behinds from his assists, with all three of his score assists on Sunday being behinds.
McCluggage is approaching Gryan Miers’ 61 score assists in 2023 with at least two finals to come. This was mentioned on the ESPN Footy Podcast a few weeks ago, and Champion Data’s count of score assists for McCluggage this season and Miers in 2023 were consistent with these estimated counts.
Here are all players with 30+ score assists in a season since 2021.
Jeremy Cameron and Brad Close have combined for the most scores (52) over the last five seasons, with Close assisting Cameron for 40 scores and Cameron reciprocating 13 times. Aaron Naughton (39) and Marcus Bontempelli (12) have combined for 51 scores.
Aaron Naughton (12) and Ed Richards (2) have combined for the most scores this season, closely followed by Jeremy Cameron (12) and Brad Close (1), and Jeremy Cameron (11) and Shaun Mannagh (2).
Using all the data compiled for that article – namely finals rates reached by teams based on each city since 1987 – here’s a look comparing cities more broadly.
First up the Central Coast turns out to be the most successful sporting city in pure percentage terms. That’s thanks to the very successful Mariners winning three championships and making finals most of the time,
The Mariners are just one regional success story in Australia, with most regional cities other than Gold Coast have at least one club making fans happy. These include the Cats in Geelong, the Sunshine Coast Lightning, the JackJumpers in Hobart, the Illawarra Hawks in Wollongong, and WNBL teams the Fire and Spirit in Townsville and Bendigo respectively.
Among the “big 5” cities, it’s Adelaide just barely ahead of Brisbane as the top sporting city.
Here’s a breakdown of the win rates for teams in each city with at least ten seasons under their belt, showing how Adelaide’s all-round selection of decent teams makes them a solid showing in nearly any sport.
Some of the most successful teams in the country of course lead their cities’ records, including the Sydney FC women’s team, the Melbourne Storm, and of course the frankly astonishing success (missing finals once in 4 decades) of the Wildcats.
When it comes to the title of best major sporting city, though, individual dominant teams like the Wildcats just don’t quite compensate for struggles in other sports out west, like soccer, rugby, and Dockering.
Adelaide performs well comparatively in women’s sport, too, which leads us to another breakdown of these records:
Looking at cities by gender, we can see that mostly due to the Titans women, Gold Coast is faring notably better in women’s sport than in men’s. It may be too soon to say for sure, but there’s incipient signs that the Gold Coast sporting curse may be a single gender affair.
The city of Geelong have had the best record of success in men’s sport, much more because of the regular Cats of the AFL than the Supercats of the NBL.
Among the big 5 cities, Perth is lagging in women’s sport performance, perhaps a result of the tyranny of distance impacting harder in the generally less well funded and resourced world of women’s sport.
Perhaps surprisingly, Canberra is the city with the largest negative gap between women’s and men’s clubs performance, with Canberra indeed having the second lowest women’s sport success rate after Newcastle.
On the surface this is surprising, given that Canberra is a progressive city with a strong record of supporting women’s sport. Indeed, Canberra is the only multi-team city which has hosted more seasons of elite women’s sport than men’s.
Many of those numerous women’s seasons are of course the reason for the gap, however. Teams like the Capitals (9 titles) and Canberra United (2 titles) have great legacies of success as standalone teams in cities without men’s counterparts in their sport. However, both have also spent extended periods missing finals in between golden periods.
Canberra also, for several decades, hosted a mostly forgotten second WNBL team, the Australian Institute of Sport, which was a development side made up of youngsters and basically only made finals when Lauren Jackson was leading them to a title.
Around the Grounds
Marnie Vinall reports for ABC on what Mitch Brown’s announcement means to queer fans.
On Sarah Burt and Georgie Parker’s podcast AFLW Weekly, Georgie worries for the way AFLW salaries, newly outpacing Super Netball pay, are beginning to lure star players across and hurt a well established traditional sport.
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.
This upcoming round is about to see the maximum amount of elite footy played in one week in the modern football era.
Nineteen games of elite football will take place in a seven day period out to Wednesday’s makeup game between the Suns and Essendon. With the compressed 2020 Covid season not reaching such levels, the last time top level footy saw so much action was probably in the state league era when three states saw top level footy at once.
It all gets a bit difficult to keep track of, particularly as the AFLM and AFLW continue to exist, despite some level of web and app integration, in somewhat parallel media and fixturing spaces. Look up what games are on when, and chances are you’ll only see half of them listed.
Luckily, friend of TWIF Polly Porridge has done something the AFL should have already done via its official app. Polly has put together a match listing for all of the weekend’s games with all AFLW and AFLM starting times with all games listed chronologically (all times AEST):
It’s a whole lot of footy – fifteen games in two days – for everyone.
Hope you are ready for Peak Football.
This Week in Football we have:
Breaking down score involvements and score launches
For my first TWIF article I will explore score involvements and score launches. What are they and who are the leaders this season?
Here are the definitions from the Champion Data glossary:
Score involvement: Number of scoring chains where a player was involved with either a disposal, hitout-to-advantage, kick-in or knock-on. If a player has two disposals in the same scoring chain, he is credited with one score involvement.
Score launch: Scoring chains launched by an intercept possession, free kick, hitout-to-advantage or clearance.
Scoring chain: Includes all disposals and possessions for the scoring side that occur between the score launch and the actual score. The chain can only be broken by either the opposition gaining possession of the ball or a stoppage.
Working back from the score itself, the scoring chain begins at the most recent stoppage, kick-in or when the scoring team last gained possession from the opposition. Only a stoppage or a change in possession breaks the chain – a spoil from the opposition does not break the chain, nor does an ineffective disposal from the scoring team if possession is retained.
For scoring chains that start with a kick-in or an intercept possession, the score launch will be credited to the player taking the kick-in or winning the intercept possession (which may be a free kick). For scoring chains starting with a stoppage, if there’s a hitout to advantage AND no opposition player took possession of the ball pre-clearance, the hitout to advantage will be the score launch, otherwise it will be the player winning possession pre-clearance and starting a chain of unbroken possession.
Scores, score assists and (most) score launches are included in the count of score involvements.
Interesting side note – if a scoring chain starts with a free kick and a teammate takes the advantage, the player winning the free kick gets a score launch but does not get credited a score involvement unless they have another involvement later in the chain.
One correction I would make to the score involvement definition is changing the second sentence to “if a player has multiple involvements in the same scoring chain, he is credited with one score involvement.” A player with a hitout-to-advantage and a disposal in the same chain is only credited with one score involvement.
To provide a visual example of scoring chains, the following chart shows all Adelaide’s score involvements against Collingwood in Round 23. Each point represents a disposal, hitout-to-advantage, kick-in, knock-on or spoil, in chains resulting in a score. The tooltip for each data point provides additional detail of their specific involvement.
Here is a summary of all non-score score involvements by type of involvement since the start of 2021.
And here are the types of involvements launching scoring chains.
Who’s leading the score involvements this season?
Ed Richards and Nick Daicos are first and second in total score involvements this season with a similar breakdown of score launches, score assists, scores, and other score involvements. Next is Jeremy Cameron with two thirds of his score involvements being his own score. Rounding out the top five is Hugh McCluggage, who leads the league in score assists, and Christian Petracca, who’s number one in the AFL for average score involvements since 2021.
Score assists have been estimated and will be the subject of a future article.
What about score launches?
Max Gawn is leading the way in score launches averaging a career high 4.27 per game – the second highest season average since 2012, behind Todd Goldstein in 2015. Witts and Xerri aren’t far behind, averaging 4.15 and 4.05 per game, respectively. Max has launched 17 scores from intercept possessions this season, 32 from hitouts to advantage, and 45 from winning possession pre-clearance.
With the first week of AFLW in the books it’s worth spending some time looking at what we can get out of the early data available.
I’ve started off by trying to identify score sources. This is relatively easy to get for the Men’s competition, but faces some extra challenges in the Women’s. This is still a work in progress, so take with a grain of salt. Because the sources are new, there’s no prior year comparison available.
Overall we can see scores from kick-in even more negligible in AFLW than AFLM, and we also see a bigger prevalence of scores from turnover.
Let’s now look at it on a game-by-game basis:
Port are the only team to have scored a goal from kick in, with Katelyn Pope’s last quarter goal.
Essendon and Melbourne had the most scoring events from turnover, while the Sydney v Richmond match saw both teams scoring as many times from stoppage as from turnover.
Winning the ball by degrees
Cody Atkinson
All teams want to do two things as much as humanly possible.
Win the ball
Score
If you’ve got the ball you can score, and the other team can’t. And – spoiler alert – if you score more than the opposition you win.
Someone get me on the line to eighteen different clubs, this is groundbreaking stuff.
But not all won ball is the same. Some is won hard, and some is loose. Some leads to territory gains, others are turned over right away. Importantly – and linking to point 2 above – some ground ball wins lead to actual scores.
This year Tom Green has won more ball on the ground than any other player. He’s averaging 10.1 ground ball gets per game. If you break it down further, 3.4 of those are classified as “hard ball gets” and the remaining 6.7 as loose ball gets.
This is where on the ground he has won them this year.
Green follows the ball – and the contest – around the ground. While there’s an expected cluster in the middle, there’s also a fair bit of action on all four corners of the deck. Note – the ground shape is normalised for the dimensions of the MCG – hence some of the boundary issues.
If you break it down by scores generated by ground ball wins, something interesting emerges.
That big cluster in the middle all but disappears. The Giants have struggled to turn Green’s inside ball into points from the middle, despite everything they’ve tried. The Giants are firmly mid-pack for points from stoppages and points differential from that source. That means a lot of Green’s work either hasn’t gotten teammates into space, or the chain of control has broken down towards goal. It’s been a longstanding issue for Adam Kingsley, and one that he needs to resolve to get the most out of the best ballwinner in the league.
As mentioned above, there are two broad types of ball to be won. The first requires physical pressure and contact. This year, no player has won more hard ball than Tom Liberatore.
Like Green, Libba follows the ball around the ground when it comes to rest. The second generation Dog has an even more pronounced cluster in the middle, but has a heavy lean to the defensive side of the centre square. That hints to his positioning at centre bounce – at the defensive sweeper side. That job is difficult, and requires balancing winning ball and preventing opposition sides from sweeping through the contest. Few can manage that balance well – let alone winning so much ball themselves.
Most ground balls are classified as loose balls however. They happen at stoppages, but also often occur in general circumstances around the ground. This year two-time Brownlow Medalist Lachie Neale is leading the way.
Neale’s loose ball wins are less focused on the middle. It’s a testament to his endurance ability and skill in reading where the play is likely to unfold. Neale has a nose for the ball, and to predicting where it will go before it gets there.
No matter if it’s hard or loose, straight from a ruck tap or occuring in the middle of a transition chain, every team needs good ball winners. Green, Liberatore and Neale have been the best three this year. All three are reasons that their sides are firmly in the race for September glory.
How does Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera’s reported contract value stack up?
Sean Lawson
With reports saying Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera has just become the first player to earn $2 million in a single season, it’s a great time to try to put that into context and see how it compares to the big contracts of years gone by.
AFL contract reporting is a very nebulous activity. Reporting around individual player contracts is often vague, misleading, and subject to spin by reporting parties.
We do know a few things for sure – the salary cap value, the minimum pay for draftees, the rough spread of player contracts.
We know as of last year the typical club senior list would have been structured roughly as below, with an average of two players on over $1 million a year. This figure is very likely to rise to at least three per team on average in 2026.
We know that, on average, the top three players might earn about 20% of the salary cap, and the top 6 players around one third of the salary cap.
We also know that cap keeps going up:
The salary cap is roughly double what it was in 2012, triple what it was in 2004, and just much larger than the 1990s. The cap growth has outpaced inflation and, in the case of some long deals, even left players behind as the cap grew around them. The AFL-AFLPA CBA has a ratchet clause for insertion in standard player contracts, but league sources indicate that insertion is not universal across the board.
That leaves the unknowns. Even when news reports appear to carry fairly specific contract values for a player, often this number will be under or over what they actually earn:
Agents have incentive to inflate contract values to bolster their percieved effectiveness.
Clubs have incentives to hide money or to deflate figures to keep other players happier.
The press like round numbers, and sensationalised reporting presenting upwardly rounded multi year payments as a single number.
Some contracts have guaranteed and non-guaranteed money, with bonuses based on honours earned or game benchmarks.
So there’s a lot of caveats here, and now we can plough ahead, remembering all this should be taken with many grains of salt:
As it turns out, Wanganeen-Milera’s two year contract at the Saintswill be roughly on par with the payment of Lance Franklin and Dustin Martin in terms of cap hit in the first year of the deal.
Both of those were much longer deals with the amount of money managed across 9 and 7 years respectively, during which times the cap increased. At times both of those players may have been forming a smaller or larger share of the cap.
For Wanganeen-Milera and the Saints, the cap hit is shorter term, which means less flexibility to spread the cap hit, but much more for the Saints to manage other cap space and recruitment.
One player filling 10% of the salary cap may not be especially unreasonable considering we know that the top 3 players at the average club might get 20% and the top 6 might get over a third. The Saints have reportedly used salary cap banking in previous years to open up space for their current recruiting decisions, and the ability to defer other longer contracts into the future also exists.
But make no mistake, the AFL’s (probably) first two million dollar man is being paid handsomely for his universally acclaimed talents, on par with a couple of the 2010s’ biggest superstars relative to the salary cap of the day.
Around the Grounds
Gemma Bastiani on the W Show makes the case for recording an inside-30 stat for AFLW after the Crows showcased a lot of deep ineffective inside-50s in their surprise loss to the Saints.
Marnie Vinall’s ABC article about the impact of homophobia in sport is essential reading in light of the current situation.
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.
TWIF can’t link you to the whole article because it has been nuked from the Lions website this morning. It is a wild ride of alleged bias and player acclamation. Luckily, it has been archived here.
The article is somewhat emblematic of the race for AFL awards at the end of the year. In order to win many of the major panel-decided awards, clubs develop packs of support for nominated players. It’s arms length, but to best support the interests of fans and their players, clubs have to do a job in selling the strengths of each player.
But that article is beyond that – a few steps past that line.
That name may sound familiar to diehard, slightly older footy fans. The AFL Queensland Hall of Famer has had a long involvement in the game, from journalist to club media manager and finally player agent.
It’s that last stop that was the one that drew the most public attention. In 2013 Blucher was suspended for a year for his involvement in the Kurt Tippett scandal, which caused Tippett to be suspended for half a season as well.
It also wasn’t the last time his behaviour was questioned. In 2015 GWS asked for an investigation into his conduct relating to a hip operation on Adam Treloar around the time he was traded to Collingwood.
A few years on, The Age’s Daniel Cherny broke the story around the alleged reasons around Joel Wilkinson’s failed return to the AFL. Blucher also features prominently in that one.
This is all somewhat a distraction from the real issue – namely whether Ashcroft is in the mix for the Rising Star. Time will tell if that blank website can sway the voting panel.
With Season 10 of the AFLW launching this week I wanted to have a look at how the 18 squads for 2025 have come together.
There are 22 players still with their original Season 1 clubs, and each of the founding clubs has at least one original player – Adelaide having the most with 5.
Carlton have made the most new additions for Season 10 with 10 new players – only one of whom comes from a previous club (Tara Bohana having played 31 games for Gold Coast).
Brisbane have made the fewest changes with just three additions to their list – Neasa Dooley, Lilly Baker, and Claudia Wright all new to the AFLW.
Melbourne have the most homegrown talent with 27, while Richmond and Essendon have the most players with prior club experience at 17.
Essendon and Carlton both enter the season with 10 players yet to play a game for the club (Sophie McKay, Poppie Scholz, and Tara Bohana all played in the opening match of the season, so Carlton are already down to 7 uncapped players).
AFLW State(s) of Origin
Sean Lawson
This is not an article about state of origin football, but rather a bit of a chart dump about where the current players in the two AFL leagues come from.
So to start with, here’s how that looks. Thanks to Emlyn for supplying AFLW data to which I applied states of origin, while the AFLM data is slightly edited state of origin data from Fanfooty.
The most notable difference between the two leagues is that Queensland is, pretty simply, not a development state in the women’s game. There’s almost as many Queenslanders as Western Australians in the AFLW, buut there’s nerly 4 times as many Western Australians in the men’s league.
Queensland is not a part of the “Allies” at the girls’ under 18s championships but competes solo, finishing second in the standings this year.
NSW and the ACT are also relatively better represented in the women’s game, which is in line with higher participation rates in adult women’s footy in the northern states.
Western Australia’s relative lag is interesting here, and this may paint a picture of a relatively struggling women’s game out west. I noted with interest an interview with Canberran Swans player Lexi Hamilton, who described their recent star Western Australian recruit Zippy Fish as “raw” in coming from Perth instead of the development pathways in Victoria.
The stronger women’s presence in NSW is especially the visible with regards to players from the north of the Barassi Line. A majority of male NSW AFL players (27 of 44) are from the south and west of the state, in line with the traditional strength of the Riverina and Murray regions and centres like Albury and Wagga.
By contrast, a large majority of NSW women in the AFLW (30 of 38) are from Sydney, or otherwise coastal or northern NSW. Riverina women’s football has been less developed until recently compared to, say, AFL Canberra, and most current AFLW players from southern NSW were recruited through intermediary periods playing in Canberra or Sydney.
Unsurprisingly, the big states who play lots of football produce the most players, and when we convert over to per capita terms, the usual suspects predominate.
Northern and southern NSW are shown separately here to give an indication of that traditional productivity below the Barassi line, where the Murray region is every bit as productive in men’s footy as Victoria itself.
Also notable here is Ireland, not a state of Australia, because the roughly 7 million people in Ireland currently have produced the same number of current AFLW players (38) as the similarly sized New South Wales.
With such a lopsided talent balance across the country, one of the big points of difference for clubs is how many locally recruited players they have.
Overall, AFLW squads are generally from closer to home, which is a product of the state-based drafting across the history of the league until last season, where clubs often could not recruit interstate players at all. The lower payscale and short contract periods also made making long distance moves less feasible until very recently when pay (now 60k to 100k in four tiers) started to get into “living wage” territory.
Only three clubs – Hawthorn, Essendon and Geelong, have a more local squad in the men’s competition than the women’s and the Hawks stand out for having the highest percentage of Victorian players in both the AFLW and the M.
In line with Queensland’s much stronger women’s footy presence, the situation for Brisbane is completely inverted between the two teams, with one of the highest local content factors on its women’s team and one of the lowest in the men’s.
In the AFLM, every Victorian club has more locally recruited players than every non-Victorian club, and the four clubs in NSW and Queensland all found over 70% of their playing lists in other states.
On the AFLW side, North have the most international players, but with a strong Irish contingent taking professional opportunities on our shores, only four clubs lack any overseas players at all.
Essendon has the most Tasmanians right now, with the likes of Ellyse Gamble and Daria Bannister probably on the phonecall list for the Devils in a couple of years.
Away from their home states, Port Adelaide is a hotspot for Western Australians like Gemma Houghton and Abbey Dowrick, St Kilda has a contingent of Queenslanders including Jesse Wardlaw, and Richmond has a number of NSW/ACT players
In the AFLM, both Carlton and Collingwood have lots of South Australians and the Dees, Dogs and Kangaroos all have 8 Western Australians. The Crows, partly with their Broken Hill connection, have the most NSW players away from Sydney.
Finally, on the types of players recruited from different states, it turns out clubs are more interested in scrounging up talls from non-traditional markets such as Queensland, with over a fifth of all Queensland players being of the two metre variety, compared to 11% in the league as a whole.
Men over 200cm tall are exceptionally rare and sought after by all sports. The AFL has pursued entire pathways in US college sport just to source more meat for the ruck grinder.
Oddly enough, South Australia has 17 men over 2m tall playing in the AFL compared to the larger Western Australia having just 11. TWIF’s own Joe Cordy has proffered the theory that the constantly successful Perth Wildcats are monopolising Western Australia’s limited supply of tall buggers, leaving the AFL coming up a bit short, and I am not going to argue with this assessment.
King’s working forward in different ways
Cody Atkinson
There’s been a bit of a debate occurring through different parts of the footy community, particularly the one existing online and in talkback spaces. It centres around Ben King and what makes a forward valuable.
Firstly, a tweet in minimal context (and a shout out to ESPN and what they do in the footy space – this isn’t intended as criticism or shade, just an example).
This is indicative of the thinking – if a forward like King is just getting shots on goal and providing nothing else by foot, is he doing enough to be considered valuable. Are Gold Coast getting enough off a player as dynamic as King if all he is doing is getting shots on goal?
This hits at an issue that Sean Lawson and I have explored in part before, but in relatively disparate ways – the lack of homogeneity of jobs across the ground, and the hidden parts that make players valuable.
In short, not all tall forwards in a team are asked to play the same role, and not all tall forwards across the league are tasked to do the same thing.
In fact, it’s a question that we’ve asked AFL coaches over the past five years. Almost universally, it’s not goals or marks that matter the most, but instead playing the team role and competing. Here’s Dean Cox explaining what’s important from earlier this year:
No – the competing part and getting the ball to ground (is the most important). So say a player takes two or three contested marks in a game – it’s a pretty good game you know. But the difference between not losing them or at least having them is really important because we want you to get the ball to ground.
“You want to be dangerous in the air and at ground level. The forwards are aware that it’s not just about their contested marks they take, it’s about how many times the opposition take it on us and we don’t get an opportunity to get inside and score from that.
Without being in the huddle with Hardwick, there’s a fair indication that the job being asked of King is very different to that of other key forwards. Hardwick’s teams, whether yellow and black or red and red, have tended to anchor players deep to stretch defences.
As footy has evolved it has become increasingly congested – vertical spacing forces defences to either leave dangerous players unattended or leave room for dashing runs and leads. Richmond used to isolate Martin, Riewoldt and Lynch, while King and Long seem to be the main options on the Coast so far.
This chart shows the top 20 goalkickers this year in terms of total marks and the average distance from goal that their marks were taken. You’ll note that King is almost 30m per mark closer to goal than a player like Riley Thilthorpe. It’s a similar story when you break it down by contested marks too – King does his work deep, as he is asked. He’s also been one of the best talls at winning ground balls inside 50 – of that list of 20, only Jack Higgins has won more per game.
He’s also one of the most clearly targeted inside 50 this year. Only Mitch Georgiades has been targeted more in total (noting potential issues with the data). When they’ve kicked it towards King when going inside 50, the Suns have been able to rack up 326 points – the most of any respective forward/team relationship in the league. This has come at the cost of raw efficiency, but sometimes there’s a place for raw volume as well.
King is doing those little things right – maintaining space, providing a contest, preventing rebounds. Beyond his actual goal totals, he’s providing that focal point necessary for the Suns to start actually climbing up the ladder. We know that King can play higher up the ground and contribute more, as he’s done it before. But that’s (likely) not the job in front of him right now.
The shift appears to have worked for the Suns. They’ve gone from having the second worst rate of generating scoring shots per inside 50 to ninth in the league. They’ve also gone from being one of the worst sides at allowing sides to march from their defensive 50 to attacking 50 to one of the better teams. The Suns are also generating the deepest contested marks of any side on average of any team, providing a clear indication of how they try to attack the field and protect on the way back.
So let’s loop back to the question above – is King doing enough? The natural reaction might be no. But given how much better the Suns have been going forward (and the role he has played) the answer is likely yes.
More precisely, due to the difficulty of assessing how players are actually operating in different systems and how they contribute to success, we probably can’t get closer than “maybe”.
Which would be the second most unsatisfying way to finish the article.
The adjustment that could win the Western Bulldogs the Flag
As the top nine AFL clubs prepare for one of the most even finals series in recent memory, the smallest improvements can be the difference between a first-week exit and a place in the Grand Final.
At this stage of the season, dramatic transformations are rare. You are what you are. Health remains the most obvious factor in any late-season surge, but more subtle edges can be found in detailed opposition analysis, targeted role tweaks, and exploiting specific matchups.
For the Western Bulldogs, their weaknesses are there for all to see. Opponents can exploit matchups in their backline, and their aggressive press leaves them vulnerable in transition.
Luke Beveridge has experimented with solutions, such as redeploying their spare across different lines and adjusting the way they use their wings, but the problem is stubborn enough that some fans have resigned themselves to hoping the Dogs can simply out-attack their opposition.
But perhaps the answer is simpler than it seems…
A small role adjustment for one of the AFL’s elite rucks, inspired by Collingwood’s use of Darcy Cameron.
Tim English is far from a defensive liability. He averages 2.8 intercept possessions per game (6th among rucks) and 1.4 intercept marks (4th). He’s also kicked 13 goals this season, ranking 2nd in total goals for ruckmen. The issue isn’t what English lacks, it’s that he’s too balanced.
The Bulldogs’ real problems lie in defence and transition. They don’t need their ruck drifting inside 50 to compete with Aaron Naughton and Sam Darcy. They don’t need him functioning as an extra midfielder on the spread. They need him prioritising defensive positioning and lending consistent support to an underweight backline.
Cameron offers the blueprint. He positions himself behind the ball at all costs, rarely caught in between his opponent and his defensive responsibilities. This often places him in prime spots to intercept on the flanks and across defensive 50. English, by contrast, tends to generate most of his intercepts deeper inside defensive 50 or along the back flanks. Less proactive, more reactive.
Possession heatmaps tell the same story. English gathers 14% of his disposals inside forward 50 and shows a higher concentration through the corridor compared to Cameron
His mobility makes him a genuine asset around the ground, capable of presenting as an option forward or tracking back to defend. It’s his greatest weapon. But when deployed more like a pseudo-midfielder than a pseudo-key defender, it can create problems.
Take a look at this Melbourne transition on the weekend. After losing a post-clearance ground ball, Melbourne transition through the wing. English works back to support but is pinned to the boundary after an aggressive back-45 lead from Tom Sparrow. As Jack Viney is held up, English stays pinned to the boundary instead of switching and repositioning himself into the dangerous space. Viney attacks the hotspot, drawing the Bulldogs’ defenders towards Max Gawn, and Melbourne have just enough coverage to crumb and score through Harrison Petty.
In finals, where margins are extremely fine, the Dogs can’t continue to be exposed inside defensive 50. By adjusting English’s role to mirror Cameron’s, sacrificing some forward forays for consistent defensive positioning, the Bulldogs could address their most glaring weakness without overhauling their system. In a finals series this even, that single tweak might just be the difference between another year of frustration and winning the flag.
Around the grounds
Here’s another plug for the W Download podcast by Sarah Black and Gemma Bastiani, which now has all 18 teams previewed in its recent back catalogue. A must to know what to expect from each team this season.
On The Shinboner, Ricky Mangidis breaks down how Collingwood have used Dan Houston away from his former role, Carlton’s two gameplans, and Geelong’s use of the Jeremy Cameron attention.
The latest Footy A2Z video is about how the rules of the game looked back in 1859. Footy A2Z is a youtube channel with simple informative animated videos about the game’s history and mechanics.
Squiggle Football is out! This is author and footy analyst Max Barry’s AFL deckbuilding football management roguelike and it’s pretty good.
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.
Every year football tends to enter a slight hibernation period in the middle of winter before awaking anew as spring slowly starts to poke its head around.
With just four weeks left the season is very much alive, with some of the finest games of the season being fought out by finalists (think Collingwood v Fremantle) and non-finalists (St Kilda v Melbourne) alike.
The race is on for most spots that matter – from the minor premier to the last finals spot. While there’s a couple of win break to tenth and eleventh on the ladder, sides right through to 14th have shown at least moments of brilliance.
But some have claimed that the season has been dull, ignoring much that we’ve observed on the field. Despite renewal at the top end of the ladder and a fair amount of tumult as the season has progressed, there hasn’t been enough for everyone.
Perhpas some of this is down to the lower number of truly close games than the last couple of seasons. Average game margins are up 2.5 points per game on last season. In addition, the number of games decided by less than a straight kick is down to 10% from last year’s 19%.
But it’s worth noting how unusually close the past four seasons have been. Normal can sometimes be skewed by the extraordinary. And while there are fewer games that are extremely close, there are more than normal that are very close.
And things only seem to be getting tighter week on week.
As a famous philosopher once said: strap yourselves in.
It started with a deep intercept mark in defensive 50 by Harris Andrews, followed by six quick-release kicks to uncontested marks as Brisbane sliced through the corridor. Callum Ah Chee then found space inside 50, setting up Logan Morris to assist one of Henry Smith’s three goals.
It was a stark contrast to the Easter Thursday match-up at the Gabba, where Collingwood’s defensive dark arts were on full display. They forced Brisbane wide at every opportunity and preyed on the umpires’ tightening of the 15m rule. Brisbane struggled to adapt to Collingwood’s aggressive front-half press and often found themselves caught in-between lengthening the ground and providing overloads on the 45s, making them vulnerable in transition when they turned the ball over.
This dichotomy in performances can be attributed to combination of factors; greater scrutiny of the stand rule; greater leniency of the 15m rule; Collingwood’s lack of speed in the front half, missing McCreery and Hill (sub); Brisbane making offensive adjustments to stay more connected to their deepest forwards; and finally, the MCG factor.
The last point is somewhat provocative and counterintuitive. How can a team based in Brisbane be better suited to the MCG than the primary occupants in Collingwood. Part of the answer lies in Brisbane’s style. At the beginning of 2024, they doubled down on their kick-mark approach, leading the league with 110 marks per game. They entered the Grand Final of 2023 winning only one of their last 11 games at the home of footy (which was the previous week’s preliminary final against Melbourne). Since the Grand Final loss, they’ve won six out of seven, turning the MCG into somewhat of a mini fortress.
The MCG provides Brisbane with the extra width and length to maximise the benefits of their control game. Give them too much space and they’ll pick you apart. Over-correct and they’ll just play around you.
Look at the video below, which analyses two plays that highlight the differences between Brisbane’s approach in round 6 at the Gabba and round 21 at the MCG.
To further emphasise the point, take a look Brisbane’s kick map across both games. In Round 6, Brisbane often got caught on the flanks, happily taking what Collingwood were willing to give up. Their profile looks like a two-hour session of circle work.
In contrast, round 21 looked a lot more like the Brisbane of 2024. Changing angles, attacking the corridor, using the full width and length of the ground, quick release kicks and still undefeated on the MCG.
Maybe I’m wrong and guilty of being a resultist. Maybe I’m right, and Collingwood delivers another beatdown at the Gabba. Or maybe we’ll have to wait until Grand Final Day to find out.
As a player, Luke Beveridge never really planted his flag successfully.
Beveridge played 118 games across three clubs (Melbourne, Footscray and St Kilda) without reaching the half century at any of them. No real personal accolades aside from making the Greek Team of the Century, almost purely to make up the numbers.
His rise as a coach followed a less traditional pathway also. He didn’t move from playing into the assistant coaches box or try his hand coaching in the VFL, SANFL or WAFL. Instead, he went back to dig his heels in at grass roots level coaching St Bede’s Mentone in the VAFA.
When Beveridge arrived at St Bedes, they were competing in the C Division. His now-trademark style of emotional buy-in, and building a theme around the season took the Mentone Tigers to the Division C premiership in 2006, the Division B premiership in 2007, and ultimately on to the Division A premiership in 2008. If we paid as much attention to our amateur or semi-professional leagues in Australia as they do in some other sports, this would be the stuff of folklore.
It became obvious to those paying attention that he had a knack for coaching, and was quickly snapped up by Collingwood’s AFL program alongside legendary coach Mick Malthouse, and was a part of the coaching panel that led the Magpies to their droughtbreaking 2010 premiership. St Bedes Meltone have still not won a premiership in any division since 2008.
Beveridge then took a break in 2011 – a year that an “unbeatable” Collingwood side couldn’t get the job done against Geelong three times – before returning to assistant coaching at the top level, this time under Alastair Clarkson at Hawthorn, helping oversee the first two of the now famous threepeat, before a coaching spot opened up at the Western Bulldogs due to the retirement of Brendan McCartney.
When Beveridge took over at the Bulldogs, they were coming off of one of their worst three season runs in the modern era, with many tipping them to win the wooden spoon, due to just seven wins for the season and Adam Cooney and Ryan Griffin departing to Essendon and GWS respectively.
Instead, the modern Docklands marvel that is Luke Beveridge impressed right from the get go, taking a plucky young Bulldogs side to a sixth-place finish. In just his second season, Luke Beveridge famously won a flag for the Western Bulldogs, something his predecessors had failed to do for 62 years prior.
Since then the Bulldogs have continued to be thereabouts, but never quite finished the job. Even in 2016 they flew home from 7th to win the flag, and nearly did the same in 2021. One thing he does have over many other coaches who get scrutinised for getting the job mostly done but never completely is that he did win that first flag.
The intangible that we have to consider when it comes to Luke Beveridge is the strange and nigh unexplainable Docklands effect. No Docklands tenant has made the Top 4 since 2009, and the Bulldogs are the only Docklands tenant to win a premiership since its first year of operation when Essendon had their famous 2000 season run and resulting premiership.
This weird and near incomprehensible Docklands statistic makes it difficult to judge Luke Beveridge’s tenure when compared to other coaches. Against coaches who have lined up against him on multiple occasions, only five have a positive win-loss ratio, a further five have broken even at 50-50, and twenty-two have lost more than they have won against Beveridge’s Bulldogs.
Another common criticism of Beveridge is his willingness to throw the magnets around and play players seemingly out of position. A phenomenon that has come to be known in footy circles as “Crazy Bevo”. But for any of the failings of Crazy Bevo’s magnet switches, there are just as many – if not more – success stories.
Rory Lobb has been a revelation in the backline, Ed Richards was being touted as a Brownlow fancy a mere month ago after being moved from the backline to the midfield. Aaron Naughton and Sam Darcy were both seen as key defenders in their first seasons and yet the two look set to combine for over 100 goals this year.
Outside of positional switches, there was outcry and mockery at the fact Beveridge didn’t have Daniel or Macrae in his best 22, especially once they were traded and were looking to have an impact at their new clubs early this year. In their stead has come the clear reason why. Freijah has been a clear upgrade on Daniel and Kennedy on Macrae, as the shunned two sat on the bench at their respective new clubs for much of the final terms in Round 20.
The Western Bulldogs haven’t lost a game by more than ten goals since the 2021 Grand Final. No other team has a streak that extends back further than the start of 2024, with only seven teams – Bulldogs included – having not lost by ten or more goals this season. In fact the Bulldogs haven’t even lost a game by 50+ since their back to back 50 point losses to start off 2023 – a year they still almost stormed home to make finals.
For all the talk of the miraculous list that the Bulldogs possess, people fail to look past the stars and into the role players. The team that just last week dismantled an in-form GWS side to the tune of 88 points included names like James O’Donnell, Oskar Baker, Lachlan McNeil, Caleb Poulter and Lachlan Bramble. At times this year, they have been joined by Nick Coffield, Ryan Gardner, James Harmes and Harvey Gallagher. This is meant as no disrespect to these players who have done a great job under Bevo’s guidance, but they are by no means walk up starts at any other club in the AFL.
It is important to factor in many of these things when discussing both Luke Beveridge and the Western Bulldogs. It is easy to get caught up in their ceiling to floor ratio, and the games they have lost in recent years that they should have easily won, but when it is all laid out, Beveridge has one of the better modern coaching records, and remains the Bulldogs only AFL era premiership coach.
Will Luke Beveridge’s Bulldogs side cause havoc in the finals series this year, and win another unlikely flag? It’s probably less likely than it is likely, but they boast two of the most unstoppable players in the league in Bontempelli and Darcy and nobody loves an underdog story more than Bevo. I don’t think many teams would be excited to face them in a last chance final.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes
This is an excerpt from a longer piece published on CreditToDuBois
Simon Goodwin’s tenure as coach can, more than any other, be defined by a rule. Fitting for the coach of the Demons that this rule would be 6-6-6.
Round 1 2017 – Simon Goodwin’s first game as Melbourne Coach. The Demons take on Alan Richardson’s St Kilda. All time Saints great Nick Riewoldt kicks two goals in the first quarter continuing his long-running torment of Melbourne. The 6-6-6 rule isn’t even a gleam in Steve Hockings eye and Goodwin has up to 9 players starting in defence at times.
This isn’t a flooding strategy though – as the ball bounces the spares move through the centre square to provide attacking options. It sees them win 10 consecutive centre clearances and helps turn the match with a run of 10 goals.
Image: Fox Sports
Four years later and as far away from a Round 1 twilight game at Docklands as you can get – the 2021 Grand Final in Perth. We turn to the middle of the match. Marcus Bontempelli has put his Bulldogs three goals up and Melbourne are on the ropes. A goal to Bayley Fritsch sees the margin closed and the ball returned to the centre. In less than a minute of game time the Demons rip the ball out of the middle and score a further two. Even more astoundingly, ten minutes later they do the same again, scoring three goals in the final minute of the quarter.
The 6-6-6 rule means nowhere to hide and few ways for the Dogs to mitigate the damage. The result is the most astounding display of pure football since the peak of Geelong’s time under Mark Thompson, and possibly ever. Melbourne score 100 of the last 107 points of the match and Goodwin breaks the longest active premiership drought in the league.
We move forward another four years, but like many stories we return to where it started. Docklands. Twilight time-slot. The opponents are once again St Kilda, although faces have changed or moved roles. Alan Richardson now plays confidant to Goodwin rather than competitor. Nick Riewoldt provides commentary as Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera anoints himself as the heir to St Nick in the St Kilda mythos with two last quarter goals.
Like the Bulldogs four years prior, Melbourne finds their options limited in blunting a withering 9-goal onslaught. However, 6-6-6 still has an even more central role to play. Melbourne goes where few teams before have tread, and none with such dire consequences. They concede a free kick for a 6-6-6 infringement at the final centre bounce with scores tied. This leads to a Wanganeen-Milera mark and a goal after the siren to seal Goodwin’s fate.
He would go on to coach the following week, and Brad Green denies the result played a part in his sacking, but it’s plain to see this is where Goodwin’s career at Melbourne was decided
Throughout Goodwin’s coaching tenure his contribution to his game and club have continually and unfairly been diminished. Now is as good a time as any to look at his legacy.
Taking the team to a preliminary final in 2018 was largely credited to the framework Paul Roos set up. Make no mistake though, this was light years away from anything Roos had coached.
People finally gave Goodwin ownership of results when Melbourne finished in the bottom two the following year.
The ultimate success of 2021 was attributed to hyperbolic assessment of Melbourne as one of the greatest playing lists ever assembled. Yet it was seen as Goodwin’s failing when those same players kicked themselves out of consecutive finals in 2023.
Simon Goodwin took over from one of the more defensively-minded coaches of the modern era. Within two seasons he had forged the team into one of the most potent offences we’ve seen in a decade. He was then able to transform it once again into one of the greatest defensive sides in the game’s history. Most coaches don’t succeed in one style, yet Goodwin appears to be criticised more than anything else for not being able to guide a playing group through a third successful metamorphosis.
Does a radically smaller ground change how AFLW games are played?
Sean Lawson
A common take on social media is that AFL Women’s games would be better or higher scoring if played on a much smaller field. Presumably this notion is based on a perception that regular fields take too long to traverse for AFLW players’ kicking distances and running speeds.
For people who believe in shrinking AFLW grounds, the first round of the AFLW presents a very special opportunity to watch some women’s footy under these very conditions.
When Sydney host Richmond in their Round 1 clash at North Sydney Oval next Friday, viewers get to see the women’s game played on by far the smallest oval ever featured in either the AFLM or AFLW .
North Sydney is uniquely small, and more distinct from other venues than anything else seen in the AFLM or AFLW. At 125 metres, it is a full 25 metres shorter than any other AFL ground in use in either league, and 35 metres shorter than the average ground.
At 108 metres, it’s narrower than anything else except North Hobart Oval, though it’s relatively close to the narrowness of Norwood Oval’s width, a venue used in both the AFLW and AFLM.
In terms of area, using the simple formula for an ellipse, North Sydney Oval at about 10,600m² is about 58% of the area of the largest ground (Cazalys in Cairns), and only about two thirds the area of a standard ground like Docklands.
For reference here is a sortable list of all the grounds being used in the AFLW this year and their dimensions:
The centre squeeze
So, how does the wildly small field at North Sydney impact footy? Most obviously, the shape of the centre square changes. A typical modern footy field features a 50 metre arc at each end and a 50 metre centre square, which obviously will not all fit here.
Following the pre-2007 SCG strategy of arcs overlapping the square would look very odd here, and also create issues adjudicating the AFLW’s 5-6-5 centre bounce starting positions.
Instead, the solution devised is to squish the square end-to-end.This creates the opportunity for very unusual setups such as that employed by Chloe Molloy here:
The truncated “square” means a starting forward like Molloy can get to the bounce well before the wings do, and even beat midfielders to the ball.
Sydney don’t run this sort of approach as a full time measure, but here’s an example from 2023’s comeback win against GWS where Brooke Lochland comes in from the forward zone and gathers a hitout which on a full-sized field probably would have been collected by a midfielder:
Tactical exploration of the centre rectangle has probably been limited by there only being one game per year at NSO. After round 1, the Swans move over to the vibes capital of the AFLW in Henson Park, while North Sydney Oval groundskeepers start developing a cricket pitch for Sixers WBBL games.
As such, there’s only a modest benefit to spending very much time getting deep and creative on different centre bounce strategies which only work for the first week of the season.
However, the very close arcs do remain available for centre bounce tactical switch ups, and are something to watch for from Sydney and Richmond at North Sydney Oval on Friday night.
Footy’s dead space
Does the tiny ground impact scoring? There’s only a small sample, but what we can say is is these games have not been especially high scoring so far:
Teams have scored more at several much larger grounds, including the 2024 Swans v Richmond result game at Coffs Harbour. Coffs appears from footage and Google Maps measurements, to be a bit under 180 metres long, good for the longest venue in either league.
A primary reason why NSO doesn’t see more scoring is probably that large parts of a footy ground are dead space at any given time. Most footy is played in an effective area quite a bit smaller than even the tiniest AFL fields. Here’s a shot from last season’s game at North Sydney Oval, ahead of a throw-in at the forward pocket:
All players are bunched into roughly one quarter of even this very small playing surface.
Consider how we expect play to unfold here. A throw-in possession can only be kicked a certain distance, and players are positioned to get wherever a kick could go. At that point, there could be a mark or free kick, or a spilled ground ball. In either case, players will already be running to maintain the bubble around that new situation.
There’s only so far, and so fast, the ball can go, and players work to keep ahead of that action. At all times, the players’ reading of the situation, their structures, and their anticipation, define the active play area, and it’s always an area much smaller than the entire field.
Fully using the entire field all at once means getting the ball truly to the outside of the active bubble, which eventually results in a released player running into an open goal. It’s difficult to engineer that, and if it happens, the empty grass ahead of the play works the same and plays the same, regardless of dimensions.
Vertical and horizontal space
Intuitively, though, one would think that 35 metres less distance goal to goal would result in far more scoring just because less kicks are required to get there.
Quick-end to-end play does occasionally take place at North Sydney, if things break correctly:
If a team can chain together long kicks either by winning a few contests or well executed leads, the shortened space is certainly there to exploit, and the game will have moments of very rapid transition from end to end.
However, just as often, the narrow width and short length of the ground combine to crush the available horizontal space and congest the game. Here’s Collingwood exiting defensive 50 towards the very shallow wings and finding themselves immediately with little room to move:
This is fairly normal coverage by Sydney on a wide Collingwood ball, but note how in this smaller ground, the Swans players pretty comfortably occupy space all the way to the corridor and a little beyond. Switching play and shifting defences will be relatively difficult with only 109 metres of width.
The lack of width, and the temptation of that short vertical distance, should often allow teams to hedge more strongly towards defending down the line roost kicks.
All in all, when it comes to a shrunken AFLW field, there doesn’t seem to be a particular reason to think that knocking 30 metres off the end-to-end distance is enough to make up for the relatively easy width coverage also allowed. That roaming bubble of footy action can move both directions, but when it overlaps with the edges of the ground, it can afford defending teams more capacity to congest ahead of the ball.
This isn’t to say that a smaller ground can’t have high scores, rather it’s just to say that like any other ground, scoring levels are probably dependent on tactics and team attributes rather than the amount of raw physical space.
Around the Grounds
Andrew Barr, Chief Minister of the ACT, made that government’s most concrete statement yet about being in the mix for the next expansion to team 20, assumed likely to come if/when Tasmania is locked in as team 19.
Speaking of Tasmania, post-election government formation is inching towards happening via testing confidence on the floor of parliament. The Liberals will get first crack but at this stage either major party may end up forming, and prospects for the stadium are unclear.
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.
Sometimes they come on the field, but there’s the rare off-field moment that raises a smile.
Trigger warning for Demons fans.
The utter insanity of the St Kilda comeback against Melbourne has to be seen to be believed. For all bar the most one-eyed of Melbourne fans it’s an example of footy at its electrifying best.
That led to one of the better off-field moments of the season too.
Ross Lyon dancing with Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera on his shoulders, I repeat, Ross Lyon dancing with Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera on his shoulders.
After Nas' late-game heroics in St Kilda's unfathomable win over Melbourne on Sunday night, vision emerged of coach Ross Lyon partying with… pic.twitter.com/K1OI7NXcNQ
There’s going to be a lot written on the future of St Kilda, Ross Lyon, Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera and physiotherapy treatments for men in their late 50s lifting other men on their shoulders, but sometimes you just need to enjoy the game as it comes.
This week in football we have:
Winning the close ones
Joe Cordy
After a bumpy start to Craig McRae’s first season at the helm of Collingwood that saw them struggle to a 4-5 record, success quickly followed. The Pies stormed home in the back half of the season, winning 12 of their last 13 home & away games to secure a top four spot with the lowest percentage since North Melbourne in 2007.
What was truly remarkable about the run wasn’t the stark change in fortune, it was the trend that would come to be the defining factor of McRae’s tenure thus far: his side had a preternatural ability to win close games.
In what must’ve felt like cruel irony, it all came apart in September. Collingwood lost to both of the eventual grand finalists by single goal margins.
Season over.
What seemed at the time like the beginning of a regression to the mean failed to materialise the next season however. Collingwood finished 8-1 in single-digit margin games, all culminating in the lowest combined margin from any premiership side to win three finals.
Even as their premiership defence fell apart due to an injury crisis that saw them miss the top 8 the next year, their record in close games held mostly steady (albeit allowing a couple of draws and just barely non-qualifying losses through the gates).
Following their six-point loss to Gold Coast away and subsequent one-point loss to Fremantle at home, 2025 became the first time that this era of Collingwood have ever had a losing record across a season in games decided by a single kick.
Some analysts of the game would tell you this was bound to happen eventually. There’s plenty of evidence that on a long enough timeframe, any team’s record in such games will regress towards a 50/50 W-L split, and that the results of such games are “mostly luck.”
Football, though, is first and foremost a game of skill. While there’s always variance game to game and moment to moment in how well a given player or team executes those skills, as well as elements completely out of your control, you can control enough to tip the scales in your favour.
What McRae and his coaching staff have identified and drilled into the team is the effects of chaos and control in close-game scenarios; namely, how much variance you let into the game.
When Collingwood are chasing a lead late they want to play as open and expansive as possible, even to the point of counterintuitiveness.
Time is the enemy, and so congestion and stoppages must be avoided at all costs, even if it means letting the ball spill out of a tackle. You’re more likely to win back clean possession in open play than a stoppage, and if you’re going to lose anyway it doesn’t make much difference if it’s by one goal or two.
Conversely, when Collingwood are aiming to defend such a lead, they want to reduce the variance by restricting the amount of football that can possibly happen.
Time is the enemy, and so congestion and stoppages are the best way to kill it. Search for the boundary, eschew first possession at stoppages so that you can descend on your opponents when they win it, and either continue to clog up the game or win possession back via free kick.
The principles of it are simple, but nothing comes easily after being physically and mentally drained by running a dozen kilometres and making thousands of small decisions in a brief 2-3 hour window.
The importance of keeping your clarity of mind was arguably never clearer than during the last ten seconds of Round 20, when Melbourne had lost sight of their rotations so badly they gave away game-defining 6-6-6 free kick, while St Kilda’s star ruck and midfielder coordinated a set play to create an uncontested marking opportunity inside forward-50.
However, Collingwood’s edge in this area has started disappearing. Not due to fatigue or absentmindedness, but opponents copying their homework. Some of the earlier adopters have looked pretty inelegant, like Sam Draper diving onto the footy and seeming to dare the umpire to call him out on it.
Collingwood’s recent match against Fremantle must’ve felt like looking into a mirror.
While they tried to open up space and get the ball forward by any means available, they faced a team running McRae’s “kill the game” playbook almost to perfection: pinning the ball at arm’s length to create stoppages without dragging it in, hanging off opponents and conceding first possession in order to wrap them up, handballing along the ground to keep the game congested, even descending on their own grounded teammates to make sure the ball doesn’t go anywhere they don’t want it to.
It was a genuine masterclass on both sides of the equation, but more importantly it was the clearest example that the tactical niche McRae has carved out for himself is quickly vanishing.
Collingwood will still have a massive edge in these situations against disorganised, flustered opponents, but they’re unlikely to ever put up records like 8-1 in these situations again. It’ll probably look like a run of bad luck.
How about a 186cm Full Forward?
Cody Atkinson
Are we ready for Jake Melksham, key position forward?
Well it doesn’t really matter if we are ready or not – the time is here.
source: afl.com.a
But how did we get here – whatever this place is?
When this TWIF correspondent watched the surprisingly enjoyable Carlton/Melbourne game at the MCG in round 19, something slightly peculiar stood out. No points for the guess here – it’s how Carlton responded to how Melbourne were using Jake Melksham.
The Demons planted the former Bomber deep in the forward line – often as the closest forward to goal. That’s not particularly unusual across the league. Many sides throw a smaller option deep towards goal to throw the traditional defensive set up off kilter. Charlie Cameron played that role regularly for Brisbane’s most dangerous forward lines, for example.
Usually this attempt succeeds, and the tall defender usually assigned the deep anchor role is forced up the ground to follow taller timber. In theory it diminishes the ability of the attacking side to take contested grabs inside 50, but it helps generate space and cause disruptions.
Melksham has also been one of two dangerous forwards for the Demons all year – alongside Pickett. Fritsch has had his moments, but the stocks have been pretty bare this year.
As alluded to above, Carlton didn’t respond in the usual way. They didn’t stick a small or medium sized defender on Melksham. Instead, they tasked All Australian key position defender Jacob Weitering on him. In isolation this matchup worked for Carlton – Melksham managed just one goal for the game and one mark inside 50, with Weitering hoovering up 6 intercept marks.
TWIF asked Voss about the match-up after the game.
“How important is it to have a tall (Weitering) that is mobile enough to go with someone, I guess, you know, half a foot a foot shorter than him?
Yeah, he’s a big man. So to get past him is a bit of a challenge. You want to be able to build a defense that can play tall, small – take their turns when they need to. That seems to be what modern defenses are all about. Play a little bit more with where your relevance is to the ball and where your strengths lie…At the same time, we’d like him further up the ground doing what he does best, which is obviously generating and interrupting opposition’s passes of play.”
For the Demons the tactic is likely bourne out of desperation – a lack of reliable talls to direct traffic through. This make Voss’s response to the situation easier – without multiple credible tall targets deep, it becomes easier to place the most mobile one on the deep anchor – even if that anchor is on the smaller side.
So how does this all relate to Jake Melksham, 186cm KPP?
It’s worth noting this is the first year that Melksham is considered to be a tall forward. That’s down not to just how Melbourne have used him, but also how teams like Carlton have responded in kind.
It turns out that some player classifications are determined not just by position on the ground and particular nominated roles (such as ruck), but also by the players that are determined to match up on them. Champion Data employees callers at the ground to not only determine what happens on the field but also on field matchups. These matchups are relatively rigid and static. The nature of the role perhaps doesn’t reflect how modern footy is played – but that’s a tangent for another day.
So, you’re telling me I can get paid to watch footy 🤯 We went behind the scenes with Champion Data to see just how they tell the story of the game and deliver live stats to you in seconds ⚡️ Follow us to learn more of some of the most epic jobs in the sports industry! #jobsinsport#championdata#afl#aussierules#analytics#dataanalytics#fyp
It’s these matchups that feed into the player classification model. The type of forward (key or general) is determined not just by where they line up on the ground, but also who lines up alongside them. Because sides like Carlton have sent KPDs to mind Melksham, Champion Data have determined that the small to medium sized forward is actually tall.
Determining player positions is tough in modern footy. The days of the standard footy field grid are long in the past when looking at how teams actually operate on the park. Interim measures – such as the Champion Data classifications – are increasingly being stretched by inventive coaching and game evolution.
Using the new Draft Value Index to analyse which positions each club has spent their points on over the last decade
Interestingly, North has spent the 3rd most points but only 10% has been allocated to key positions (which ranks them 15th on aggregate) pic.twitter.com/hmbi74HfDj
Further research is being done at both club level and by independent analysts. TWIF’s own James Ives has teased different player classifications, while former legend The Arc developed his own model way back in 2016.
Or maybe Jake Melksham is just a 186cm KPP? Probably not, but maybe?
What statistics are correlated with winning and losing in season 2025? And how do those correlations differ for different teams with different strengths and game styles?
This article comes with an acknowledgement and a few disclaimers. I wouldn’t have been able to do this without the incredible work of Andrew Whelan of WheeloRatings.com – having such a rich data source as a base meant I could take the time to pull together the analysis.
The disclaimer, for the purposes of this piece, is that I’ve used really simple linear regression with r2as the basis for determining correlation. It’s not something you’d use to try to put a predictive model together, but it does enough to allow us to draw some interesting points.
Another disclaimer is that correlation is not causation, and doesn’t establish directionality. For example, West Coast’s margins are more strongly correlated to their ruck output than the rest of the league. Is that because when Bailey Williams and Matt Flynn have managed to win the battle, Harley Reid is able to go to work, or is it that an opposing ruck getting bested by them is emblematic of a team ripe to be beaten by West Coast?
It could also be that a given stat is a real non-negotiable for a team, it’s something they can be relied to win week in week out regardless of the end result – which would be reflected in a low correlation. The data can hopefully lead us to some interesting points for discussion, but can’t be definitive one way or the other.
Lastly,it is worth noting that I have used stat differentials (team minus opponent) rather than raw stats when correlating to margin, so keep that in mind.
With that out of the way, let’s get into the statistical correlations.
As you’d expect, kicking more goals than your opponent is very strongly tied to the final result. Champion Data’s rating points are also very closely correlated.
We can see that xScore has a higher correlation with victory than the pure number of shots, which we’d expect from a measure that incorporates not just the volume but the level of difficulty of shots taken.
Among score sources, Points from Turnover appear more valuable than Points from Stoppage, unsurprising as turnover is the primary scoring source. Points from forward half are a better predictor than points from defensive half.
xScore rating, that is how well the teams are executing on the shots at goal they generate, appears to be worth about as much as a gap in uncontested possessions, which is a better predictor than contested possessions or clearances.
Commit more clangers than your opponent and you’re likely to lose, however the correlation is relatively weak (to have a clanger you’ve generally got possession first).
Defensive half pressure acts is a rare example of a “positive” stat with a negative correlation to margin. If you’re racking them up, it means both that the ball is in your defensive half and the opponent has control of it.
We’ve got the league averages, so where and how does each team diverge on individual statistics?
The arrow indicates the direction a team diverges from – a red arrow to the left means that stats correlates less (or more negatively) with margin for the team than for the league at large and blue indicates stronger correlation.
Adelaide win through having a better spread of goalkickers than their opponents. They’ve had more unique goalscorers on 10 occasions for an eye-watering average margin of +62 points. Handballs are more valuable in their games than average, and kicks less so. The gap in value of points from forward half compared to defensive half expands.
They also don’t rely on a high mark inside 50 differential as much as the rest of the league. To revisit our disclaimer, this doesn’t necessarily mean they’re bad at it, just that it hasn’t correlated with winning and losing to the same degree it has for other teams. Adelaide has lost 5 games for the year – in three of them they won marks inside 50 and in a fourth they drew. They’ve lost marks inside 50 three times, and won two of those games. They’ve drawn it three times for a three point loss and two 10+ goal wins. They’ve also managed to win by 10+ goals with a +0,+0,+1, and +2 marks inside 50.
Brisbane aren’t converting xScore into wins particularly well (because they’re 4th worst in goal accuracy this year). They’re getting more value from centre clearances than most teams, and appear to not be as affected by turnovers. This is partly driven by the fact that they haven’t had a turnover differential larger than 8 in the positive or negative whereas a quarter of games league-wide have blown out past this.
Carlton don’t often lose more defensive 1 on 1s than their opponent, only on four occasions so far and never by more than two. Their biggest wins against West Coast and North saw them win the stat by 6 and 4 respectively. When they’ve been required to make more defensive half pressure acts than their opponent however they’ve got an average margin of -24 compared to +20 the other way.
Similar to Adelaide, Collingwood benefit from having a better spread of goalkickers than their opponents. All of Collingwood’s losses have come while winning the inside 50 count and three of the four came while also winning the marks inside 50 count, including a three point loss to Geelong while recording their best differential for the year (+9).
They’ve only lost the tackle count once all year, in their opening round drubbing by GWS. While they recorded a solid +21 tackles in their 1 point loss to Fremantle, the other two losses saw low differentials (for Collingwood) of 8 and 10. Three of their four biggest wins have matched up with their three biggest tackle differentials. Their pressure game also helps explain why they can lose the kick count convincingly and still come out on top.
Essendon want clean hands. Their average result is a 47 point loss when recording more ineffective handballs than their opponent, compared to just a 9 point loss when recording fewer. This is mirrored in effective disposal tallies. It’s not surprising, decimated by injury my best guess is that they just don’t have the drilled structures in place to respond to errors so when things go bad there is little damage mitigation.
It’s been a common theme of criticism that Fremantle can tend to rack up meaningless uncontested possessions. They’re 7-3 in games they win the count and 6-3 when losing it, but with a slightly better average margin. By comparison their average margin when winning contested possession is +26.2 compared to -10 when losing it.
Geelong benefit from winning the intercept game as well as tackles inside 50. When the Cats have recorded +8 tackles inside 50 or better they average a 65 point win. On the two occasions they’ve achieved -8 or worse they’ve lost by 18 and 41. They also don’t mind getting on the positive end of some xScore variance. Points from stoppage aren’t as big a predictor for them as others.
Gold Coast are towards the bottom of the league for post-clearance ground ball, but they’re 8-1 when they’ve won the stat. They boast the same record when winning crumbing possessions, but are dead average in the stat across the season.
GWS have only won points from centre bounce in 6 games this season, but they’re 6-0 with an average margin of +45 when doing so. They’re not as dependent as most teams on building an xScore advantage to win, because they outperform their opponents on xScore rating by a maddening 10+ points per game.
I’ll be back next week to step through the remaining nine teams as well as hopefully looking at which teams do or don’t have their performance captured well by Rating Points.
Comparing this year’s finals race
Sean Lawson
The race for finals is down to 9 teams with a month left to play in the regular season of 2025. Sydney’s loss to GWS dropped their already remote finals chances to the purely mathematical realms involving multiple wooden spooner upsets, two collapsing teams, and improbable percentage boosts.
The remaining equation is pretty simple. One team from the top 9 is going to miss out, and after the Dogs smashed GWS last night, there’s 4 teams (GWS, Hawthorn, Freo and Bulldogs) with a decent chance of missing the cut.
With 4 weeks of the season to go, this is unusually early for so few teams to be in the hunt for finals in the 18 team era.
The peculiarity of this season’s ladder is naturally being used to argue for an expansion of the finals to ten sides, so more teams can avoid dead rubbers for longer. However, Greg Swann appears to see the 10-team finals series as a change to be made when there’s 19 teams.
Most years since 2012 have seen several clubs still in close contention for catching 8th spot. Indeed, some recent seasons have still seen the team as far adrift as 13th a viable chance of qualification, although on average, the top of the bottom 6 has been more than three games behind the pace.
2016 was the last year where so few teams were in contention for finals a month out. In 2016, there were three games separating North Melbourne in 8th from St Kilda in 9th. Funnily enough, this was the season where North opened by winning 10 of their first 11, and by August were in open free-fall. North failed to win another game after round 20, and the Saints only missed finals on percentage.
If making up 1 or 2 games on 8th is reasonably possible with a month remaining, most years we can expect up to four teams to still have fans furiously running their ladder predictors and death riding certain opponents.
This year, all of the calculation of permutations is confined to the top 9 sides. The big reason there’s such a small chasing pack this year is that the fringe finalists are simply losing fewer games.
This year is the first season since 2018 where the team in 8th has only lost 7 games to this point. Further, with the longer season thanks to Gather Round, the Suns on 12 wins are the winningest 8th place team yet seen in the 18 team era.
A further consequence of the success of the teams ranked 5 to 8 is that a winning by teams outside the top 4 is that the actual positional spread within the top 8 is quite close at the start of Round 21.
Those stronger results for the bottom few teams, and the lack of a runaway ladder leader, mean nearly everything is still up for grabs.
The last few weeks of the season should be a tight jostle for home finals and double chances, everyone in the finals race has winning form to point to, there’s no clear single standout leading team, and it’s honestly strange that so many commentators seem to think that this all constitutes a “dismal” or “boring” season.
Simply the best way to prepare for the upcoming AFLW season is a podcast previewing every team by Gemma Bastiani and Sarah Black, and luckily, that’s exactly a thing which exists. The W Download is running under the old Credit to the Girls Feed, and so far they’ve covered half the teams in their first three episodes.
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.
A small moment in the aftermath of Carlton’s win over Melbourne last weekend went largely unnoticed except by those who pay attention to post-match press conferences.
There’s a good reason that most people don’t pay attention to press conferences. This was one of the exceptions.
At the end of the journalist questions, Michael Voss took a moment to speak about the Carlton Respects program, a community program the football club funds, focused on educating about gender equality as a tool to combat gendered violence.
It is a serious subject that requires more focus, and more broad attention. Gendered violence is a societal problem that requires real discussions and policy solutions. Football is a just a game, but it is at its best when it mirrors and assists society at large.
It probably says something about the perfunctory and rote nature of many press conferences that this went by without much further attention.
Last week, I unveiled the Threat Index, which attempts to identify how threatening teams are across the course of a match. The Threat Index can also guide us on how well teams capitalise on a combination of territory, possession and shots at goal.
This week, I will detail which teams concede the most goals against the run of play and the games with the biggest margin-threat differentials where a team has lost the game with greater threat.
Part 1: Brisbane’s Achilles Heel
For years, Brisbane have been dominant in both their transition ball movement and their ability to generate forward half turnovers. If there is one criticism of their game, it’s their inability to capitalise on their field position. In season 2025, almost 40% of opposition goals are scored while Brisbane has greater threat. This is one of the highest returns over the last five years.
It helps explain why I’ve left a couple of Brisbane games wondering if I read the scoreboard incorrectly.
Part of this is a result of their aggressive front half press, which explains why we also see other dominant front half teams, such as Collingwood, with high percentages. Interestingly, Melbourne and Carlton both concede similarly high percentages, albeit with much less territory and possession than the likes of Brisbane and Collingwood.
Part 2: The Back Breakers
That leads into a broader type of game – where a team wins despite the flow of game being against them. Here is a list of games with the biggest differentials between threat and margin.
Gold Coast’s round 19 horror loss against Adelaide comes out on top. We can see a critical period early in the game between Adelaide’s 2nd and 3rd goal in the visualisation below.
In this five-minute stretch, Gold Coast had eight inside 50s to Adelaide’s two, and three shots to Adelaide’s one – which was generated from a kick-in and resulted in a Tex Walker banana from the pocket with an expected score of 2.3. A truly soul-crushing goal against the run of play.
Part 3: The Threat Leaders
The threat ladder shows Brisbane sitting atop, led by their dominant possession and front half game.
Carlton and Melbourne sit just inside the top 8, highlighting their inability to convert territory into scores. While GWS sit 13th, highlighting their ability to absorb positional pressure and their counter-attacking prowess.
As always, please send through any requests, feedback or questions.
Centre bounces are one of the things that sets Australian football apart. Not so much for the novelty of the bounce, but because after a major score possession is reset to neutral. In most sports play restarts with the ball in possession, whether alternating (e.g. netball) or given to the team who conceded (e.g. basketball, soccer).
That makes centre bounces an incredibly potent weapon. There aren’t any brakes that the rules applied, only what the opposition can summon. A patch of dominance can reshape the course of a game in mere moments.
Who’s delivering at centre bounces this year then?
Getting the clearance isn’t the only way a player can contribute at a centre bounce. First possession is important, rucks can add a lot through hitouts to advantage, and defensive pressure is critical. For the purpose of a single number to measure impact though clearances work pretty well.
Centre bounce attendance and clearance rate, 2025
As expected, down the bottom right in the “high attendance, low clearance” group we see the primary rucks. Solo rucks are there 80% or more of the time, but they’re generally not going to be winning clearances themselves at a high rate.
Above that we’ve got some of the other heavily used midfielders. Caleb Serong stands out among them as the only player attending a high number of clearances to keep a clearance rate (clearances / bounces attended) above 15%.
The top left is where things probably get the most interesting. We’ve got three players who have attended (relatively) few bounces this year but when they do are making things happen at an alarming rate.
Going back as far as 2021 (and limiting only to players with 100+ CBAs in a full season (or 75+ so far this year), Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera, Joel Freijah, and Cam Rayner are the only players to have a clearance rate above 20% across a season (Paddy Dow finished with exactly 20% in 2023).
How these three got to their CBA numbers is quite different though.
Centre bounce attendance by Freijah, Wanganeen-Milera and Rayner by round, 2025
Wanganeen-Milera has had four games with 40%+ attendance, including 79% last week, his other 14 games have seen two in the 20s, three below 10%, and the rest with no attendances. It seems clear the Saints are looking to build into him the capacity to be an elite primary midfielder, rather than a half-back who rotates through.
Freijah on the other hand has seen between 20% and 40% of bounces in 11 of his 18 and attended at least 5% every week. Rayner is somewhat similar, although with a higher floor and lower ceiling, all of his games falling between 7.7% and 25%.
This brings us to the question of how teams are sharing the load more generally.
Club centre bounce attendance distributions, 2025
The chart is ranked in ladder order as of the end of round 19. Teams where the dark colour extends further right represent a higher concentration of CBAs among a smaller number of players – for example 93% of Brisbane’s CBAs have been taken by 6 players – Neale, Dunkley, McCluggage, Ashcroft, and the two rucks in Fort and McInerney. By comparison Essendon and West Coast use 13 and 12 players to fill out the first 93% of CBAs.
What does it mean to have a settled centre bounce lineup? To be able to distil down into a single number I’ve chosen a measure of what % of centre bounce attendances are filled by the first 8 players across a season. This is arbitrary to an extent, but looking through the data appeared to give a reasonable point of separation between teams. It then allows us to compare it to an output – centre clearance differential.
Centre bounce attendance differentials vs centre bounce attendance concentration since 2021
We can see two things. Firstly a higher proportion of CBAs from a core group appears to correlate to a better centre clearance return. This matches intuition, one of the primary drivers of a high concentration of CBAs is health. Having your top tier midfielders available throughout more of the season will naturally yield better results.
The second is that over the last 5 seasons CBAs have become more concentrated among a smaller group of players. Four of the 9 most concentrated CBAs occur this year – although for very different ladder results with the teams being Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne, and North Melbourne.
We also see Richmond and Port Adelaide as the most concentrated teams to have averaged a -1 differential or worse further showing that consistency alone isn’t a guarantee of even centre bounce results.
Big Docker has you fooled
Sean Lawson
What’s a “big club”?
There’s a well understood hierarchy in Victoria with the “Big 4 clubs” at the top being Collingwood, Essendon, Carlton and Richmond. These clubs have the largest fanbases, long histories of success and the most money. At the other end are the Docklands tenants (derogatory) who have small fanbases, lower profiles and more difficult histories. Regional Geelong and nouveau riche Hawthorn somewhere in the middle.
But what about the rest of the country?
It is generally also understood that West Coast and Adelaide are very rich and powerful clubs, by virtue of their large market share in the second and third cities of Australian football. After that though, perceptions and characterisations by fans and media tend to get a lot murkier.
I decided to test public perceptions of the middle cases by asking twitter followers:
As it turns out, most people see the second teams in Adelaide and Perth as “small” clubs, but quite a few more see the Lions in Brisbane as a bigger club.
This didn’t surprise me because I think it quantified something I’ve long noticed about the Dockers: most fans think they are effectively a “minnow” club, and this may even include a bit of an inferiority complex within their own fanbase.
The reasons for this perception aren’t difficult to understand. The Dockers had a tortured early history, while existing in the same city with the bank-breaking death star of a club that is West Coast.
And of course, the Dockers haven’t won a flag, whereas the Lions have won 4. Premierships create the perception of power and size, even if Essendon exist to remind us that money doesn’t buy football happiness in the modern world.
To a certain extent this underdog branding is also how the club positions itself – scrappy battler, ignored by other fans and the media, set up to fail from day 1, disrespected and treated poorly, starved of success.
This perception is, however, all an illusion. By most reasonable metrics, the Dockers are not just middling, but a powerhouse of a clubs.
Most obviously, Freo are one of two teams from a pretty big city, one not much less than half the size of Australia’s largest city, Melbourne.
Perth is footy’s second city and quite a lot larger (and richer) than Adelaide. If we assume the club split in both cities is about 60:40, then the smaller share of Perth is larger than majority share of Adelaide.
On the strength of this background alone, we have to suspect that even the smaller team based out west has to be doing pretty well for itself.
And that scale of population translates into fans. Fremantle’s crowds have been persistently huge for years now. They used to fill Subiaco pretty well and right now, with the Eagles at a low ebb, they’re even outdrawing the cross-town megaclub.
Indeed, Freo are outdrawing everyone else except Collingwood right now. That’s when we measure each club’s own fanbase in isolation by excluding games where both teams are based in the same city and both fanbases are contributing to the crowd figures:
Money-wise, Fremantle is a fairly well-off club, too. The AFL distributes shares of broadcast revenue to all clubs to enable them to fully fund their football programs to clubs. Small needier clubs receive more revenue and larger clubs receive less.
These distributions serve as a rough (but not exact, given differences in operating costs and the like) guide to how the AFL has measured each club’s financial capacity:
Fremantle are among the clubs considered to need the least support, as befits a big team in the second city of football.
Note that on the other hand, the Lions receive a lot of support from the AFL, as they have done since equalisation really took hold around 2015. The Lions are based in a development market and were heavily impacted by the introduction of the Suns, with membership and crowd data indicating that perhaps a quarter or more of the Lions’ attendance base (presumably concentrated in Gold Coast) was lost to the Suns. That impact would have amounted to several million dollars of revenue a season.
Fremantle’s financial health is of course largely because, with those huge crowds and a large, rich and football-obsessed city at their back, they generate simply a lot of money from football.
This is my best estimate of the relative “profitability” of each club’s football operations, from an article earlier in the year. It is the money they make from sponsors, memberships, gate, merchandise, after the costs of providing these things are deducted:
With their lack of silverware, their powerful neighbour, their off-broadway TV timeslots and low profile in Melbourne, Fremantle might not feel like a powerhouse club. But perception isn’t reality. They aren’t West Coast, but the Dockers are massive. Don’t let them or their enemies trick you into thinking otherwise.
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.
There might never be a definitive answer to that philosophical issue. In the meantime Greg Swann will be tasked with what might be one of the hardest jobs in the code.
As of Monday, the former Brisbane Lions head honcho steps into AFL House in a newly created “Football Performance Executive” role in the executive suite.
Similar jobs have created vitriol for those who have sat in the chair. Names like Hocking, Scott and Kane have been spat out in colourful terms by those in the outer whenever any change to the game is made.
Swann will rapidly become the face of the changes that will inevitably be made to the sport in the coming years. Swann has already flagged the “speed of game” as something that may need to be addressed. Concussions and head knocks also continue to be a major issue, with contact and tackle rules surely being investigated for potential change.
Whatever decisions the league makes, there will be an element of footy fandom that just wants the game to return to what it was. Keeping those people, the clubs, the media and the rest of the AFL executive happy is a tough tightrope to walk.
Swann will have a tough job ahead in an increasingly combative football conversation.
This week in football we have:
If only there was an easier way to talk about goalkicking accuracy
“For the past four seasons, the Giants have an accuracy rate of 54 per cent at home, while the opposition convert at just 43 per cent at Engie Stadium. The League average in that time is 49 per cent, meaning the Giants at home are well above AFL average, while their opponents are well below it”
This piece raised a few eyebrows among some of the contributors to This Week In Football, primarily because it focused solely on goalkicking accuracy (goals vs behinds) and made no mention of the expected score (or xScore, for short).
If you’re not familiar with the term, the expected score concept looks at every shot on goal each team has over the course of the game and calculates how many points each shot should have scored based on historical scoring data. The historical data considers a range of factors when determining the xScore, including how far away from goal the player is, the angle of the shot, whether they are taking a set shot or are under pressure.
Different analysts and organisations have created their own xScore models, including Andrew Whelan (Wheelo Ratings), Adam Tunney (AFL xScore), and ESPN. But ultimately all of the models indicate whether individual players or teams have scored more or less points than what they should have. It’s a more sophisticated way of looking at scoring among AFL teams compared to simply looking at goalkicking accuracy.
And we don’t have to look too far back in order to find a game that highlights some of the differences between goalkicking accuracy instead of something slightly more sophisticated: the clash between Hawthorn and Fremantle in Round 18, where Fremantle won by 15 points. The Dockers were more accurate from a goalkicking perspective (12 goals, five behinds from 17 shots at goal; 60%) compared to the Hawks (nine goals, eight behinds from the same number of shots, 40.9%).
However, Fremantle under-performed from an xScore perspective while Hawthorn essentially scored as expected – primarily because of the very small number of shots from high-value positions. Andrew Whelan’s shot map (below) highlights this quite nicely.
Credit: Andrew Whelan
So now that we have a better idea of what xScore is and how it is more nuanced that goalkicking accuracy alone, let’s look to see how the Giants (and their opponents) perform at Engie Stadium with respect to xScore using Adam’s AFL xScore data over the same timeframe as the original article (2022 to 2025).
Over the past four seasons Greater Western Sydney have exceeded their expected score by an average of at least 4.9 points while playing at the Showgrounds, and have exceeded their expected score in over half of the games they have played. This is well above what is seen for their opponents and the league more broadly with respect to both the average difference between the expected and actual scores, and the proportion of games where the actual score exceeds the expected score.
Examining the xScore data also shows that the Giants’ performances at the Showgrounds in 2025 is somewhat of an outlier compared to other years, unlike what is seen when we only consider goalkicking accuracy. GWS have kicked goals from more than half of their shots in four of their six games at the venue so far this year and exceeded their expected score in all but one of the games.
The two matches with sub-50% goalkicking accuracy were the Opening Round clash with Collingwood and their Round 10 encounter with Fremantle, while the Fremantle game is they lone match where they did not exceed the expected score. Astute observers will notice that the Dockers clash is the one game the Giants have lost at the Showgrounds this season.
It’s a much different picture at Manuka – the Giant’s home away from home, however. GWS perform significantly below average on each of the metrics, and their opponents seem to have good years and bad years when playing in the nation’s capital. It therefore comes as little surprise to see that the Giants have a much better record at the Showgrounds (19-10) compared to Manuka (4-12) over this period of time. Fans of the orange team will take some comfort in the fixture, with the Giants slated to play two more games at their home base in Sydney and only one more in Canberra.
Other teams who have significantly outperformed their opponents on xScore are Sydney at the SCG (average difference in proportion of games above xScore of 23%, even with there being no difference to this point in 2025), Hawthorn at York Park (+21%), and Adelaide at the Adelaide Oval (+20%). At the other end of the spectrum, Melbourne at the MCG (-17%), Brisbane at the Gabba (-19%), and Richmond at Docklands (-38%) tend to score below their xScore more frequently compared to their opponents.
Is there a more frustrating sequence as an AFL fan than when your team concedes a goal against the run of play?
Every fan has experienced it before. A sustained period of territory and possession dominance, only for the opposition to slingshot down the other end and score a goal – killing off all ‘momentum’ with one big giant sucker punch.
It was noticeable in the Richmond vs Carlton clash in round one, where Carlton dominated all night peppering Richmond with a barrage of inside 50s only to find themselves down by 11 of the final siren; or Gold Coast’s back-to-back goals following Collingwood’s 40-point comeback in round 18; or Brisbane’s inability to capitalise in the last 10 minutes of their round 13 clash against Adelaide. Currently, we can tell the story through a combination of territory, possession, inside 50s, expected scores. But there isn’t an all-encompassing metric that measures threat. That’s what I’ve attempted to do in this piece.
What is it?
Threat is derived from my previous expected threat model with elements of equity ratings. It aggregates the maximum probability of scoring a goal from each chain across a rolling (approximate) 5 minute window to determine which team had the more threatening chains.
How is it calculated?
The goal scoring probability is calculated using field position and possession states – set and general play – for every possession in a chain. It then derives the maximum goal scoring probability for the team that owns the chain.
Examples
Takeaways:
Carlton was more threatening for large parts of the game
Richmond managed to score 7 goals in periods where Carlton was more threatening compared to Carlton’s 1 (which now allows us to understand how many goals teams score/concede against the run of play)
Takeaways
This game was a lot more even with both teams scoring goals against the run of play
3 of Adelaide’s last 5 goals came during periods when Brisbane had greater threat
The most dominant period of play came in the last 20 chains when Brisbane failed to capitalise
Next steps
This is still somewhat of a work in progress and requires some further tweaking. Any feedback is welcome.
Next week I’ll detail which teams lead the league in scoring and conceding against the run of play.
P.S Please @ me if you’d like me to run the viz for any specific games from the season so far.
Given that Shark Week starts this Sunday this topic seems only fitting.
For those unaware, Champion Data gives a definition of a sharked hitout as “A hitout that directly results in an opponent’s possession.”
[author’s note: I’ve had to infer sharks from the data I’ve got which probably results in some false positives. I’d expect my numbers to be a little higher volume and lower quality, but should still be broadly representative]
So, who is Jaws to the AFL’s Amity Island?
Jack Macrae has a clear lead feasting off opposing rucks, and the list overall isn’t too surprising – elite inside midfielders who are great at winning their own ball.
On the other side of the ledger it’s Matt Flynn who’s chumming the water most regularly this year.
If we expand it out to a team-wide scale we can find Adelaide has the worst differential in the league between sharking and being bait, which isn’t totally surprising as Reilly O’Brien gets sharked regularly.
St Kilda being on top is somewhat surprising, while the Bulldogs at #2 are to be expected with the mids available to them.
I’ve got data going back to 2017, so let’s see if there are any particular feeding frenzies. On top we’ve got Brisbane feasting on Adelaide to the tune of 26 sharks in their round 9 matchup last year.
Finally, over that expanded timespan who of our sharks has a taste for a particular player?
Have we built the AFL where the footy people are?
Sean Lawson
Despite the dramas around the Tasmanian team, another round of expansion talk was kicked off by media reports suggesting that the WAFC is starting to take the question of a third team in Western Australia seriously.
TWIF’s own Joe Cordy also posed a question related to the expansion question, asking what a new AFL created with no history might look like:
if you were creating an entirely new top flight aussie rules competition from scratch like the A-League in 2005, how many teams would you have? what spread would there be?
Logically, the best way to figure out where teams should be based would be to go where footy fans are. Fans are a nebulous thing to define The polling company Roy Morgan rather notoriously likes to publish survey data from a market research perspective showing Sydney and Brisbane with the largest fandoms in the league.
But Roy Morgan wants to sell fan profiles to advertisers, and therefore privileges name recognition and extremely casual interest. A large majority of their profiled “fans” don’t attend games and a solid percentage don’t even watch on TV.
We need a firmer basis for identifying where the football fans are than that, and luckily the Australian Sports Commission runs a large survey called Ausplay that collects information about sport participation. Playing footy is a pretty reasonable proxy for where the “footy people” are.
Fairly obviously there is a preponderance of Victorians playing footy, about 40% of the national total, as well as a surprisingly tight spread across the other four mainland states. These numbers mean Victoria punches above its weight in national talent contributions, as over half the player pool are from Victoria.
Correspondingly, NSW and Qld produce far fewer AFLM players than their footy player base would suggest, which is down to many historical and cultural factors.
There is also a pronounced gender split in footy demographics by state, especially for adult women’s participation:
Simply put, it appears that North of the Barassi line, footy is more of a women’s game while women’s participation lags in parts of the heartland.
Converting the national participation shares to the ideal distribution of an 18 team league we get the following breakdown of teams in a fresh start:
This is not too different from today’s setup. Victoria is over represented in the AFL, unsurprisingly, but still would warrant 7 teams in an evenly distributed competition.
With 7 Victorian teams in our “fresh start” league, compared to the contemporary AFL the three “extra” teams would be allocated to Western Australia, New South Wales (more on that in a moment) and Tasmania.
It should be said, against various arguments to rationalise the Victorian clubs, that the difference between 7 and 10 Victorian teams is probably not that substantial from a football finance perspective. Those three extra teams located near the big teams would be generating a lot of economies of scale, saving travel costs, and boosting overall attendance by bringing a lot of extra people through the gates as away fans at the many Victorian derbies which occur.
But let’s get back to the question of expansion, and in particular, that suggested under-representation of NSW. This number looks odd on the face of it – New South Wales with the third most footballers of any state? And potentially warranting a third team, like footy powerhouse Western Australia?
As any student of footy should know, though, the unique thing about NSW in Australian football is that a lot of its football base is in the south and east of the state, rather than in Sydney. South of the Barassi Line, things get AFL focused.
We can more or less quantify how much this matters to NSW footy numbers.
Ausplay prior to 2023 had local government area participation estimates for Albury, Wagga Wagga and Bega which all placed Australian football participation at over 6%. Most other LGAs in NSW were too small to have data, or situated further north without footy participation breaking into the top 10 activities.
If we extrapolate those Albury and Wagga participation rates out against the population of the southern NSW Riverina and Murray regions as a whole, we get probably about 16000 footballers in that region, more than in NT and not too far below the number in Tasmania.
But then of course, there’s also a notable city of a half a million people sitting surrounded by southern NSW, with another roughly 12000 footballers.
Surrounding Canberra is a region which, while not footy heartland, can be estimated using ACT participation rates to maybe have about 6000 footballers as well.
Putting all that together, we can see that there’s a largely forgotten football region, with more footy people than the current new expansion location of Tasmania. It is a region centred between Albury, Wagga and Canberra, though also stretching a long way west.
Adjusting our quotas to split NSW and combine the southern regions with the ACT, we can see that our third NSW quota reassigns fairly comfortably towards the Barassi Line:
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.
This season, for all its apparent evenness, has ended up strangely bifurcated between the two halvs of the ladder. Three wins and percentage separate 9th and 10th, and while there’s about a 1 in 20 chance of 10th bridging that gap with a mad win streak and two other teams collapsing, for all practical purposes the race is now down to half a dozen teams trying not to be the one team that misses out when the season is done.
This has triggered a lot of talk of the season being too long, and a lot of opportunistic discussion of ideas to make the long winter stretch more interesting, but it’s worth remembering that:
The race for 9 teams into 8 spots is still pretty fun and exciting
One of the reasons the ladder is the way it is is the parity between most of the top 8, and as a result the premiership race looks very open
The other main reason for the gap is the teams sitting 10th to about 14th have won less games than they usually do.
With fewer expectations on Essendon and St Kilda this season, we can probably name the Swans, Port, Carlton and Demons as the four sides who are, for different reasons, further adrift than most would’ve expected early in the year. That’s a whole chasing pack who, most other years, would be jostling for finals right up until the last couple of rounds.
It’s a weird season, but at least the flag race looks pretty open.
I’m a firm believer that one of the best things a team can do for its marketability is having a really tall guy who stands out in looks and play. My kids are currently Max Gawn supporters first and Melbourne supporters second.
As a Melbourne supporter approaching 40 I feel like I’ve seen my fair share of good rucks and then some. Of the 34 All Australian teams named since 1991, Melbourne has provided the first choice ruck eight times, plus another 3 inclusions on the interchange bench (Gawn 5+2, Jamar 0+1, White 1, Stynes 2).
While we’ve had stats on hit outs and hit outs to advantage for a while, there’s a lack of understanding of how much these impact the game. Let’s look at the potential outcomes of a ruck contest and see where the most value for a team is.
As you’d expect, getting a free from the ruck contest is by far the best outcome, followed by hit outs to advantage. Ruck hard ball gets also put you in a good position.
If we look at hitouts overall though, even when including hit outs to advantage as part of that, they barely move the needle. A quarter of them don’t lead to a clearance at all, and teams are almost as likely to concede a clearance or scoring opportunity after winning a hitout as they are to generate one.
Another consideration is that two Ruck Hard Ball Gets aren’t necessarily the same. Let’s break down some of these outcomes by the top 20 rucks (by hitouts recorded in 2025).
(Selecting one of the flows will highlight that flow across all charts, allowing for easier comparison)
In terms of getting the ball moving, Oscar McInerney and Brodie Grundy are kings – 85% and 80% of their RHBGs resulting in a clearance for their team. For the next step along, Luke Jackson generates a scoring chance from 44% of RHBGs, well ahead of the next best in Gawn and English, both sitting at 30%.
43% of Kieran Briggs’ RHBGs end up with a clearance going the wrong way, while Sean Darcy is a rock – 25% of his result in the ball not clearing the stoppage area.
Turning to Hitouts To Advantage, Jarrod Witts leads the league in seeing HTA turn to clearances with 83% ahead of Darcy Fort and Matt Flynn on 80%. 30% of Jordon Sweet’s HTAs result in a scoring chance, but he also has the highest number of HTAs turn into an opponent scoring chance at 9.2%. This highlights that these figures can be heavily influenced by the supporting midfielders. Port are electric when they’re on, but can lack some defensive accountability with the league’s worst opposition score from stoppages.
Now that we know what they’re worth, let’s look at how good teams are at generating them. There are some limitations on the data I have – one being that I don’t know who the opposing two rucks are – only the ones that record a stat (Ruck hard ball get, hit out, getting or conceding a ruck free). Because of that we have to look at these stats team-wide rather than individually.
Melbourne, North Melbourne, Sydney, and Carlton are the best at generating positive outcomes – each getting a Ruck Hard Ball Get or better from at least 18.4% of their ruck contests compared to an AFL average of 15.4%.
Looking at the other end, West Coast, Essendon, St Kilda, and the Giants all give up good starting position relatively regularly. Looking at the differentials (% of contests gaining Ruck Hard Ball Get or better minus % of contests conceding the same), Melbourne and North Melbourne are clearly in front at +6%.
Now, ruck frees aren’t that common, occurring about one in every 36 contests. However, they are impactful – as we discovered earlier 20% of them lead to a scoring chance – so they do warrant a further look.
Since 2021 the best players at generating more ruck frees than they give away are Ben McEvoy and Sam Hayes. In the opposite direction, Stefan Martin is the only player to break the -1 free per hundred contests barrier.
For a bit of fun let’s wind up with the head to head ruck free kick counts for the 15 rucks with the most hitouts since 2025.
The thing that jumps out to me here is just how hard Jarrod Witts is to ruck against. A lot of ruck frees seem to come when an experienced ruckman is up against a pinch hitter. Witts is posting big numbers against the elite rucks of the competition with only Darcy Cameron (5-1) and Oscar McInerney (2-1) getting the better of him.Finally, numbers can only tell us so much. I highly recommend Jeff White’s youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@First_Use/videos). It contains a lot of video analysis, but with a particular focus on ruck contests and stoppage play.
Many of you will know that Carlton and Collingwood have played against each other more than any other combination of teams in V/AFL history, with last Friday’s match being the 268th time the two teams have met.
Many of you may also know that this has historically been a very even rivalry, with the head-to-head ledger currently sitting at 135 wins for the Magpies, 129 wins for the Blues, and four draws.
But how even has the rivalry been over its 120-plus year history? Let’s graph the head-to-head record over time and find out. A quick look at the figure below tells us that there have been a few different periods of dominance by either club.
Collingwood had Carlton’s number more often than not for the best part of the first century of the rivalry, then it was Carlton’s turn to be on top from the mid 1970’s through to the early 2000s. From that point on the pendulum has swung back Collingwood’s way – and may continue to for some time given how disappointing Carlton have been since the turn of the century. But for the most part, the Carlton-Collingwood rivalry has had some degree of evenness, with neither club being more than 15 wins ahead of the other.
The second most common matchup in V/AFL history – Carlton versus Essendon – is slightly more one sided. Carlton also started this rivalry poorly, winning just seven of their first 25 games against the Bombers between 1897 and 1906. However, things have been in Carlton’s favour more often than not from that point onwards. The Blues won 19 of the 20 clashes between 1927 and 1939 and 17 out of 20 between 1968 and 1977, with the latter period of dominance resulting in a +21 count on the head-to-head record. However, Essendon have pulled things back since then to sit 10 wins behind the men from Princes Park on the all-time tally.
Collingwood versus Essendon, the third most common matchup, is even more one sided than the previous two. The Magpies currently have won 30 more games between these two teams than Essendon, and have not been behind in the head-to-head count since 1897. Diehard Pies fans will remember the 1990 team breaking a three-game losing streak against the Bombers in the 1990 semi-final, and getting the better of Essendon again just two weeks later in the Grand Final, the most-recent post-season encounter between the two sides.
In more good news for the black and white army, Collingwood also has the upper hand on their rivalry with Melbourne, leading the head-to-head by 72 games (157-85, with five draws). The Demons won the first and fourth games between the two clubs, but from that point on it has been advantage Collingwood. Although, to give Melbourne some credit, there have been two seven-game winning streaks against Collingwood since then, from 1939-1941 and from 1955-1957. This latter streak involved the Demons beating the Pies in two grand finals – 1955 and 1957.
And it’s a similar story for the fifth most common matchup – Collingwood and Geelong. Collingwood struggled early against Geelong, winning four of the first 13 games. A win over Geelong in the 1901 finals series set the Magpies on a 14-game win streak against their feline foes, which tilted the ledger in Collingwood’s favour. But I imagine Collingwood’s good record against Geelong will be of little comfort should the two teams meet again in September, with the Cats winning six of the last eight against the Magpies – including the last two finals (2020 semi-final and 2022 qualifying final).
Please stop calling things you don’t like “American”
Sean Lawson
Look, I get it. Nobody much likes the US these days.
Everyone’s favourite hegemonic state and nascent autocracy is sliding into a dark place, and we just had an election decided largely by voters rejecting its political and social trends.
So the temptation to dismiss something we don’t like as being American is substantial.
But this rhetorical flourish can go too far. In a sporting discourse landscape as replete as ours is with thought bubbles and reform plans, it seems like every week there’s some new innovation being put forth by some talking head. And there’s a common refrain dismissing these ideas as being “American”, a denigration intended to fully invalidate an idea on those grounds alone.
The behaviour is common on social media but also gets a guernsey in some more professional punditry. For example:
Rohan Connolly on the “wildcard”: “Not that history means much to the sorts of vested interests who continually try to cram this Americanised garbage (designed for competitions with conferences, not one ladder) down our throats.”
Less temperate voices can also be found across social media, dismissing pretty much any idea around as smacking of yankeedom. From shorter game time to removing the father/son rule to private ownership, everything we don’t like is American to someone.
It’s not all America
I am not here to argue that American things are not bad. They very often are!
But I do think that, ironically, many of these criticisms are guilty of giving the US too much credit and centrality on the world stage, assigning certain ideas as exclusively American, when they have a broader currency around world sport or even within Australia.
Most obviously, the idea of an in-season cup competition, it scarcely needs be said, is most associated with the decidedly un-American sport of soccer.
Indeed, the NBA in-season tournament was a recent innovation created pretty much with the same reasoning the AFL is following – that if we can replicate soccer’s ability to run two competitions in parallel, we get more watchable content and more happy fans, and more money making opportunities.
America ain’t free
Then there’s player free agency. That’s is a particularly funny one to describe as “American” because United States professional sport probably has, on average, the least free player movement of any prominent country’s sporting landscape. Heavy with drafts and player trading, none of the four big leagues have the sort of total and full free agency common especially to soccer in many countries. American “free agency” refers instead to an unusually proscribed and specific set of circumstances.
Even in Australia, most of our major sports are characterised by pretty much total free agency, the full expression of a player’s unfettered right to work for who they wish.
In Australian sport, the most common practice is that, give or take some domestic player quotas or a salary cap, players in most leagues can pretty much sign with whoever they want whenever they are out of contract. That applies to the NRL, to the A-Leagues, to both rugby codes, to cricket, to netball, to basketball.
Indeed, the more AFL free agency expands, the more like other Australian sport it will become. At the moment, the strong influence of the national draft ironically does make it a more Americanised league than many others in this country. I’ve seen NRL fans dismiss the idea of a player draft on the grounds of it being a hated American innovation.
Wildcards
Finally, there’s the “wildcard” finals idea. As proposed, admittedly the American links are being created by overt misuse of the term by proponents.
In an AFL finals context the “wildcard” is simply describing adding a 9th and 10th team and a 5th week to finals, with 7 to 10 on the ladder spending the first week playing for survival.
That’s pretty much exactly the way the traditional McIntyre top 6 starts for teams who finish 3 through 6.
The concept of a staggered and asymmetrical finals series with lower teams having to play more weeks and win more games is definitely not an American innovation. Instead, it’s a long-standing Australian one. Our finals systems from the top 4 to the top 8 have all been replete with double chances and bye privileges for higher ranked teams. By contrast, American playoffs often plump for a straight knockout bracket where finishing with the first seed is barely an advantage.
Even the idea of finals involving many teams have their precedents. As noted last week, in 1898 the finals series used in the VFL involved all eight participating teams, resulting in the scenario in 1900 where Melbourne won the premiership from 6th. A number of footy leagues around the country have long run finals systems featuring over half the sides. The SANFL went decades qualifying 5 of 9 teams, the AFL in 1994 had 8 of 15.
To be clear, many ideas for new innovations are bad. The in-season tournament proposal, two-part seasons (so called “17-5” or similar breakdowns) where the last few rounds are re-seeded and bottom sides play for a draft pick, permanent conferences to even the ladder out. These things sound terrible! But they’re not terrible because they’re American, and they’re often not even really especially American.
Meanwhile there significant aspects of our sport which are exactly aligned with practice in the US, things which most fans approve of. These include the draft and salary cap, and a closed league without promotion and relegation. Nobody is advocating to ditch them these features for this reason.
In the end, the “American” label as a dismissal of novelty is cheap and easy, but it’s often hypocritical, it’s not persuasive and usually not even particularly accurate.
The long and short of it
Cody Atkinson, freeloader
Around this time of the year attention starts to turn to the ancillary awards of the elite competition. No – we aren’t talking about the upcoming AFL In-Season Non-Premiership Cup.
Instead, TWIF is talking about All-Australians, MVPs, Brownlows, Coaches’ Awards, BnFs…and the big two of them all.
That’s right – Mark of the Year and Goal of the Year.
hover over each blue and yellow bar to see each Mark of the Year
While the former usually delivers an absolute banger of a grab, the latter often leaves a lot to be desired. There’s a lot of this type of goal in the mix.
That’s no slight to Matt White – it’s a great run, and a good goal. But does it stick out? Colour us doubtful.
But what if we went another way to work out the Goal of the Year? This week TWIF has decided to look at the extremes – and the extremely average – to see if it would uncover a more spectacular goal that the normal goal of the year.
The season’s not over yet, but these are some out of the box contenders. None have been named as Goal of the Week this year.
Longest Goal of the Year
Everyone loves a roost right? You’re not going to find many better than this ping from Dan McStay last week to put the game well beyond doubt against Carlton.
Maybe it should have been rushed through for a behind. But who cares – he’s kicked it nearly 67 metres through the big sticks. There’s a couple of others that are close but this is the best of the long bunch.
Most average Goal of the Year
So far this year the average distance for a goal is about 31.6m. So surely picking the most average distance for a goal would produce the most average goal?
Or maybe not.
Shaun Mannagh’s sealer against Hawthorn put a cap on what was a pretty good game between two likely finalists. It’s far from the average goal, with limited time to operate and frenetic movement opening up the opportunity.
It should be noted that there are four other goals from the most average distance, but this was the first one chosen at random. Apologies to Nick Daicos, Tim Membrey, Rhyan Mansell and Jack Higgins for their equally average efforts.
Shortest Goal of the Year
You might question how you can find the truly shortest goal, and TWIF might agree with you to a large degree. But according to AFL data, this is the shortest one to the centre of goal this year.
After a look at the footage, it’s hard to disagree.
This was Jasper Alger’s first AFL goal. Every goal he kicks from here will likely be both less difficult and kicked from further away.
He barely gets a foot on the ball. The kick goes maybe three metres. Just 10cm or so of that journey is in the field of play.
It is glorious.
So maybe we should look at the extremes when looking for the best goal of the year.
Around the Grounds
Jason Lassey at Footy Industry talks some sense about the (women’s) footy industry.
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.
While this push for finals expansion seemingly comes from an American basis, finals expansion likely has its origins in Australia instead.
Punch, 27 September 1900
In 1898 the VFL expanded their finals to eight teams… comprising of the whole competition. The use of the system culminated in 1900, when Melbourne, who finished 6th through the home and away season, were able to storm the finals and finish on top.
The fact that the system of determining the premiership is not the best that could be framed detracts little from the credit of their performance. They have fulfilled the requirements of the scheme, and they are honestly entitled to the honours they have gained.
The system was not only used in Victoria, but also around other football playing strongholds such as South Australia. Unfortunately, the system was so successful that it was shelved since then.
Maybe the solution is not a modest American expansion, but a full-on Australian one. Noted football #influencer Eddie McGuire made a similar proposal a few years back. If there’s one thing Eddie is known for, it’s being measured in his public statements.
Maybe we all aren’t being bold enough.
This week in football we have:
What Makes a Key Forward?
Joe Cordy
Jack Riewoldt copped no small amount of mockery recently for saying about Gold Coast spearhead Ben King:
“I’m starting to come to the belief that I don’t think [he] can be a big finals player. He doesn’t get the ball enough…He is not a key forward, he’s a tall half-forward flanker… If I’m Damien Hardwick, I’d put a call in to Tom Lynch.”
I don’t know that I agree Ben King can’t play well in finals, or what possessed him to suggest a soon to be 33-year-old Tom Lynch is good for what ails his former coach, but there was something intriguing to me in what he said.
It’s plainly obvious to me that Ben King doesn’t get enough of the footy to seriously affect games as much as he could, especially compared to others with the key forward label.
With an average disposal location 51m forward of the centre circle, and an average mark location 57m forward, Ben King is the deepest sitting player in the league in 2025.
Keeping himself as close to the goals as he does is oft reflected in his output. As well as sitting equal third in the Coleman Medal race, among key forwards this year with at least 10 games under their belt, he’s the only player averaging at least four shots at goal a game with an average expected score per shot above four points.
This trend of sitting deep can be seen in his Suns compatriots too, with Jed Walter and Ethan Read pushing the 4.0 xScore threshold for their shots. This is despite King taking the lion’s share of the Suns’ scoring attempts. The issue, which Riewoldt identified, is how little King creates for anyone else.
Compared to the other high volume shot takers, King stands out for his total single-mindedness in kicking, averaging just one kick every other game not directly aimed at the big sticks.
The same trend can be observed in where he marks the ball. While he’s a constant and ever-reliable target for the Suns at the end of their attacking moves, if you see Ben King mark the footy beyond the arc you should appreciate the sight, as it’s unlikely to come about again another three whole games.
In fact, his total marks per game is less than what Charlie Curnow manages just outside the 50m arc.
All of this stands in stark contrast to how Damien Hardwick’s key forwards in the Tigers dynastic run would operate, which makes it stand out all the more. Riewoldt, and particularly ex-Suns captain Tom Lynch, would frequently push up the ground to link up play, creating inverted structures with Dustin Martin often sitting deepest forward and using his supreme athleticism and goal sense to finish attacks.
Arguably the key forward group that most resembles this style of play are with the Tigers’ biggest rivals from that era. Led by Coleman Medal and All-Australian Centre Half Forward frontrunner Jeremy Cameron, Geelong have a trio of talls who not only create ball movement further up the chain than anyone at the Suns, but have retention and threat creation numbers that are pushing for the highest in the league.
While I’m still not sure that Jack Riewoldt and I have an aligned vision of a tall half-forward flanker, I think we’d agree that this is closer to what we’d like to see from a key forward. Less of a big man waiting for it to be lobbed on top of his head, and more of a Thierry Henry-esque dual-threat in finishing and creation.
I think Ben King has the tools to add this creative output to his game, but at the moment the Suns setup keeps him restrained fairly strictly to always being within a kick of the goals. Whether this is a reflection of the Hardwick’s estimation of King’s abilities, his changing tactical sensibility, or just how he feels the Suns are best structured given their other pieces is hard to tell at first glance, but it seems clear they’re not currently getting the most out of the former #6 draft pick.
Given the clear separation between the top and the bottom teams, I thought it’d be interesting to have a look at the ladder based on games against the top 9.
Collingwood consistently come up on top, no matter what metric you look at.
Fremantle are a surprise in 2nd place, with key wins against the Western Bulldogs, Adelaide, GWS and Gold Coast.
The Western Bulldogs find themselves at the bottom of the list, with relatively close finishes against Collingwood, Brisbane, Gold Coast and Geelong.
Port Adelaide’s percentage is a concern for those who believe they have turned the corner after recent wins against Carlton, Melbourne and GWS.
These matchups will go a long way in shaping the final 8. Look no further than round 18, where we have a stacked round of season-defining games.
Round 18:
Gold Coast vs Collingwood
Western Bulldogs vs Adelaide
GWS vs Geelong
Fremantle vs Hawthorn
Buckle up.
Darcy Fogarty leading the expected score ladder – one of the best set shots in the game.
Max Gawn is almost a flawless player. Outside of shots inside 50…
Do the Bombers Bomb?
Cody Atkinson, idiot
Nominative determinism is a fun thing. You know, a baker with the last name Baker, a gold medal winning sprinter named Bolt or a banker named White Collar Fraud.
We kid (please don’t sue us).
That raises the obvious questions as posed by the headline. Do the Bombers (of Essendon) bomb?
We aren’t talking about actual bombing. As is very well known, bombing on the footy field was banned in the 1960s during the ANFC era.
Instead, we are talking about taking pings from deep – you know, long bombs at goal.
So…do the Bombers bomb?
No.
They do not bomb. In fact, they bomb less than almost any other team in the league. They are particularly reticent from set shots, where they have taken the second fewest shots from outside 50 this year.
Taking shots from deep serves multiple goals. Firstly – and most obviously – it puts points on the scoreboard. TWIF was recently told that scoring more points than your opponent means that you win games.
That’s a good thing!
There’s also a metagame at play. Taking shots from deep helps to stretch the defence and make it harder to defend when going inside 50. If there are credible targets across a wide variety of spots in the forwardline – from close to goal to pushing 60 – teams will find it hard to effectively close them off. It helps to render spares less valuable, and reduces the impact of tall defenders who peel off and help.
Some teams get nervy about the accuracy drop that comes with shooting from deep, and there are some with tall targets (or effective enough set ups) to not need to stretch the defence further. For all teams not named the Bulldogs, fewer defenders where you want them to be is the goal.
The Bombers have played one less game than most teams, and have faced significant injury issues through the year. But their most reliable bomb threat (Peter Wright) has been in and out of the team for various reasons over the last two years.
If the Bombers are to rise up the ladder again, maybe they need to bomb more.
Premiership windows
Sean Lawson
The “premiership window” has been a beloved content generator for the Fox Footy Couch for a number of years, and it’s pretty appealing, being a simple all-in graphic that shows which teams are good.
If you haven’t come across it yet, this is sort of what it looks like.
The idea here is incredibly basic – nearly all premiership teams finish in the top 6 for both scoring points, and conceding few points. The exceptions to this pattern since 2000 are the same two teams who are nearly always the exceptions to a premiership pattern: Sydney in 2005 and the Bulldogs in 2016. Both had low to middling scoring power.
There are of course issues! The big one, for me, is the presentation of this chart as a set of rankings. Plotting by rank equalises the gaps between teams, stretching closely bunched teams apart and collapsing large gulfs between different teams.
If we take exactly the same data as went into the above chart and instead just show the values directly, the difference is fairly clear.
Immediately we can see which teams are being pumped up or underestimated by the ranking presentation.
Collingwood and Adelaide currently sit a reasonable difference away from the pack, and instead we see a cluster of teams with similar figures both inside and outside the “window”. We can also see that the bad teams are quite a lot worse than everyone else!
Of course, there’s a lot more statistics in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in On The Couch’s philosophy, and some amateur analysts have added to the space by pulling together their own statistical measuring sticks for premiership contention that go beyond just reading the ladder.
On the offensive side are not just scoring and scoring shots, but various territory measures and possession chain measures.
From this we can see that Adelaide and the Bulldogs are setting the pace across most metrics. We can also see certain other middling teams producing some dangerous characteristics, like GWS’ turnover scoring and Melbourne’s front half game.
On the defensive side, it’s still the Crows shaping well, pointing towards a team quietly building the profile needed to succeed this year. Among the middling teams GWS defend turnover as well as they score from it, Essendon are doing very well with post clearance ground ball, and Sydney can hang its hat on a new defensive focus, being very hard to transition against.
Intriguingly, Carlton appear to be still, somehow, stacking up quite well in many of these metrics, especially on the defensive side. This adds yet another perspective to their struggles, pointing towards what many observers have found so frustrating about the Blues in recent years. Somehow the team manages to be much less than the sum of its often impressive parts, doing many of the right things and not getting results from them.
As the run to finals heats up, it’s well worth keeping tabs on Andrew’s metrics to see how the race among the contenders is shaping.
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.
And just like that, there’s only two months of the season left. As the nights get colder, the battle for finals gets hotter.
Something else that is getting hotter is the seats of several coaches are getting warmer. After an offseason where only one coach stepped away (John Longmire) relatively late in the process, we could be entering a summer with several job opening across the league.
One of these changes is already confirmed, with Port’s Ken Hinkley stepping away after the season and Josh Carr taking over. Several others, such as Carlton’s Michael Voss, North’s Alistair Clarkson, Fremantle’s Justin Longmuir, St Kilda’s Ross Lyon and Melbourne’s Simon Goodwin have been mentioned by fans or media as having some threat to their job.
There’s a very real chance that most of these coaches will stay in their jobs, and most clubs will deny that there was any threat to their employment.
Idle speculation is cheap, all around.
There’s also a chance that conversations are being held about other coaches across the league. This job uncertainty adds an extra dimension to the final weeks of normal AFLM football for the year.
This week in football we have:
The Joe Daniher (or Buddy) replacement nobody suggested
The Lions look ominous in their premiership defence, but the absence of an experienced key pillar is still notable
I know I’ve been critical of trade discussion slop during the season, but this article has become topical this week despite my plans to keep it in the barrel until the season was over.
Take two hypothetical key forwards. Both 26 years old, and have had many seasons interrupted by injury, including their most recent one where they only managed four games.
The first player averages 1.79 goals, 4.5 marks and 5.1 Score Involvements over his 70 game career.
The other averages 1.76 goals, 5.8 marks and 5.5 Score Involvements over his 108 game career.
They each have a career high of six goals, and have kicked bags of five multiple times.
Who are you picking? The numbers probably sit slightly with Player Two, especially considering that on average the first player would kick just the one more goal per season than the second if they played a full 23 games.
But if you missed out on the first one, you would likely be happy to take the second, wouldn’t you agree?
So as you may have guessed, the second player is Joe Daniher – specifically at the point of his career when he left Essendon. He had only played four games that year and four games the year prior, never able to get his body right.
Then he moved to Brisbane, kicked 46 goals from 24 games, and you know the rest of the story.
The other player is forgotten Hawks forward Mitchell Lewis. Came back last year only to be felled by injury again, but his best has been clearly good enough – and he’s still only 26. Recently he has been back in the news as he has been eying a VFL return.
This isn’t to suggest that Mitchell Lewis is the talent that Joe Daniher was. Daniher was a game breaker in a way that many key forwards struggle to be. But as the saying goes, “we can recreate him in the aggregate,”.
Mitchell Lewis hasn’t played a game at any level since he ruptured his ACL against Geelong in Round 17 last year, in what was his first game back after a cartilage problem from a past partial ACL tear kept him out from Round 3.
In the 2022 and 2023 seasons, despite managing just 15 games, Lewis tallied 36 and 37 goals, finishing runner-up in the Hawks goalkicking both years and averaging the most goals per game in the team.
With Sam Mitchell and the Hawks courting Oscar Allen, and with Calsher Dear and Mabior Chol already making that forwardline their own, you wonder if there is any room for a fit Mitch Lewis in 2026 anyway.
Brisbane have somewhat of a recent history of getting players bodies right, with Joe Daniher the obvious example, but even Lincoln McCarthy – despite unluckily getting injured in their premiership year – strung together five full seasons at the Lions having never played one at Geelong.
The Lions have looked intimidating at times this year, and short of firepower or accuracy in front of goal at others. Logan Morris is starting to come into his own as a key forward, but is a little more one-dimensional and less crash and bash than Lewis can be and Daniher previously was.
This may all be a different story if Brisbane instead get Oscar Allen this year, as is now being rumoured more and more as the season goes on, but there is another club who could use a replacement key forward – for both structure and marketing purposes. That team is the Sydney Swans.
Sydney’s forwardline has been their weakest link since Buddy left, with a combination of injuries and form preventing any of Logan McDonald, Hayden McLean or Joel Amartey from really stamping their authority over it, with the Swans forced to throw key defender Tom McCartin back at times this season.
Pairing a (hopefully) fit Mitch Lewis with a slightly less wayward Joel Amartey would make for an imposing forward pairing, and might be what gets the Swans to take that final step in 2026.
Now this might all be pointless if Hawthorn don’t land Allen or chase another key forward in the off season this year, or Mitch Lewis may simply want to try a change of location in an attempt to get his body right – either way, don’t be surprised if Mitch Lewis finds himself a new home in 2026, or at the very least has his name come up in discussions during trade week.
Until then, lets just hope that Lewis gets through this weekend of VFL unscathed.
What goes around comes around (once in a blue moon)
One of the much talked about inequities of the AFL fixture is who plays who twice, and when they do so. For example, Carlton has played both West Coast and North Melbourne twice in their 14 games so far this season, while Geelong didn’t play either team until Round 12 (when they played the Eagles).
Here’s a list of teams that have played each other twice to this point of the season, prior to the start of Round 16:
Brisbane and Geelong, Carlton and North Melbourne, Carlton and West Coast, Port Adelaide and Sydney, and the Western Bulldogs and St Kilda.
Three of these pairs of teams had their second meeting in Round 15 (Brisbane/Geelong, Carlton/North Melbourne, and Port Adelaide/Sydney), but there was something about the Power and Swans game that caught my attention – and no, it wasn’t Joel Amartey’s abysmal night on the goal kicking front.
Last week Sydney’s Justin McInerney put his side in front when he kicked the opening goal in the first minute of the match; a lead the Bloods would not relinquish for the remainder of the game. The Power got within three points partway through the second quarter but never got things back on level pegging (or held their own lead at any point during the game).
Source: afl.com.au
This is the opposite of what happened when the two sides met in Round 6, where Sam Powell-Pepper registered the first goal in the fourth minute. The Swans never held a lead at any point after this, although they did draw level with the Power in the first quarter, which I suppose is an improvement compared to the more recent game.
Source: afl.com.au
After looking at scoring chain and match result data for nearly 350 matches going back to the start of the 2018 season, I believe this is the first and only time this reversal of fortunes has happened during that particular period of time.
The two teams will most likely take little notice of this incredibly useless finding, given Ken Hinkley and Dean Cox have bigger issues to deal with. Something to add to their summer reading piles, perhaps?
Which clubs have a lot of player contracts expiring soon?
Player contracts have obviously been in the news a lot lately, particularly in the wake of Melbourne signing Kysaiah Pickett to the end of 2034.
Using Footywire’s database of contract status I thought it would be interesting to look at how each list shapes up in terms of who is locked away and for how long.
To the left, in the faded area, you can see how long a player has been on that club’s list. The right shows how far into the future they are contracted.
Let’s also get a quick summary of who has the most potential fluidity in their list over the next few years.
For this year, Port Adelaide and Collingwood have the highest proportion of their list unsigned.
If we look forward to the end of 2026. Carlton, Port Adelaide again, as well as Hawthorn and West Coast all have 70% of more of their players yet to extend.
At the three-year mark we’ve got Richmond, St Kilda, Carlton and Hawthorn with 90% of their list potentially out of contract by then, with the Bulldogs just shy.
Going from the opposite direction Fremantle, GWS, Collingwood, and Brisbane have the highest proportion of players contracted out past the end of 2028.
West Coast, Essendon, Gold Coast, Hawthorn, and Collingwood are the only clubs with no players contracted beyond 2030, with West Coast’s longest current commitments ending with Jake Waterman, Jack Hutchinson, and Liam Baker in 2029.
Attacking off the mark
Cody Atkinson
If you watch enough footy on a weekend, you’ll likely hear the commentators implore players to attack quickly after taking a mark. Attacking instinct has always been envied in football, but the “stand” rule has seen some see attacking directly from marks as a priority.
There’s a couple of quick ways this can happen. Teams can either look to play on immediately after marks, with the running finding space and ideally bouncing the ball before kicking, or they can look for either an overlapping or forward handball. This is an example of what the latter looks like.
The concept is that decisive movement forward can catch the defence before it can settle, especially early in chains after intercepts or stoppage wins. Although the clip above didn’t end up in a score for Brisbane, it did give them a clear look inside 50 – about as good as you can get in modern footy.
The second benefit is that it can often leave the man on the mark as a passenger in play, looking to cover off two different objectives without moving.
Some teams look to attack this way more than others. TWIF have looked at how often teams handball directly or bounce from taking marks.
While a couple of very solid sides rely on this type of movement, two of the league’s teams to beat (Collingwood and Brisbane) sit near the bottom. This shows that instead of a universal strategy, it’s more situational. Too many overlap handballs can leave you exposed the other way if the subsequent use isn’t accurate. Unlike what is often discussed, handballing or playing on straight from marks is a “sometimes” activity.
It also inherently takes away the biggest advantage of a mark – a pressure free disposal. Pressure on kickers has been shown to increase the likelihood of turnovers and reduce the accuracy of kicks. Players and teams need to be sure that the trade off is worth removing this advantage.
Another angle to this is when attacking from marks lead to scores.
Adelaide and Brisbane don’t go hard after marks as much as other teams, but when they do it comes off more of the time. By contrast Port Adelaide and Essendon probably go to attack too often based on their ability to score from these types of attacks.
So what’s the lesson from all of this? Maybe it’s that there is more than one way to get the ball through the goals, and attacking all out isn’t always the right move.
Which players love the tough conditions?
Sean Lawson
Following on from our look at weather impacted footy for the ABC, Emlyn suggested we have a look at individual player data related to the weather. It turns out there’s some poor schmucks have played in the muck much more than others. And some players go their best when conditions are far from ideal.
The players who have played in the wet since the most since 2022 are mostly Crows players – namely those who have played in all their 16 rain affected games. But there’s one non-Crow on the top.
Daniel Rioli’s move from Richmond to Gold Coast sets him apart from the rest. The Suns have played 5 games in the wet this year, to add to his steady diet of soggy MCG games in previous years.
Rioli also tends to have a bit more impact in the wet, improving his average AFL Player Rating from about 12 to about 14. The picture of which players go best in the rain is just a who’s who of pretty good AFL players more generally, but Christian Petracca stands out as a genuine mud pig, having rated a little higher in the rain than even Marcus Bontempelli since 2022.
Many of the top players are skilled or powerful midfielders, but two relatively mobile big men in Luke Jackson and Tim English also stand up in the rain. Jackson, in fact, is one of the biggest wet weather improvers overall since 2022, behind only the surprising name of Jake Lever whose player rating in wet games goes to 14.5 against 8.9 on other occasions.
Living up to their hydrophilic club mascot’s identity, two battling Swans talls, Hayden McLean and Aaron Francis, also seem to have a knack for impacting plenty in the rain.
At the other end of the scale, a number of very skilled forward half players and some other more traditional rucks historically fail to impact as well when there’s rain around.
As far as heat goes, Murphy Reid has started brightly at Freo and stands out as having played nearly half his games this year in temperatures hitting above 25 degrees. Suns and Dockers players dominate the list of players who have spent the largest share of their games in the heat, and the Suns completely monopolise the list of most games played hot conditions.
As noted in the ABC article, hot weather games tend to lend themselves to open running as pressure and defensive running gets harder to maintain. The list of players to improve the most in these conditions tends to be a list of players who benefit from finding some space to create and attack in.
Finally, in cold weather, the biggest improver is Bulldogs runner Jason Johannisen. Amusingly, there are a number of Brisbane players who show large increases in performance in the cold weather.
Perhaps, with Tasmania on the horizon, a few of these cold-weather Lions might consider a move southwards.
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.
Peter Ryan at The Age has reported this week on a potential revival of State of Origin, but this time in Australian Football form. Yet again the thirst for seeing the best against the best has raised its head.
Despite the Origin format of interstate football becoming ubiquitous in League over the years, the concept started out in Australian Football originally a few years beforehand.
Since then Origin has become nearly bigger than the rest of league in this country itself, with its devotion to mates, states and mates going against mates who come from different states.
There is also no Gus Gould to set the mood in Australian Football.
‘The statement she made is in its narrow sense true, but also in a broader sense impossible, it defies history and the future at the same time, it asks us to challenge our own senses of what is expected of us in life, and isn’t that the beating core of football? After the break we return to ORIGIN’
But AFL administrators have seen the impact of Origin on the slightly differently shaped ball game, and the broadcasters have taken note of the ratings.
One of the big issues is which states should get a call up for the game. Ryan’s report notes that WA and Victoria have been tabbed for a potential 2026 game, leaving South Australia and a strong Allies side in the cold.
More important is the timing and potential rewards for playing. Pride only gets you so far in an increasingly professional environment. A preseason game may not drive the level of competition the rugby league origin game drives.
Whatever the case, we may soon have an even longer men’s AFL season ahead of us.
Why has Harvey Thomas maxed out his frequent flyer card in just 32 games?
Earlier this year, there was a much discussed stat about the fact that GWS youngster Harvey Thomas has played at 13 venues in just 32 games, surpassing Scott Pendlebury’s 11 venues in just his 23rd game. Harvey Thomas is a long way off league record holder David Swallow, who has played at 22 venues in his 245 career games.
That’s a record that may be equalled or surpassed by Nick Holman, Jarrod Witts or Touk Miller should the Tasmanian Devils still join the competition in the 2028 AFL season.
But what is the reason for this? Is it simply Vic bias and the fact Collingwood never travel? Or is there something else at play here?
Well, the easiest way to do this is to break down the grounds that Harvey Thomas has played at and why.
Harvey’s Giants already spread their games across two unique stadia – Manuka Oval in Canberra and Sydney Showground in Olympic Park – while their cross town rivals play at a different ground all together (the SCG). That’s three without leaving the confines of NSW/ACT.
You can tick off the other major stadiums pretty easily, with the MCG having four major tenants, Docklands having five major tenants, and Adelaide Oval and Perth Stadium having two each. This means every team will play at each of these grounds once a year. Thomas, already a mainstay at the Giants, only missed three games in his debut season. All up, that’s seven grounds without breaking a sweat. Add the Gabba once every year and a half (on average) and that’s eight.
It is perhaps worth mentioning that Scott Pendlebury too has played at all seven of the grounds listed above in the past two seasons and also at Carrara. Harvey Thomas is yet to play there as the Suns home game against GWS was during Gather Round last year, but we’ll get to that in a moment.
Now we start to get to the fun part – the ‘bonus’ grounds. Where do we find the four (now five) extra grounds that Harvey Thomas has played at to surpass Scott Pendlebury so fast?
Well, first up was the aforementioned Gather Round game against Gold Coast. Fair or not, the clashes between smaller clubs are less likely to be played at Adelaide Oval, and the Giants and Suns clashed at Summit Sports Park in Mt Barker last year. This year they faced the Saints at the oddly shaped Norwood Oval.
Here’s where we get to the sticky part. Some teams – much like GWS – are in the habit of selling home games to regional cities to help generate a little more profit than ticket sales alone can create, but they don’t want to sell their games against Collingwood because they make the big bucks. Why sell a profitable home game when you can sell one that might struggle to break even?
Collingwood are the Bulldogs highest pulling home game, while the Giants are their second lowest. This is why Harvey Thomas has now played in Ballarat against the Dogs and at York Park against North Melbourne.
The last remaining ground on this list is Kardinia Park in Geelong, where Harvey Thomas has already played twice – for two wins I might add – while Pendlebury has never played there. While many – including myself – think that Collingwood should have to make the trip down the highway at least every second year, (and I can’t believe I’m saying this) there’s a few good reasons why he hasn’t yet. Geelong only play nine or ten home games at Kardinia Park, with the remaining home game/s held at the MCG. The Cats have requested to play the MCG games against large sides – this year Hawthorn, but with Collingwood getting the nod in many years. Collingwood also has a deal for 14 guaranteed MCG games a year expires, it is a no brainer that in seasons where they clash twice, Geelong will continue to host Collingwood at the MCG.
So is it Victorian bias? Or simply a case of luck? Arguably it’s a bit of both – or neither. Even last year – in a season where they were historically poor – one of the most travelled teams in the country in West Coast only played at eight different stadia, the only difference to Pendles being that they had to play in Geelong.
The real answer here is that as long as the poorer clubs continue to sell two or three home games a season, the smaller interstate teams and other poorer clubs will continue to play games at more grounds than their opponents.
Goal kicking isn’t one of the most under-rated stats, but it’s maybe one of the most poorly analysed
Emlyn Breese / CreditToDuBois.com
This article makes heavy use of the excellent wheeloratings.com by Andrew Whelan for this piece (and many other pieces). If you’re not familiar you should go have a look, it surfaces a lot of things that will help you understand the game far better than official league stat offerings.
Goal kicking, eh?
Last week for the ABC Cody and Sean poured some much needed cold water on the supposed goal-kicking crisis. More articles followed this week and, apart from the aforementioned, surface level would be a generous description of them.
Goal accuracy = goals / shots. It’s a simple proposition and attractive because of it. However, like many simple explanations it misses more than it hits.
I’ve instead measured teams goalkicking performance based on three different attributes:
Volume – how many shots is a team generating per game
Quality – on average, how high quality are those shots (xScore per shot – xScore is a measure of how many points on average you would expect a given shot to result in by comparing it to similar shots taken previously. A set shot from the goal square would have an xScore of almost 6, a shot under physical pressure from the boundary might have an xScore of under 2.)
Execution – is a team making the most of those opportunities (total score / total xScore)
It’s my tentative view that execution is largely chance based rather than a quality of a given team. Over the past 5 seasons the only team to not record seasons both in the negative and positive is Fremantle. Last year Melbourne were above average in executing while this year they’re abysmal. If you’re going to be weak in one thing you want it to be this because it doesn’t represent a structural problem.
I’ve then grouped teams on overall performance in these categories:
Elite – overperforms in at least two of the categories
Poor – underperforms in at least two of the categories
Strength outlier – A mixed bag, but defined most clearly by a strength
Weakness outlier – A mixed bag, but defined most clearly by a weakness
Average – Teams who neither overperform or underperform majorly in any given category
Some interesting things jump out right away.
Geelong and the Dogs excel on all metrics. If you need another excuse to hop on their premiership chances, this will help you get there.
By contrast Adelaide’s quality of shots is lagging a bit. Gone are the days of Tom Lynch or Josh Jenkins getting endless passes out the back to an undefended goalsquare. These “cheapies” have been made up for by volume of shots and maximizing the chances they do take.
Collingwood’s attacking strength has been predominantly the volume of opportunities they create, with fairly average quality and execution.
Gold Coast and North Melbourne are both generating their shots in really dangerous places. The difference between the finals fancy and the Roos at the bottom of the ladder is North’s lack of supply – which continues to be a critical problem.
St Kilda and Hawthorn don’t have a real strength or weakness and hit around average on all three measures.
GWS and Carlton’s execution has been strong through the year, making up significant ground in their attacking space. Fremantle’s quality of shots has covered a similar role for the Dockers.
Brisbane are creating a lot of shots at a decent quality. But so far this year their execution has let them down. If their execution lifts they could easily click into another gear coming into finals.
Melbourne are abysmal at executing on their shots, by far the biggest outlier of any metric by any team.
Sydney’s quality of shots generated is the biggest thing letting them down. This may have to do with the lack of targets they’ve had up forward for much of the year.
The bottom six has several predictable tales. Essendon are executing well enough on the shots they generate. Execution is Richmond’s strongpoint relatively but still below league average. West Coast is underperforming on all three metrics.
We can also apply a similar method to looking at the shots a team concedes. For this one I’m not going to use a three-axis chart, as (in my view) a team has little control over the week-to-week accuracy of their opponent. What is replicable for a team’s defence is how many shots it concedes and where it concedes them.
Collingwood are clearly the best defending team in the league – outperforming in both restricting the quality and volume of their opponents shots. Carlton are the clear next in line.
Adelaide and Gold Coast are quite similar – doing quite well in restricting the volume, but around average for constraining those shots to low quality ones. GWS and Essendon are the reverse but moreso – elite for restricting their opponents to low quality shots, but they do allow a lot of them.
The Dogs and Melbourne can restrict the volume of shots to some degree, but the ones they do concede are dangerous.
Finals chasers Hawthorn, Fremantle and Brisbane are above average on both axes.
While at the other end of the scale is West Coast. They are the Melbourne of this chart, a clear outlier that stretches the axis.
Cooling it all down
Cody Atkinson
The last two weeks of footy have seen something that’s usually experienced by players and fans amplified to an extreme
While footy is meant to be a winter game, the combination of a surprisingly cold start to winter and the perplexing scheduling of two night games in the coldest AFL cities in the country have led to a couple of notably low scores. Sometimes the scoreboard lies about the quality of a game, but both last week’s Hawthorn-Adelaide match and round 13’s game between GWS and Port were scrappy affairs.
Don’t just take my word for it.
“We haven’t played a lot of night games here and…I’m sure you saw on the bench there was fair bit of steam coming off the heads of the players and things like that.” Hawthorn coach Sam Mitchell said after the match in Launceston.
“So it was obviously colder than we’ve played. So it was a beautiful day absolutely ma magic um day here today but obviously the temperature drops quite steeply with no cloud cover,”
“It meant that it was going to be slippery and I thought both teams, I thought, handled it really well early…I think it was the conditions that led to the low scoring.”
“I think both teams – it was slippery you know. It’s dewy obviously – there’s there’s no doubt it
was a slippery wet game. So that’s a challenge when it comes to finishing your work off.” Adelaide coach Matthew Nicks added.
Wet weather gets talked about a fair bit, with a return to first principles and 80s style footy often getting sprinkled amongst more established game plans. Focus around the contest and straight line movement comes back into play, and the ground tends to get “skinny” and long.
We will get to what that looks like later.
Cold weather footy gets talked about a fair bit less. That makes sense – we see a lot less of truly cold conditions here given the general climates of where the games are played. It can often be hard to work out why there are issues. In Canberra the dewy surface was noticeable in person, but may have not come across on TV.
“It wasn’t a pretty game of footy but it’s not a “pretty game of footy” weekend.” It was pretty slippery all over the place this weekend.” Port coach Ken Hinkley explained.
“Of course you have to adjust to what you play (to) what the conditions are so, you know, it’s something we had to do.”
When watching the game, one particular attribute came through clearly. That is how “skinny” the game was.
Playing “skinny” is pretty simple – it generally refers to playing on the narrow side of the ground without looking to stretch through the corridor or the fat side by using horizontal handballs or kicks. Generally, skinny games are also accompanied by a “long” set up, with bookends sitting far deeper than normal to attempt to provide some vertical spacing.
If you are watching in the stands or at home, an easy test is where the widest players are sitting when the ball is near the boundary. If the wing roles are sitting well inside the centrepoint of the ground, chances are that it’s a pretty skinny game.
This is one example of Port’s set up when exiting 50 when in Canberra.
Up the ground the Power crammed hard to the boundary. Another example comes at this midfield boundary throw in. Players are heavily concentrated on the ball, and no-one is sitting on the fat side of the ground.
I asked Ken post-game about this
“It seemed like you tried to play a pretty skinny game?”
“Yeah we did because the conditions made it a bit more challenging…that’s what was happening, I think, in the second quarter. We were throwing the ball around a little bit too much, boys were trying to probably fight through too much contest.” Hinkley explained.
For those who love data to back up the eye test, here it is.
For the rest of the season, Port and GWS are the two sides most likely to use the corridor when transitioning the ball from their defensive third – or behind the back of the centre square. In Canberra, both sides avoiding doing so stringently, with the exception of the unsuccessful foray that Hinkley mentioned in the second quarter.
The Hawthorn and Adelaide game last week saw both sides try the corridor more often than in Canberra, but there were other hallmarks of a modified style of game. The sides combined for 16 contested knock ons, well above their combined average of 10. There were also 183 intercept possessions – almost 60 more than the league match average of 128. There was also one passage where interchanges were stranded for about 10 minutes, kicking rotations right out, due to the ball being stuck on the “wrong” side of the ground”.
By now you might have cottoned on that it sounds a bit like wet weather footy. It’s similar, yet different.
But sometimes conditions are down to how you perceive them. I also asked GWS coach Adam Kingsley about the conditions in Canberra post game and he had a different view from my frozen fingers.
Conditions play a bit of a factor with the ball movement?
“Nope, it’s pretty dry out there I reckon. We may have made it look a bit wet at times but for the most part it was pretty good conditions.”
Completing the Australian Football Hall of Fame
Sean Lawson
The Hall of Fame of Australian Football has an oft-discussed Victorian bias, with statistical analysis showing that, from before the national era, lower levels of achievement will lead to likely induction versus South Australian and Western Australian players.
Initially dominated by Victorian journalists (the-13 person inaugural panel featured only SANFL president Max Basheer and Perth journalist Geoff Christian), the Hall started with 116 of 136 inaugural names having played substantially in Victoria.
More recent years have seen some attempt to correct the record, with AFL chair Mike Fitzpatrick ordering a review in 2010 that led to a required 25% minimum of selectors living outside Victoria.
The Hall then started to belatedly recognise early non-Victorian stars like Tom Leahy (notably an even match for Roy Cazaly at interstate carnivals) and in 2018, analysis by Daniel Hoevenaars and James Coventry in Footballistics showed that since the regime change, WAFL and SANFL nominations had kept pace with pre-AFL names from Victoria.
There has also been more effort to correct for the relative under-representation of eras before about the 1970s.
Keen students of Australian geography will be aware that there are in fact more than three states in Australia. All of them have long football histories, and lost in a lot of the older debates about the relative merit of SANFL and WAFL players have been other worthy candidates across the full geographical sweep of Australian football’s century and a half of history.
So, what of the Hall of Fame representation of the rest of Australia? What recognition has there been so far, and who might we look to for still-unrepresented regions of the footballing nation?
For those looking for those overlooked Victorians such as Sav Rocca you have found the wrong article.
Tasmania
First up is Tasmania, clearly the fourth state among football states. Tasmanian VFL players Darrel Baldock and Peter Hudson were inaugural legends, and Ian Stewart joined them in the following year. Others like Roy Cazaly, Stuart Spencer and Ivor Warne-Smith developed later ties to the Apple Isle. Several players who began their footy journeys down south have been inducted into the Hall, including Terry Cashion, Verdun Howell and Laurie Nash.
It wasn’t until almost immediately after Fitzpatrick’s review when Tasmania finally had players inducted who hadn’t played in the VFL. Horrie Gorringe in 2010 and John Leedham this year are the only Tasmanian players inducted solely on the basis of their play in Tasmania. Several players, such as Cashion, almost exclusively plied their trade down south. Of the states outside the big three, Tasmania possibly is the best represented and needs the smallest correction.
New South Wales
The New South Wales Australian Football Hall of Fame features 10 legends in its ranks.The majority of these legends had extensive careers in the AFL/VFL or elsewhere, such as Tony Lockett, Paul Kelly and Terry Daniher, but it also features several names from earlier eras.
Haydn Bunton Sr is notable in this list of NSW Hall of Fame Legends, because to read the national Hall of Fame Legends entry his career simply starts at age 20 already at Fitzroy. This is despite Bunton having been rather famously the subject of an illegal payments scandal to get him there at all. He played several senior seasons at Albury and West Albury (both former incarnations of the current Albury Tigers) from age 15 until age 20, and won the only premierships of his career there.
The entry of NSW Hall of Fame legend Ralph Robertson in 2024 arguably broke the duck for NSW footy excellence being recognised on its own terms. Robertson did play 14 games for St Kilda in 1899, but his Hall of Fame case was built on the strength of his contributions to footy in Sydney. Robertson played for East Sydney (now merged into the UNSW/Eastern Suburbs Bulldogs) and North Shore, and represented New South Wales on several dozen occasions. Longtime Swans chair Richard Colless, himself a legend in the NSW Hall of Fame for football administration, publicly lobbied for this inclusion for years.
Figures such as leading goalkicker Stan Miller (the namesake of their Coleman), administrators Harry Hedger and Jim Phelan (the Best and Fairest in AFL Sydney is the Phelan Medal) and long term player and administrator Jack Dean may hear their names called in future years.
There is also a solid case for the induction of Sir Doug Nicholls, who grew up in New South Wales. While his career was only 11 years long he was successful at both VFL and VFA levels, including representing the VFL and VFA sides in representative matches.
Queensland
The Queensland Hall of Fame only has two playing legend – Marcus Ashcroft. The premiership Lion already naturally sits in the national Hall for his exploits at AFL level. Many other Queenslanders also sit in the current national Hall of Fame, such as Jason Dunstall, Jason Akermanis and Michael Voss.
The lone QAFL-specific entry in the Hall of Fame comes, strangely enough, in the form of an umpire. Tom McArthur umpired 502 games from 1959 to 1985.
Dick Verdon has arguably the strongest case of the Queenlanders to stay up north to make the national Hall in coming years.
Northern Territory
Neither territory yet has a truly standalone entry in the national Hall of Fame, though there are several players with ties which go unmentioned in the AFL website’s honours lists.
Curiously, Michael Graham’s long career with St Mary’s is listed alongside his Sturt career, but several other inductees like Maurice Rioli and Bill Dempsey do not have their games for St Mary’s and Darwin listed.
In the NT Hall of Fame, among the inaugural legends are two Indigenous Team of the Century players, Bill Dempsey and David Kantilla. They played for West Perth and South Adelaide respectively. Rather notably though, both spent substantial parts of their careers playing in the NTFL during the southern off-season. That’s something that’s rather unique to footy in the Top End, and would be worthy of note by a truly national Hall of Fame on cultural significance grounds alone.
There’s also a wide range of other notable NT players that merit consideration alongside Dempsey and Kantilla.
The ACT
Finally, let’s talk about the nation’s capital.
The most famous name in Canberra football is Alex Jesaulenko. Jezza played in Canberra until age 20, winning three senior premierships with Eastlake before making the move to Carlton, something that is (unsurprisingly) omitted from his Hall of Fame record. His story of migration and only taking up the game at age 14 is well known, but also significant is that he did this on the mere fringes of what could be reasonably considered football heartland. Jesalulenko also returned to Canberra to play and coach after his retirement.
Among several AFL Canberra Hall of Fame legends (and the strange omission of both James Hird and Jesaulenko) are two names I want to highlight as potential national Hall of Fame candidates based on Canberran exploits.
The first is Kevin “Cowboy” Neale. Neale was part of St Kilda’s only VFL premiership and played 256 games for them. He’s probably not quite in the frame for Hall of Fame honours on his St Kilda career alone, especially with the over representation of players from his era already.
However, his contributions to football in Canberra after this were also significant. While serving as captain-coach at Ainslie, he led the Tricolours to four flags in five years, kicking about a million goals in the process.
He also led Canberra to this most storied of moments:
Against a VFL team featuring plenty of legitimate VFL talent such as Malcolm Blight, Merv Neagle, Robert Dipierdomenico, Francis Bourke, Michael Turner and Trevor Barker, Neale led a Canberra side also featuring Jesaulenko, to a hard fought win at Manuka Oval in July 1980.
If there’s one historical moment worth commemorating in a century of Canberra footy, it’s this moment, and captain-coach Neale was its architect.
The second name is Tony Wynd, who dominated football in the ACT in the 1980s and early 1990s. As a junior he was selected in national All-Australian sides from junior carnivals, he naturally won a stack of Mulrooney Medals in the ACTAFL and just generally seems to have been about the most dominant player on record in the league among those who never played VFL or similar football.
What else is notable, though, is that he was also playing to a level that got him selected to represent Australia in a tour of Ireland in 1987, though he subsequently broke his leg and missed out on the tour. As the AFL Canberra entry for his Legend status notes:
Injury prevented Tony from playing in the All-Australian Representative team which toured Ireland and the United States in 1987. His selection was widely recognised as he was one of very few players from outside the major Australian football league teams to ever be named in an All-Australian team.
Could Wynd have played successfully in a more credentialled competition in another state? Who knows? He appears never to have considered it. Wynd had a career in the ACT outside of football, working for ASADA’s predecessor, the ASDA and can be found in publications of the era promoting the anti-doping message.
This highlights a significant problem with trying to assess things like the Hall of Fame in an era before professionalisation and mass media. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the level of pay across senior football competitions would not have made chancing the move interstate a financially appealing prospect for someone already holding a well-paying job such as one in the public service. Indeed, the average AFL salary didn’t pass the average full-time male salary for workers in general until around 1991.
Wynd, then, represents something of the end of the unknowable hinterland of football talent – players plying their trade well outside the big leagues before professional money and recruiting made talent identification and recruitment all but inevitable. There are probably dozens of former players out there like him from the pre-modern eras of football, who dazzled onlookers in their own leagues, but played out careers well beyond the spotlights in Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide.
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.
Last week saw eight games of footy and approximately eight goals across an entire round.
As winter falls on the football fields the goals tend to dry up, but not normally to this extent. No team scored more than 81 points in a game, a (non-COVID) record since decimal currency (probably).
But overall, the footy was…enjoyable? We had four games decided by less than two goals, and all bar one by four goals or less.
Already it is looking more like an anomaly rather than a long term trend, but it still warrants a little more attention than normal in coming weeks.
This week in football we have:
Are the finalists set?
TWIF survey
According to the writers of This Week In Football (and Ricky Mangidis of the Shinboner and Len Phillips of the internet) it might not be far away.
Six teams were locked into the top eight the mid-year survey. Eleven teams were nominated across the 13 voters, with eight teams clearly ahead of three sides garnering some interest.
This aligns with how the computer models complied by Max Barry’s Squiggle see the season playing out from here. There seems to be a gap opening up between Fremantle in eighth and GWS in a projected ninth.
Some voters saw this uniformity as “pretty boring” but sometimes the boring option is the right one. But there’s still a fair amount of footy to play out.
Interesting, no voter nominated Sydney to make the finals despite their recent history of making late charges towards finals.
Contributors were also asked about the SPOONRACE, and it was even more straightforward, with twelve votes for West Coast and one for Richmond.
Last week over on CreditToDuBois I wrote about the three-year clangiversary of Hawthorn setting the record for most clangers in a match.
I wanted to provide a bit of a broader overview of the clanger. We have data on clangers going back to 1998. Ted Hopkins, who co-founded Champion Data, is the one who popularised what has since become an integral part of the footy lexicon.
I’d wager however that many of us (and even many broadcasters and journalists) don’t have more than a general sense of what a clanger is, so let’s bring out the virtual whiteboard.
Now, how many clangers happen per game?
If you look at just the numbers you’ll see a massive uptick in clangers since 1998. I don’t have a definitive answer on this, but I strongly suspect this is partly due to improvements in data capture and categorisation. Some of those actions above weren’t collected in the early days of Champion Data.
We can see that since 1998 the average clangers per game has tripled. If we move to the second slide we can see that free kicks have stayed relatively stable, while other sources of clangers have grown significantly.
From 2021 onwards we can see that the majority of clangers are disposals gone awry.
We know what a clanger is, and we know how often they occur, but we haven’t addressed the key question – do they matter?
Let’s look at the profiles of winning teams from 1998 onwards:
We find that over the last 5 years, a lower clanger rate (clangers / disposals) is a meaningfully better win predictor than a positive disposal differential.
Having a lot of clangers doesn’t necessarily mean you’re performing poorly – some of the best players in the league frequently top the count. What matters is why you’re getting them – is it because you’re getting a lot of the ball, or is it because you’re being far less efficient with it than your opponent.
Before we get to our top (bottom?) list, let’s take a quick look at the clanger profiles of each team.
And finally, here’s the 20 worst clanger counts, clanger differentials, and clanger rate differentials
Surprises all around
TWIFsurvey
The league may have separated into groups at the top and the bottom, but that doesn’t neccessarily mean it is who we thought it would have been at the start of the year.
This Week In Football contributors were asked which teams had surprised them the most this year, and which had disappointed.
Reflecting the evenness of the league and of pre-season expectations, a wide variety of teams were nominated.
The most surprising side according to the voters has been the top 4 aspirant Suns, with the rise of the Crows and re-rise of Collingwood also causing some surprise.
Reflecting that “surprising” doesn’t just mean unexpectedly rising up the ladder, Richmond also got a couple of nods.
“Richmond are way ahead of where I thought they’d be. In hindsight, you can probably point to them still having a useful experienced defensive core as a starting point, but 3 wins is probably 2 more than what I’d have thought their best case scenario would be to this point.”
The voter who chose the Dogs provided a solid explanation for the surprise:
“I thought they were going to find their depth wanting and battle to perform with a coach who was distracted by his contract issues and an interpersonal style that isn’t necessarily for everyone.”
A much stronger consensus emerged on the question of who has disappointed observers.
One voter provided a clear description of the disappointment.
“For knowing exactly what their flaws were but doubling down on largely the same ball movement patterns of the last few years.”
Roughly half went for the Blues, who after widespread expectations of taking a theoretically strong list to the next level, are floundering on the very limits of finals possibilities.
North Melbourne managed to disappoint a couple of respondents even against their own low expectations, while other likely September spectators like Sydney and Port Adelaide also got nods.
One can only assume Collingwood being disappointing was a nomination by someone hoping to see them fail.
How is footy going, and what we’d change about it
TWIF survey
Turn on the radio and the panel shows and some weeks you’d be convinced FOOTBALL IS IN TROUBLE.
Well, maybe its time to shoot the messenger instead.
This Week In Football contributors were asked about the state of the game in the survey, in an open ended format. Despite the lack of direction, 12 of the 13 respondents either directly or indirectly mentioning that the game is in a good state or as good as it has been.
The thirteenth didn’t criticise the quality of the modern game, but said that the game wasn’t good enough to sustain the ever extending season.
The good current balance between attack and defence was raised by several writers, with one saying:
“There’s reasonable balance in attack and defence, the best players are shining through, and a nice amount of tactical and strategic variation.”
Another added:
“(The game is) in a decent sweet spot balancing ball use and contest work. The best teams can do both, and those who can only do one or the other get punished fairly regularly.”
A clear focus of some was on the off-field side of the game.
“The on-field product’s as good as it’s ever been but the off-field media slop is at a tipping point of sheer dogshit.”
There’s also a common concern amongst footy media, fanatics and insiders that the amount of footy might be hitting saturation levels.
There’s just way too much of it. Both from a media sense -which is pretty obvious and something you can block out – but even then 207 games is too many. Nine games a week is too many. It’s only one extra round but I reckon Gather Round has been a tipping point where the season becomes too long and games don’t matter as much as they should.
Umpiring, rule interpretation and the MRO also came under the hammer.
There are clearly some serious issues that need working out with the approach to MRO and umpiring consistency and interpretation though.
So if the game is in a generally good state, albeit with some concerns, what would our contributors fix?
Responses to this question were more specific to changes. A number of contributors suggested that the recent rule changes were a positive thing when talking about the state of the game, but others criticised their application.
There was some questioning of the equalisation off field as well, with Hawthorn on someone’s chopping block.
There was also a continued focus on needing to improve the understanding and decision making around tackling and prior opportunity.
This is an excerpt of a longer piece I’ve written over on myblog, so please check out that version if you’re interested in this topic.
The out of bounds on the full rule was first introduced in 1969, where – as the name implies – a free kick is paid against any player who kicks the ball out of bounds on the full. Since then, football games at every level are met by groans from supporters when a player concedes this type of free kick, whether it be from a rushed kick out of the back line that just carries over the boundary on the wing, or a crucial shot at goal that gets absolutely sprayed off the boot.
But which player and team kicks it out on the full the most? And which games have seen the most balls end up in the crowd, instead of their intended location?
In the 328 AFL games that have been played since the start of the 2024 season, there have been 1903 free kicks for out on the full against 541 players. There have been 133 players with a single kick out on the full, 157 players who have kicked it out on the full at least five times, 15 players who have kicked it out on the full at least 10 times, and one player who has kicked it out on the full 15 or more times.
That one player? Shai Bolton.
I was surprised to see a number of these names on the list. Bolton and Izak Rankine were a little unexpected, given they aren’t always high-possession players (although the number of kicks a player has does impact the proportion of kicks that can go out on the full). Max Holmes has been touted as the best draft pick of the 2020s to date, while Hugh McCluggage and Jordan Dawson are arguably having career-best seasons.
Based on the list above, you can begin to understand why the Brisbane Lions, Geelong, and Adelaide find themselves at the pointy end of the table in terms of having the most out on the full kicks. And despite Carlton’s trouble moving the ball in 2025, they don’t seem to have as much of an issue kicking the ball out on the full (got to celebrate the small victories, right?).
Since the start of 2024 the most out on the full kicks by an individual player during a match is three, which has been done 10 times – most recently by Brisbane’s Zac Bailey against Adelaide last weekend (including two in the final quarter when the game was on the line). Other players to have three out on the fulls in a single game include Oskar Baker (Round 5, 2024), Brody Mihocek (R7 2024), Nathan Broad (R19 2024), and Jack Gunston (R6 2025).
I hope that, at the very least, this post makes for some interesting discussion with your footy-loving mates.
Which players are overrated and underrated?
TWIF survey
Naturally, asking a bunch of footy analysts to indulge in some hot takery about players being overrated elicited a fair amount of caution. Most didn’t like the question at all, but a few of the braver souls took some shots.
It’s probably worth recalling, too, the parable of Tyrese Halliburton, who was rather cruelly voted “most overrated” by his own NBA peers in April. He is now leading his Pacers into an NBA Finals lead against the Thunder, and is just two wins away from a ring (and a Finals MVP).
The only player to be mentioned twice for either question was Ben King, noted for perhaps being a little one-dimensional.
Several contributors identified midfielders who tend to catch the public eye. Nick Daicos, Jason Horne-Francis, Zak Butters, Sam Walsh and Patrick Cripps were all identified by someone as being perhaps a little too well-regarded.
That multiple members of two spluttering midfields were mentioned is perhaps not a coincidence.
Horne-Francis was mentioned for his defensive game and for his role causing Port to struggle to fit and balance their midfielders. Cripps was highlighted simply as very good at things that aren’t that valuable at present.
Someone also didn’t appreciate the hype around Archie Perkins.
In terms of underrated players, a lot of people simply mentioned someone from their own team, which means naming them probably identifies the respondent.
Among non-homer answers were many midfielders in a neat balance against the focus on them in the overrated question. Among these underrated midfielders were the likes of Ed Richards, Noah Anderson, Tom Atkins, Ollie Dempsey and Josh Dunkley. Dunkley was rather poetically/hungrily described as doing “all the mise en place so the chefs can cook”.
Defenders in the underrated mix were Connor Idun (balancing the focus in the AA team on Lachie Ash) and Ryan Lester.
Which player would you want at your club?
TWIF Survey
It’s a juicy question. Out of anyone available in the league, which player would be the best fit at your club.
We didn’t ask whether it was just for a year, or forever.
That reflected the split in votes received for different players.
Some of our voters probably recognise that the most valuable recruits are young players of proven value.
Such players can provide potentially a decade of very good service to a club, helping move the dial on a sustained push to success.
However, it turns out that what many of our seasoned and sober analysts actually want to experience is the short term joy of just seeing the best player in the league run around in your own colours.
Nearly a third of all respondents want the 30 year old Marcus Bontempelli at their club over anyone else.
Several contributors went for younger stars like Pickett and Daicos while some sought to fill specific needs like big forwards or inside midfielders, but really, it was all about the Bonk here.
XScore Pissers
Joe Cordy
My favourite kind of game to watch is an xScore Pisser.
They’re an opportunity to revel in the chaos of the sport, and the fact that a significant on-paper advantage is never truly safe from it just not being your day.
For those who are unaware, expected score (AKA xScore) is a measurement of goalkicking accuracy. Every shot in a game is compared to a sample of similar shots based on location and situation to get an xScore value based on the average amount of points it scores.
For example, a shot that results in a goal 50% of the time, a behind 40% of the time, and a miss in the remaining 10% will have a value of (50% of 6) + (40% of 1) + (10% of 0) = 3 + 0.4 = 3.4 points. The total xScore for a match is the sum of every shot’s xScore value.
If you’ve ever felt a team was either squandering or capitalising on their chances more than usual, xScore is the measurement that’d back you up.
Since 2021 the current crop of amateur analysts have been able to record xScores for each match, and there have been two obvious takeaways:
Over the course of a whole season, almost every team will end up within +/- 3 points of their xScore per game. The few exceptions are teams who funnel a disproportionate share of their shots through a small number of exceptionally good or bad players.
Despite everybody regressing to the mean eventually, it has more variance week to week than virtually any other statistic.
The latter point is where chaos gets introduced, and you find your xScore pissers.
The xScore pisser isn’t a uniform type of game – rather there are several types of pisser to soothe the soul.
Double Swing
The classic of the genre is the double swing. When one team kicks well above their expected total, in perfect juxtaposition to their opponents wastefulness in front of goal.
You can typically find a low-scale example of one of these every other weekend or so, such as Round 12’s perfect mirror match of Walyalup vs Gold Coast where the visitors triumphed 9.10.64 – 11.9.75 from xScores of 75.5 and 64.9 respectively.
The really special games are rarer though. To see a proper swing not just between two teams, but two specific players both taking the lion’s share of their team’s looks at goal.
In Round 21 2021, in one of the few games able to be played in Melbourne that season, the top of the ladder – premiership favourite – Bulldogs took on 10th place finals hopefuls Essendon.
The game, for the most part, played out how you’d expect: Bulldogs comfortably won KPIs like Inside 50s (60-39), contested possessions (127-108) and shots at goal (33-23), for an xScore finish of 114.6 – 76.5. This margin would see a team win the match 98.6% of the time according to Wheelo Rating’s model.
The beauty and tragedy of football though is sometimes despite having the clear talent advantage across the field, you can find yourself relying on one tall idiot to put the points on the board.
Both teams went in with one such idiot, with Josh Bruce and Peter Wright at the spear tip of either team’s attack. Josh Bruce, for his part, played a reasonable game: scoring 3.2.20 from 7 shots, and taking 7 marks (3 contested). Unfortunately for him and his team, his counterpart at the other end was performing alchemy.
Peter Wright turned the same number of marks, one more shot, and less favourable positioning into 7.0.42, his best goal tally to date.
Despite their domination of almost every other phase of play, the Dogs went down 12.12.84 to 15.7.97 for a 51-point swing from the expected margin. On their own Bruce and Wright combined for 27 of these.
None of that helped the Bombers a few weeks later trying to end their finals drought against the same opposition, where they finished 27 points below their xScore, with Peter Wright not registering a shot on goal.
But a pisser is a pisser, and it made for one great night of chaos.
Taking Your Chances
The more common example is when one team, for one reason or another, simply cannot hit the final target. They can restrict their opponent’s chances, they can generate their own, but they can’t execute the only skill that determines the result.
There’s one club that is consistently on the wrong end of these results, and one club that is almost as consistently the beneficiary.
Coming in to Round 16 2023 the Giants’ season was just barely hanging on to the hope of finals, sitting at 6-8 in 14th place. They had put together a bit of form winning 3 of their last 4, with the solitary loss being a single goal margin to Richmond.
The Demons had been going strong across the season, but were coming off a 15-point loss to Geelong where they kicked 8.15.63 from an xScore of 75.2.
If they’d managed to just be not great in front of goals again they would likely have won reasonably comfortably, happy to simply secure four points. Instead they put on an all-time great display of not taking your chances.
Despite falling just 3 points short of their expected total from the week before, and holding their opponents to 7.5.47 from an expected 44.1, Melbourne put up 5.15.45 to lose by two points. The worst offenders were Pickett, Petracca, Viney and Sparrow who generated a scoreboard impact of 1.9.15 from an expected 38.
Nobody has benefited more from opposition inaccuracy since 2021 than the Giants, but this was their masterpiece.
Deadeye Dicks
The last and possibly most aggravating variation on the xScore Pisser for the losing team is when despite creating opportunities, and even making the most of them, your opponents completely forget how to miss for just one game.
There are a couple recent examples of this: Hawthorn finishing two goals above their xScore total of 83.1 against the Suns in Darwin, while also restricting their quality and quantity of opportunities to 70.6, but still going down to 104-96 being one.
The highlight of this subgenre that’s stuck in my mind since I watched it unfold however was the 2022 Anzac Day clash.
Despite coming into their marquee fixture with a 1-4 record against a more talented opposition, Essendon had virtually everything they could hope for to go their way. They won the arm wrestles of territory, possession, shots on goal, and even found an unlikely goal source in Alec Waterman putting up 4.1 for the day.
Despite a pretty meagre xScore total of 66.1, they managed to exceed it by 15.9 points for a respectable 12.10.82 final score. The only Essendon could’ve lost is exactly the way they did: with almost every opposition player making the most of their one opportunity, and a couple of centrepieces with golden boots.
Collingwood finished on a total of 15.3.93, outperforming expectations by over six goals. They found eight individual goal-scorers on the day, the two obvious standouts being Jack Ginnivan and Brody Mihocek arguably playing the best games of their Collingwood career, as they combined for nine goals from ten shots.
The first entry in Macrae’s long history of being on the right side of fine margins, and in my opinion, still the funniest.
Around the Grounds
Check out Gemma Bastiani’s final part of a four part series that is the definitive document on the tactical evolution of the AFLW in its first decade. This time, she’s covering midfield development.
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.
Got an idea or want to contribute? Email thisweekinaustralianfootball at gmail dot com
The back half of the season is underway with the race for finals firmly in train. With the turning of the corner This Week In Football decided to take an internal stocktake of how the the game is going in 2025.
This week we will run through the mid year All Australian team, while next week will week we will go through the teams that have surprised us, disappointed us, who we think will make finals and a whole lot more.
This Week In Football we have:
The TWIF collective mid-season All-Australian team – defence
On Tuesday afternoon, one TWIF contributor summed up the task at hand.
The All Australian selections are hard. I may actually be developing some empathy.
Every year the public and media descend at two times to determine their best team of the year, ahead of the choices by official selectors.
With 18 teams and a range of talented players, selecting the best of the best is tough. To mark the halfway point of the season(ish) we’ve taken a bit of time to poll contributors about various elements of the game, including votes for an all-Australian team at this point.
With 11 entries from contributors and friends of the show, there’s hopefully a good mix of perspectives here and a fairly solid consensus team has emerged.
Let’s run through it line by line with some comments from entrants along the way, and then look at the end result, starting with the defenders.
All up, twenty-eight different players were nominated across 11 writers. Perhaps this is a sign of the depth of defenders across the competition. Maybe it demonstrates of how hard it is to evaluate defence, and who stands out at that end of the ground.
The top eight vote getters ended up quite heavy on talls. But there were two smaller players joing them as leading nominees: a rapidly emerging Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera and Bailey Dale.
Meanwhile, nearly unanimous nominations came for Sam Taylor with one note that he’s “still the best pure defender in the comp”.
Defensive balance is quite hard to evaluate these days. Different sides run a different number of options down back, and there are even more permutations when you consider the “plus one”.
Different people said three talls were “a cop out” and “probably a bit much” but like those commenters themselves, our final team will end up with the same mix:
B
Lachie Ash
Sam Taylor
Callum Wilkie
HB
Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera
Darcy Moore
Bailey Dale
The inclusion of two defenders from the Saints is notable, but probably reflects how Wanganeen-Milera in particular is “the reason the side ranks 6th for scores from the back half”
For partisans of those with less votes, we had comments such as:
Connor Idun – “underrated from a defensive perspective”
Sam Wicks – “convinced the entire league that Nick Watson was shit for one (1) round”
Harris Andrews – “clear number one for keys”
Jordan Clark – “has been awesome giving Freo some genuine drive off half back and contributing forward of centre” and “is the If He Was In Melbourne pick for 2025”
The TWIF collective mid-season All-Australian team – midfield
While some nominate the defence as the most difficult part of the ground to populate with All-Australians, some also point to the questions at play for the midfield.
A key question with selecting a midfield is one of balance and role. Do you name true wings? Do you pick a group with different roles who can work together? Do you just name all the Western Bulldogs?
Most nominated in midfield group was Ed Richards, who is performing brilliantly in the most effective midfield in the competition. Eye catching territory gainers Bailey Smith and Jordan Dawson also garnered a lot of support.
All up our group of 11 picked 26 different players in their respective lists. This time it’s likely down to how little distance there is between the group.
The overall top five was clear, with the next few thereabouts for bench spots. No true wings were picked, so our consensus lineup stumps for the two most wingish of the five players.
C
Bailey Smith
Ed Richards
Jordan Dawson
R
Max Gawn
Tom Liberatore
Noah Anderson
It’s also not spoiling anything to also include the unanimously-selected Max Gawn in the consensus midfield lines here. Only two entrants even bothered with a second nomination.
To summarise: “He is #1 for Score Involvements, #1 for Score Launches, #4 for Hit Out Win%, #1 for Disposals, #1 for Marks (and #1 for Contested Marks and #2 for Intercept Marks), as well as being #2 for Clearances and #1 for Post Clearance Contested Possessions.”
Some notable comments on other nominations:
Matt Rowell – “the best inside midfielder […] His ability to add outside running game this year has been outstanding”
Touk Miller – “is the only player in the comp to play over 10 games while averaging a goal, 25+ disposals, 10+ contested and 5+ clearances. Quietly putting up an all time year for a midfielder”.
Chad Warner – “has been as impactful as any attacking midfielder this year in the games I’ve watched, but hasn’t had anyone to kick to. He’ll fit right in at West Coast”.
The Bonk – “Failing more injuries I struggle to imagine an AA team come September that doesn’t have Bontempelli in it.”
The TWIF collective mid-season All-Australian team – forwards
In contrast to the other two lines, forward nominations were more tightly clustered with only 22 players named. The existence of an objective metric in goalkicking helps here, with one contributor bluntly just picking the players with the most goals.
Alongside Gawn in the ruck, Jeremy Cameron was the only other unanimous nomination across all 11 voters, with Cameron “leading the Coleman medal, most score involvements, disposals and meters gained of any Key Forward with 15+ goals”.
Jesse Hogan sits close behind Cameron. They are the two players meaningfully averaging over three goals per game.
The balance of the top 6 picks worked out two key forwards, two small forwards and two hybrid mid-forwards who both garnered a couple of nominations in the midfield category above but were chosen here.
Pickett and Rankine have moved much more in a midfield direction this season but Rankine in particular drew high praise. TWIFers noted that “he remains one of the league’s best finishers and creative ball users” and “the potential to be the most all round threatening player forward of centre of the second half of the decade”.
HF
Izak Rankine
Jeremy Cameron
Kysaiah Pickett
F
Ben Long
Jesse Hogan
Jamie Elliott
Jamie Elliott meanwhile was simply called “a must”.
There was also some praise for those who just missed the cut.
Sam Darcy – “would have been an easy inclusion for me if he had made the games cutoff”
Jack Gunston – “has been involved in everything – big numbers of shots plus high assists and score involvements as well”
Tyson Stengle was included in a team picked for “goals, pressure, tackles and retention”.
The TWIF collective mid-season All-Australian team – putting it together
So with the above votes tallied, let’s complete the picture.
First up, the bench is simply filled from the next most voted players with an eye to balance that meant excluding the key defenders Harris Andrews and Sam Collins as a tiebreaker.
Int
Caleb Serong
Hugh McCluggage
Nick Daicos
Riley Thilthorpe
Riley Thilthorpe was picked by a couple of people who noted his “versatility edges him past the other key forwards” and at least in theory he can take a few ruck contests.
Daicos gets a tonne of discussion about his ratedness, being one of “best mids in the best teams” though for some “he hasn’t shown it in his games so far.”
Caleb Serong was noted as a centre bounce specialist who “attends nearly the most and has a really high rate of winning the centre clearance.”
McLuggage got slightly more support and could probably be replaced with the next most nomianted non-key defenders in Dayne Zorko or Jordan Clark.
In a real team an extra mid/small defender and forward would come in for McCluggage and Daicos – but this team isn’t playing games. If you wanted to do that, drop Zorko and West in, and name one of those two as a sub.
Ever since players have been able to play-on from a kick-in without impediment in 2019, some highly skilled young players began taking their team’s kick-ins. More cynical footy fans have used this as a way to question the value of players’ stats and their overall disposal count.
The value of a kick-in over any other disposal may be debatable but the responsibility is typically given to players deemed to be both skilled enough by foot and also good enough decision makers. These players are backed to pick the best target or to choose the right set play at the appropriate time.
But the next kick – and often mark – can be equally as important. Typically taken anywhere from 40-60m out from defensive goal and sometimes contested, this mark and subsequent kick can be the disposal that sets you up for a fast break or leaves you kicking backwards and scrambling in the back half. Worse, it could be cut off and turned into a repeat entry by the opposition.
In the 312 games since the beginning of the 2024 season, there have been 4,608 successful marks from a kick-in, shared between 587 players. 54 players have been the successful kick-in target on 20 or more occasions, and 179 players have been successful targets on 10 or more occasions.
So who are your clubs’ #1 targets when kicking out from a behind? And who takes the most marks when targeted with the first disposal after an opposition’s minor score?
As you can see, some teams’ number one player is significantly higher than others. There are a few reasons for this; some teams play a less controlled game style, some teams don’t have a standard target, and other teams have had a change of personnel in the last 18 months either due to injuries or list management.
Of these players some have significantly more than others, and some are on the same team as other top targets. The following are the top 10 (well, 11 because 10th is a draw) players league-wide for marks from kick-in since the start of 2024.
But what happens with these kicks afterwards? These players are obviously trusted to find the best option, so how often does this option convert to a score?
The overwhelming majority of kick-ins eventually result in a turnover, and 65% of all chains that begin with a successful mark are turned over to the opposition at some point down the line. Just 13% of these chains become a score, and 22% become a stoppage (or the quarter ends).
So, which players generate the most scoring chains from kick-ins? From the start of 2024, just 14 players have had successful scoring chains the first mark after a kick-in. Unsurprisingly some of the top kick-in targets are amongst these players.
There is a lot of discussion about players taking kick-ins as cheap stats, but there is a reason particular players are trusted to take the first kick, and even the second kick in the chain, as it can be the difference between a turnover and opposition score and a forward 50 entry; or even – as we have seen above – in some rare cases a shot on goal.
Much like every other part of the game, teams are so well drilled these days that every link in the chain is important, and given that many of the top teams score the majority of their points from turnover – the exception being the Bulldogs – having players you can trust not to turn the ball over in your defensive half is crucial to team defence, and the first two kicks in the chain are arguably the most important when clearing the ball from the danger zone.
So next time you see someone online or on a panel show parroting lines about “cheap disposals,” just remember that amongst the top five scoring teams in the AFL, almost half of their scores come from forward half turnovers, and the players most frequently entrusted to prevent this are some of the most important in the team.
A quarter behind the bench
Cody Atkinson and Sean Lawson
About a month ago there was an article published for the ABC on interchanges and sideline signs.
While researching the article we sat behind the benches for a game to observe the patterns with players coming on and off. All of this information is observable, and other sides have similar patterns of movement.
It’s not a complete picture, and we may have missed some shifts. For the period that there were only two KPFs on the ground, it appeared that Toby Greene played taller.
Some of these shifts were well planned, and some seemingly were extended due to ball placement on the ground and opportunity. If you had to watch the Giants this week, the rotation would be different – not least due to changing players.
Still, it’s an interesting look at how teams move, shift and evolve in one part of the ground across a quarter.
AFLW fixture strength of schedule – how unfair is the draw?
Sean Lawson
The AFLW fixture has finally been released for 2025 and it’s…just 12 rounds long. Those missing matches might end up mattering a lot.
Those five missing matchups this season shape the difficulty of the draw. Teams can either miss or make finals or top 4 narrowly, based on those differences in fixture difficulty.
The AFL deliberately makes a virtue out of fixture imbalance by weighting the fixture, with the impact of uneven opponent sets serving as a handicapping measure. The best teams play each other more often, and the weaker teams do likewise.
The process isn’t perfect, as Brisbane benefited from last year, on the way to a grand final berth.
In 2024 the Lions were handed a seemingly rough draw as befit one of the top sides, playing almost every previous finalist and skipping five non-finalists. But then those non-finalists in Hawthorn, Fremantle, Port Adelaide and Richmond all jumped into the AFLW finals, and turned the Lions apparently hard draw into one of the softest schedules in the league.
These shifts are unpredictable and always mean draw strength changes to an extent from preseason projections.
With this caveat in mind, we can take the 2024 results, use Pythagorean Expectation to calculate each team’s true strength adjusted for scoring luck, and see how well the fixture has been weighted and how unfair things might get.
First, here’s how the teams look following 2024:
Adjusting for team strength here mostly serves to highlight that North were really further ahead of the pack than wins and losses on the real ladder suggests. Meanwhile a couple of the bottom sides, especially the two Sydney teams, were probably better than 15th and 16th, while Carlton overperformed.
These strength ratings have consequences for fixture assessment – North and Hawthorn finished top 2, but there’s a gulf in strength making avoiding North Melbourne a big make or break factor for teams’ draws.
The AFL have managed to give last year’s finalists the eight hardest draws, which is commendable. Hawthorn and Brisbane have gotten off relatively lightly as top four sides, but this is mostly by virtue of missing more middling sides and fewer bottom ones. The Lions still play all the top sides from last year.
Down the bottom, we can identify GWS as a potential riser based on probably underperforming last year and also being handed the weakest set of opponents this season. The Giants skip four of the six top sides from last year. The Eagles, while not as strong in 2024, also miss the same top sides as GWS.
The AFLW fixture is more uneven than the AFLM
Overall, it appears that the AFLW fixture contains bigger inequalities than the AFLM draw. Here’s the strength of schedule rating for all 18 fixtures in the two competitions, with the strongest fixtures nearly 1 full expected win
Overall, the expected wins impact of the hardest and easiest draws in the AFLW is a bit higher than the AFLM, but that’s before we consider that the season is around half the length. Here’s the same strength of schedule impacts with the “expected wins” impact expressed as a share of the season’s total games:
Simply put, when there’s only 12 games, a fixture being over 1.5 expected wins harder than the easiest, makes a lot more impact than in a 23 game season.
Beyond the shorter season, though, another reason behind this is just that AFLW teams have a wider spread of strengths. Looking at 2025 preseason Pythagorean expectation, there were four AFLW teams rate stronger than the strongest rated AFLM team, including North Melbourne at a stupid 91% (remember, they won every game except for a draw).
At the other end of the scale, there were three clearly weaker AFLM teams and a group of 7 in the AFLW. The worst rated teams across either comp were the two AFLM laggards in West Coast and North, but there’s a greater spread of relatively struggling teams in from 2024 AFLW season – roughly seven, from Sydney on downwards on the underlying strength chart above.
What the greater extremes in team strengths mean is simply that there’s more variance in strength of schedule, so playing or avoiding the top or bottom groups of AFLW teams moves the dial more.
The most controllable factor, though, is season length. Getting closer to a full 17 game season as quickly as possible is a fairness and integrity imperative.
Around the Grounds
Gemma Bastiani’s third part of her decade retrospective on AFLW tactical and game style evolution covers the world of the ruck
Max Barry’s Squiggle Football game, a football management deckbuilder roguelike, releases a demo next week
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.
Got an idea or want to contribute? Email thisweekinaustralianfootball at gmail dot com
The Mid-Season Rookie Draft has been with us for a few years now, and has evolved into a last chance saloon of hopes and dreams of young-ish footballers everywhere. By its nature it’s made up of players that have been passed over several times already, but have kept their dreams alive.
There have been some really solid finds through the short time it has been around (again), including Jai Newcombe and Ned Long. Mostly, thought, it has been used for fliers and filling gaps.
But this long journey often creates some of the most joyous off-field celebrations
"It’s an amazing feeling and emotions are running high."
Tom McCarthy waited a while for his name to be called by a league club, but the celebration was well worth it. There was no shock in the announcement – to the degree that a club polo was on hand.
And that his mate was in an Eagles mascot costume.
Will Bravo narrowly missed out selection in the 2020 AFL Draft, and has been battling it out for the Tigers’ VFL side for the past few years. He knows the journey, and how hard it is to get to that final level.
We don’t know how Bravo got his hands on a costume, but it was worth it.
Congratulations Tom, and Will.
This week in football we have:
Multiskilled Midfielders – The Value of Tackling and Clearing
The concept of a defensive midfielder – not a tagger – is becoming a more well known and widespread concept recently. But the real value is in a defensive midfielder who can prevent the opposition from getting out the back while helping their team get the ball forward.
So who does the best job of preventing the ball being cleared by the opposition or creating stoppages around the ground, meanwhile also getting the ball in the hands of their teammates at subsequent stoppages?
After the final round before the byes, there are just 18 players in the competition who average more than 5 tackles and more than 5 clearances per game (5+ games).
These 18 players come from just 12 sides. Adelaide, Collingwood, Essendon, Fremantle, GWS and West Coast are the only teams without a current representative.
North Melbourne and Tristan Xerri being the only outliers with the only ruck in a list of inside midfielders.
Despite these players seemingly having similar skillsets in regards to being able to clear the footy and clamp down on opposition mids, they usually specialise in one major skillset while being good at covering in the other. Effectively they give their team one and a half players in and around stoppages.
For example – as seen in the chart below – Tom Atkins and Jack Steele aren’t doing a huge amount to move the ball long post-clearance. Instead they are utilised more to get it out to the other guys in the midfield group.
Meanwhile players like Bailey Smith, Zac Butters, and – perhaps somewhat surprisingly – Tom Liberatore are used to get the ball moving forward as much as possible and as deep as possible.
There is also a significant split when it comes to the amount of contested vs uncontested ball these players are getting. That’s despite that split being something that you would think would be pretty consistent since clearances and tackles are both indicative of a contested mid.
This comes partly from a misunderstanding of what a “Contested Possession” really is, as well as how little of some players’ games are made of stoppages.
A contested possession, by definition, is “a possession which has been won when the ball is in dispute. Includes looseball-gets, hardball-gets, contested marks, gathers from a hitout and frees for,” which does not necessarily mean the ball was won in a contest, a stat better covered by “Hard Ball Gets”.
Instead, contested possessions are an indicator of how often a player wins their own ball vs how often their teammates look for them post clearance or turnover.
Of our list of dual-skilled mids, what makes some of these players able to play these “inside-outside” roles is the fact that they get the bulk of their clearances at stoppage around the ground rather than at centre bounce attendances.
While players like Liberatore, Newcombe and Rowell get a larger percentage of their clearances in the middle of the ground at restart, players like Butters, Taranto, and Patrick Cripps are more skilled at clearing the ball from stoppages around the ground, where they are able to lose their player in the chaos. Jack Macrae is somewhat of a unicorn here, winning St Kilda clearances from all types of stoppage as well or better than most (he is the second highest clearance winning player in the competition currently).
The final test of a midfielder’s mettle in the eyes of many (especially those who aren’t blinded by the glow of the confusing and popular contested possession stat) is the amount of score involvements they are able to generate. Score involvements are a skill relevant to clearance midfielders and outside midfielders alike.
The more inside players like Atkins, Bontempelli, Liberatore, and (mostly due to him being a ruck) Xerri have a larger number of score launches because they get more of the ball initially. Players who get the first possession less than others, but are still able create scoring opportunities later down the chain, are just as valuable. Seven of our seventeen midfielders are in the top 20 for score involvements amongst midfielders in the competition.
Top 5 vs bottom 5: The definitive answer to ‘the poll’
On Tuesday, I posted a poll on X that caused some intentional and some unintentional heated debate about whether your top 5 players or bottom 5 players have a greater impact on your team’s performance.
The unintentional parts are largely due to my poor wording. My intention was to pose whether it’s better to have a better top 5 and lesser bottom 5 compared to your opposition, or visa-versa.
Let’s use an example using some methodology I’ll refer to later.
In the Round 9, Fremantle vs Collingwood clash, Fremantle had the stronger top 5 players leading into the game according to AFL Player Ratings.
*I have used a rolling 8-game average to determine the top and bottom five players leading into each game
Top 5 Player Ratings
Player Name
Rating
Andrew Brayshaw (Fre)
19.2
Caleb Serong (Fre)
15.2
Nick Daicos (Col)
14.3
Steele Sidebottom (Col)
13.6
Luke Jackson (Fre)
15.1
Darcy Cameron (Col)
11.8
Alex Pearce (Fre)
11.3
Ned Long (Col)
11.7
Dan Houston (Col)
9.5
Sean Darcy (Fre)
9.0
Accumulative Total
Fremantle = 69.8
Collingwood = 60.9
Bottom 5 Player Ratings
Player Name
Player Rating
Tim Membrey (Col)
6.0
Isaac Quaynor (Col)
5.9
Karl Worner (Fre)
5.8
Lachlan Sullivan (Col)
5.6
Oleg Markov (Col)
5.3
Will Hoskin-Elliott (Col)
5.2
Jye Amiss (Fre)
4.0
Patrick Voss (Fre)
3.6
Cooper Simpson (Fre)
3.3
Neil Erasmus (Fre)
3.2
Accumulative Total
Fremantle = 19.9
Collingwood = 28.0
Now consider the question, which top 5, and bottom 5 players would you rather have? How important is Collingwood’s depth compared to Fremantle’s in-form stars? This question sits at the heart of the poll.
*Interestingly, Collingwood won this game by 14 points, yet only had one of their top 5 players feature in the top 5 on gameday (Cameron), compared to three of Fremantle’s (Brayshaw, Serong and Jackson).
Using this methodology, I’ve expanded the analysis to each game back to 2016 to try and understand what’s more important.
Here are the results based on the winners of each game.
All games
Key takeaways
25.2% of games are won by teams with the better top 5 and lesser bottom 5 compared to 20.8% who have the lesser top 5 and better bottom 5 – indicating it’s better to have a stronger top 5 compared to a stronger bottom 5.
9% of games are won by the team that didn’t have the better top 5 and the better bottom 5.
Only 44.9% of games are won by the team that have the best top 5 and best bottom 5 players.
Finals
Looking at just finals, we see that most winners have better top 5 and better bottom 5.
Close games (under 12 points)
In close games, we get a bit more randomness. Possibly because a close game will naturally promote a more even distribution of ratings points across both teams.
Lastly, before we declare a definitive answer, let’s look at each club’s top 5 and bottom 5 player ratings average across the 2025 season.
Collingwood’s depth, through recruitment and system, show that you don’t need to rely on a small number of elite players to win. Gold Coast on the other hand, appear to have a contrasting profile, relying more heavily on the likes of Rowell, Anderson, Collins and Witts, while their young forwards find their way.
*Sidenote – the player ratings love the Bulldogs
So, amongst all the confusion, maybe the poll was right… Across nearly a decade of games, an outperforming top 5 gives you a slight edge — especially in finals, where the margins for error shrink.
But the data also reminds us that depth matters, particularly in close games where every moment matters.
A modest proposal for upending the fabric of Australian Rules Football
Something different from me this week, brought on partly by *waves vaguely towards the entirety of human knowledge of head trauma* but more specifically two recent things.
Firstly, Paul Seedsman’s confronting interview on the ABC about his ongoing battles with symptoms from concussion. There are numerous write-ups available, but I think it’s best to hear it directly from him.
Secondly, the collision between Darcy Byrne-Jones and Alex Pearce, and the subsequent tribunal hearing which saw Pearce’s three-match suspension overturned.
Contested marks where one player is running back with the flight of the ball are one of the most dangerous situations in the modern game. Some of the most celebrated moments in 21st century football, Nick Riewoldt and Jonathan Brown launching themselves with no sense of self preservation, are deeply uncomfortable to watch today with what we know about concussion.
Even had Pearce’s suspension stood, his evidence suggests he doesn’t feel he could or should have acted any differently. His coach, probably correctly, stated after the game that he would have faced fierce criticism if he did not contest the ball with everything he had.
To date the AFL has attempted to address this through punitive measure. Suspend the player (or pay a free kick) where they get it wrong, and hope it influences their decision in the moment.
The problem isn’t a lack of punishment, it’s that the punishment runs contrary to the incentive provided within the game (winning or negating a mark) How do we change that?
There’s a bunch of proposals that could work:
Only award a mark if, at the time of contact with the ball, the marking player is stationary or moving towards or lateral to the flight of the ball. Clarification would be needed around movement after engaging physically with an opponent, because I don’t think you need to prevent marks in the case of a push-off or jostle.
Make any front-on contact in a marking contest result in a free kick (currently you are allowed to make front-on contact if your sole objective is to mark or spoil).
The intended outcome? Players stop going for all-or-nothing marking attempts. This is not intended to victim blame, but I would argue that the actions of the player running back with the flight contribute more to the potential for injury than those of the player coming towards the ball.
Under these proposed changes, If you’re coming back with the flight of the ball you’ll effectively treat it as a ground ball. Your priority isn’t just winning the ball but instead keeping yourself in a position to contest. You’ll take a bit of speed off, and you are unlikely to leave your feet. This is amplified by penalising any front-on contact. If the defence is set up it creates almost a “fair catch” situation you see in Rugby League or American Football.
You could make an argument that a mark should be allowed if the player is in space. There are a couple of problems –
Running back with the flight you often won’t know how much space you have, because you’re not looking ahead of you
Players will continue to overestimate their ability to get to the ball in space – either because of their speed, their opponents speed, or the misjudging the flight of the ball.
Allowing marks in space still provides the incentive for players to go hell for leather with the flight.
Where a player does catch it in space with the flight, they also don’t necessarily need the mark as much. If they’ve got space ahead of them they can use that to play on. If they’re in a lot of space, a really clever kick to them will be placed to give them time to stop and turn, and effect a mark if they want to.
This would be a radical change to the rules of the game but I simply don’t see a viable alternative.
Sydney’s long term free kick deficit: a product of club philosophy?
Sean Lawson
Free kick balances are a perennial topic of conversation. Rational people know free kicks broadly reflect a combination of game style and player attributes in general and luck in particular games, but they regularly get usually brought up by upset fans and provide regular grist for the content mill via “free kick ladders”.
My initial facetious take was that this table is clear evidence that umpires are favouring blue uniforms and biased against red, yellow or orange teams. I’m about 20% serious about this – there’s famously some evidence that black uniforms earn more penalties in the NHL.
But what I want to do is investigate the team at the bottom here, the Swans, who for a quarter of a century have conceded the worst free kick differential in the league by some distance. The Swans have a differential of -638 free kicks or about 25 a season, or 1 per game against their opponents. It’s a comparable tally to the average edge in free kicks per game provided by many teams’ home ground advantage.
So, what gives?
I think the persistence across generations may be evidence of something systemic about how this very stable club builds itself.
Let’s dig into where the discrepancy is coming from on an individual player basis. Broadly speaking, the Swans players with notably negative free kick counts fall into three groups – defenders, rucks and a secret third group.
Defenders
Let’s start with the defenders – here’s a chart of something resembling a who’s who of Sydney defenders since 2000, identified mostly by career rebound 50 counts (excluding obvious exceptions or edge cases like Adam Goodes, Luke Parker and Callum Mills).
Collectively this group of 20 defenders has a combined free kick difference of -467, and just like that we’re over halfway to explaining the differential.
One might suspect that defenders in general may give a lot of free kicks away, but here’s a scatter of defender free kick differentials since 2000:
It’s not the case that defenders all have negative free kick differentials. There’s even been plenty of Swans defenders that don’t infringe as often. It’s just that a group of long-term mainstays have given away a heap for them over this century, in the pursuit of their generally miserly work.
Rucks
If Sydney’s defensive history is characterised by the stable procession of long term mainstays, its ruck stocks have been altogether the contrary.
Only two specialist rucks have played 100 games for the Swans this century – Darren Jolly on 118 and Mike Pyke 110 games, which leaves by far a majority of Sydney games rucked by a shorter-term journeyman. The club has chopped and changed every few seasons, rarely if ever developing a ruck from the national draft through to a stable long-term career at the club.
Here’s the free kick balance of every specialist ruck for the Swans with more hitouts to their name since 2000 than the 182cm Jude Bolton:
Almost every Swans ruck this century has been prone to giving away free kicks. A lot of these names have been either undersized, or very physical in their craft, and quite a few were overmatched in many battles.
Not since the retirement of Mark Seaby have the Swans even had a ruck push into positive double figures, and collectively this grouping is -237 in free kicks.
The big names up forward
Finally, there’s a few big names we need to talk about who have collectively kicked about 18% of Sydney’s goals since 2000 while registering a combined free kick differential of -218.
Top 5 Sydney goalkickers since 2000
Free kick differential
Goals
Lance Franklin
-54
486
Barry Hall
-124
467
Adam Goodes
-40
445
Michael O’Loughlin
-7
396
Tom Papley
2
295
These are Barry Hall (-124 free kicks), Lance Franklin (-54) and Adam Goodes (-40). These three singular talents each had their own peculiarities.
Hall was known for onfield violence, and also conceded frees in part time ruck duties. Franklin regularly infringed in his battles with defenders.
Goodes played such a long career, spanning stints in defence, ruck, midfield and forward, and his free kicks differential ebbed and flowed. It was most negative during his Brownlow-era midfield work, but rarely pushed very positive.
Midfielders
Speaking of Adam Goodes, we can also just note the key area where Sydney have not been free kick merchants. Sydney’s midfields have generally earned free kicks more than given them.
Here’s a collection of Sydney’s biggest clearance-getting players since 2000, a mix of midfielders and more forward types. It excludes rucks and also a couple of guys classed as defenders above (Florent, McVeigh, Lloyd):
The midfield has been characterised by plenty of players earning their share of holding and high free kicks, as well as a few who haven’t.
Broadly, though, it’s positive in free kicks to the tune of 258, noting that there’s a little positional overlap with the defenders above.
Bringing it together
So there we have it, we can now assign that -638 free kick count for the Swans using our counts for different onfield roles:
The four categories shown above add up to -624, pretty much netting out to explain the imbalance.
Now if I can get a little subjective, I would suggest that some of this reflects the sustained long-term characteristics of the Swans as a club.
The negative differential was at its greatest during the Paul Roos era, but we can see it persisted through most of the Longmire years. It’s pretty negative in 2025, but it’s way too soon to judge the Cox era.
What we can say though is that, more than most clubs, we can assume the existence of some long term list and gamestyle philosophies thanks to the back office continuity they’ve enjoyed since 2003.
The Paul Roos and John Longmire coaching era covers nearly the entire period and was a smooth handover with no regime change. Kinnear Beatson ran list management and recruiting for most of the era, between 2006 and his recent step back. The Swans worked through a succession of football managers, each served for at least half a decade and a couple going straight on to executive positions at the club afterwards.
One persistent feature of this emergent Swans list philosophy has been a steady rotation of ready-made ruck journeymen, rarely lasting more than 3 or 4 seasons and never threatening, say, an All-Australian squad posting.
Another has been stalwart defenders, often a bit undersized, often found in the recruiting bargain bin. These free kicks never seem to have hurt Sydney’s defence all that much, with the Swans being a below average defence precisely once this century.
Evidently, both the rucks and the defenders are expected to compete in such a way that they are going to give away a lot of free kicks in the pursuit of the priorities expected of them. Experience for the Swans has been that these players can concede free kicks mostly without damaging the prospects of the team.
Throw in a couple of undisciplined spearheads, and it’s a recipe for a long term persistently negative free kick record.
Either that, or it’s all a giant conspiracy.
Around the Grounds
Gemma Bastiani produces some of the best work on AFLW tactics and gamestyles, and is taking a multi-part look at the tactical evolution of the AFLW in its first decade. Here’s her coverage of the forward approaches and the defensive setups
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.
Got an idea or want to contribute? Email thisweekinaustralianfootball at gmail dot com
As we enter the second week of Sir Doug Nicholls Round, increasing calls have been made to seek other rounds of celebration, recognition and action.
Some have asked about Multicultural Round – which has been transitioned into the Cultural Heritage Series.
Others have made – maybe – slightly less serious calls for acknowledgement.
Italian round NEEDS to happen, I would love to see the @AFL have an Italian round. As I am Italian myself and to the representation and to see the Italian players be celebrated would make me feel proud.
The events of the last few months on and off the field have prompted increasing calls for a round of recognition and promotion of the cause of mental health as well.
There’s nothing wrong with those calls. It is worth noting that awareness and talking are one thing, but a far better public focus would be campaigning to address the shameful underfunding and inaccessibility of vital mental healthcare in this country.
Sport, politics and social issues are inexorably interlinked. Sport is a reflection of the society it exists in, often with social norms and rites that draw from it. Sport is just a microcosm of broader life.
In that sense a round focusing on assisting mental health awareness would be better than nothing. But it would be far more powerful if it was to linked to a broader set of actions, rather than a recognition of those who have slipped or fallen.
It shouldn’t take a public series of stories, or a death, to prompt us into action to help address mental health care in Australia.
If the AFL does eventually choose to focus on a mental health round, they may have to consider their linkages to industries that have detrimental effects on broader mental health in Australia.
Bring on change for how we talk about and treat mental health issues – with or without a football round to support it.
Earlier today Essendon announced that Angus Clarke, pick 39 in the 2024 National Draft, will make his debut on Friday night when the Bombers face off against Richmond in the Dreamtime at the ‘G clash.
The young South Australian becomes the sixth Essendon player to make their debut in 2025, following Isaac Kako (Round 1), Tom Edwards (Round 2), Saad El-Hawli (Round 3), Archer Day-Wicks (Round 9), and Lewis Hayes (Round 9).
The Bombers’ announcement got me thinking about the record for the number of players making their debut across a teams’ first 10 games of the season in more recent years, i.e., excluding Gold Coast and Greater Western Sydney during their first year in the league.
At the time of writing only their opponents in the Dreamtime clash, Richmond (seven), have played more debutants across their first 10 games of the 2025 season. The Bombers draw equal with Euro-Yroke (St Kilda), who used six debutants in their first 10 games.
In contrast, Collingwood, the Gold Coast, and Hawthorn have not played a first gamer across their initial 10 outings – although the Suns have the opportunity to do so in their clash against the Saints (which is their tenth game of the season courtesy of ex-tropical cyclone Alfred).
Looking at the year-by-year breakdown for clubs reveals some interesting patterns. For example, Essendon had no debutants during the first 10 games last year.
However, 2025 is the first year since 2013 where Hawthorn have not blooded a debutant in their first 10 games of the season (although they have had several players make their club debuts – Ginnivan, Barrass, Battle, Chol, etc.).
Kuwarna (Adelaide) holds the post-2012 record for the highest number of debutants played by a club across their first 10 games of the season.
Eight first-gamers were used over this timeframe in 2020: Fisher McAsey (Round 1), Ned McHenry (Round 2), Will Hamill (Round 3), Shane McAdam (Round 4), Andew McPherson (breaking the streak in Round 6), Kieran Strachan (Round 9), Harry Schoenberg (Round 10), and Lachlan Scholl (Round 10).
Digging into interchange stuff to assist Cody and Sean’s article on the ABC last week (go read it) left me with way more data than could ever fit into one article, so it’s probably something I’ll come back to a few times.
Today I’m diving into the use of the sub, focusing from 2023 onwards (when the current tactical sub rules were introduced, rather than requiring a player be medically unable to continue in order to be subbed off).
The thing that jumps out to me immediately is Gold Coast as a real outlier, only needing to use their substitute to replace an injured player six times since the tactical sub was introduced.
Compare this to the Bulldogs, who have had to activate a sub to cover injury 44% of the time. This gives the Suns a much freer hand when deciding when and how to deploy an impact player.
Those with my specific brand of trauma (Editor: Melbourne coded alert) will be having a visceral reaction to the sole game Narrm went through without activating its sub in September 2023.
When teams have the option though, how do they use it? Let’s isolate just games where both subs were used tactically rather than injury driven, to see who is Han Solo and who is Greedo.
Across the three years Hawthorn are the standout in aggressive use of the sub, pulling the trigger 75% of the time. Sydney (25%) and Brisbane (32%) initiate far less.
If we break it down to just 2025 we see some pretty interesting changes. Brisbane has reversed their previous trend, initiating the sub 2/3rds of the time. Adelaide is the most aggressive this year and Hawthorn is split down the middle.
The Dogs have been pretty cautious both this year and across the previous two, which is understandable given how often they have had to call upon their sub to cover an injury.
The last thing we’ll look at is the types of player used and the output gained from them.
As you’d expect, most clubs stick to medium-height players that can play a range of roles rather than key position players when naming their sub.
In terms of output we can look at time on ground as well as a projected rating points output if the player had 80% time on ground for the game.
Gold Coast and Sydney are getting the highest impact per minutes from their subs. Angus Sheldrick for the Swans is a clear leader among players named as sub more than once – averaging 7.2 rating points in just 25% of game time across his 5 games as sub. Gold Coast’s numbers are boosted by impressive games by David Swallow and Nick Holman, and some solid work put in by Jake Rogers in his 4 games starting with the vest.
There’s a lot more in this data – the next thing I’ll probably look at is when clubs use their last rotation and when they’re stuck with multiple players on the bench through injury.
As always hit me up on BlueSky if you’ve got any feedback or questions. In the meantime I’ll be trying to figure out what Gold Coast’s secret to health is.
Trouble at the coalface on Lygon Street?
Cody Atkinson
Win the hard ball, win the game – or so the abridged saying goes.
Since Michael Voss took over at Carlton no side has been better at winning first possession at stoppages than Carlton. If you remember what he was like as a player that’s no surprise.
In 2021 – the year before Voss took over – Carlton finished third last for first possession differential. They finished that season 13th for points differential from stoppage, but were able to convert their first possessions into clearances at about league average rates – 77.5% of the time to be clear. In short – low quantity, decent efficiency, subpar output.
This is the first short diversion of this short piece. Winning first possession isn’t a guarantee that you win a clearance. If you aren’t in enough space when you get your hands on the ball, or there isn’t enough support around you, winning first possession can turn right into a repeat stoppage or (significantly worse) a turnover and opposition clearance. Sean Lawson and I wrote a bit on this topic for the ABC recently.
In the Voss era Carlton has finished 4th, 2nd and 2nd for first possession differential. This year they are streets ahead of the competition with a differential of +9.1 per game. If that holds it’ll be the biggest differential in the last half decade.
So there’s a big tick for winning the ball. But what’s even more interesting is that they’ve gotten less effective at getting the ball to the outside of the contest successfully.
In Voss’s first season (2022) the Blues sat fourth for converting first possessions to clearances. That translated into the second best clearance differential in the league, as well as the second best clearance scoring differential.
Since then the Blues haven’t finished in the top half for conversion from first possession to clearances. This year they are sitting second last for first possession conversion, ahead of just the Tigers at 72%. They also allow opposition first possession to clearance at a relatively high rate – 77%, or fifth worst in the league. This indicates that they might be hunting the ball a little too much at the expense of holding space and structuring up correctly at contests.
The eye test tends to back this up, with the Blues often pack hunting for ball at the bottom of contests. While it is a great thing to watch a player emerge from the hardest of contests with clean ball, it can hurt you the other way if you overcommit.
The Blues do sit fifth for clearance differential and seventh for scoring differential from clearances, but this is comparatively low considering how much early ball they win.
This year the big culprits are Tom De Koning and Sam Walsh.
De Koning gets his hands on the ball at stoppage more than any other Blue, but he’s also among the worst at converting that early ball to clearances. He’s only converting to clearances 66% of the time – well below both league and ruck average. The only other two first choice rucks with a lower conversion rate are Luke Jackson and Kieren Briggs – and both of those players take the ball from stoppages first far less of the time. This could be an earlyish season anomaly for TDK – it’s a drop from his previous two seasons, but that drop has been continuous over time.
Second diversion – and it’s a question. How sure are we that TDK is going to be the best in his position one day as the hype machine goes? He’s good in the air, very good at winning the ball on the deck, but maybe a bit average defensively and from a spacing POV. Just a question for now.
Of more surprise at face value is Sam Walsh, who sits at a rate of just 63%. Walsh’s trends might be even more concerning as well. The former number one draft pick has not finished with a conversion rate above league average since 2021. While Walsh does his best work as first receiver from players like Patrick Cripps, it appears that he struggles to get the ball out in tough situations compared with his comparable players across the league.
So how does Voss fix this shortcoming in the short term? Well, the de-emphasis of Walsh in the middle might be a sign that some things are changing – his volume of first possessions has dropped considerably this year. For De Koning the goal might be sitting up in the contest a little more and applying pressure rather than pouncing at will. A focus on balance might assist the defensive side of their stoppage game as well.
Or – perhaps somewhat radically – it might be a problem that Voss sees as secondary to their broader issues across the ground and in transition from the defensive half.
There’s only so many problems you have time to fix, even if the season drags on forever.
AFLW and women’s league crowds
Sean Lawson
Women’s sport is in a place now where many events can get huge crowds.
The Matildas now routinely sell out international friendlies – your scribe has been caught out missing their upcoming match against Argentina in Canberra due to it selling out weeks in advance. The women’s soccer World Cup in 2023 averaged 30,000 people per game. Women’s State of Origin crowds now outstrip men’s NRL games.
A Crows grand final at Adelaide Oval has drawn 50,000 people. Overseas, the right promotion of the right derby or rivalry matchup in soccer can net tens of thousands of people in Mexico or Brazil or England.
At 12 games per season, the AFLW is inching closer to a fuller season of 17 matchups but remains a fair way off. To extend the season, the AFL has imposed a crowd “target” of 6000 people per game in order to allow the season to go even to 14 rounds in the next few years.
Much has been written about the headwinds imposed on the league achieving this target. Obstacles like 5pm weekday time slots, far-flung and poor quality venues in some cities, and superheated near-summer conditions have no doubt hurt attendances.
I thought I’d try to contextualise the AFLW into the broader landscape of women’s sport and show where it sits, and how it’s tracking against attendance in other peer leagues. It’s an important context for asking whether criticisms of crowd numbers, and the target for expansion, are particularly fair.
There’s clearly an ever-greater interest in attending women’s sport. However, since those boom attendances are so far mostly concentrated in “event” games like internationals, tournaments, finals, and certain hyped up rivalries, it is surely not how we should be judging the regular week-to-week grind of domestic league attendance.
Here’s a look at every domestic club’s home game crowds in their most recent season:
The average attendance at regular standalone home games in Australian women’s sport is about 2,500 people. Of these leagues, Super Netball is easily the highest drawing.
In fact, in Perth and Adelaide, the netball side outdraws the four other local teams combined. Netball is the biggest women’s ticket in every city it’s played.
Aside from the larger footprint of most netball, for all other sports in this country, week-to-week domestic attendance at is generally in a similar place: a few thousand attendees per team for standalone games. Indeed, no team outside netball meets that AFL benchmark of 6,000 people per game, and they all play netball.
Habitual mass attendance at regular week-to-week games just isn’t so widespread a behaviour yet for the new women’s leagues in traditionally male sports, but that lag shouldn’t be a surprise or a criticism. Men’s leagues have had a century and a half of cultural centrality and ingrained habit behind them, during which time the same culture was largely suppressing the very idea of women’s professional sport.
The picture mostly looks broadly similar globally, though with some notably successful case studies to look at.
Many other soccer leagues have lower crowds than shown below, I just selected the soccer leagues with known high attendances, such as the biggest European countries’ leagues plus the American WNSL and the Mexican league. I couldn’t find IPL crowds but a news report suggests crowds there averaged about 9,000 to 13,000 people with the biggest crowds topping 30,000, putting the richest women’s cricket league potentially near the forefront of women’s spectator sport globally as well.
Some notable findings here.
Something that stands out immediately is how especially well the two big American women’s leagues do in terms of crowds. Portland and Seattle are long-time women’s soccer powerhouses and are now joined by two other big west coast soccer teams in San Diego and LA. Meanwhile Caitlin Clark has driven massive growth in attendance for the Indiana Fever this season.
We should again note just how relatively big netball is on a global scale. The West Coast Fever have the second biggest average attendance of any women’s team I can find outside of North America, and the Vixens, Lightning and Swifts all stack up really well too.
Then there are Arsenal and FC Barcelona. Playing most of their games at their club’s big primary stadium, recruiting superstars, basically never losing, and building much bigger crowds than anyone else in their league. It’s not exactly a model that can be replicated in a league with a salary cap and a draft, but it’s a notable example of one way women’s clubs are building bigger things.
Elsewhere in Europe, we can see much more modest crowds at most clubs, far more in line with the sort of lower key domestic attendance typical in Australia.
In general then, the AFLW probably doesn’t stack up too badly. AFLW crowds are pretty typical among Australian sporting leagues, and notably fairly tightly clustered on a global scale with no dominant outliers. This parity is probably a strength, since all clubs are pretty equal in terms of salary cap and the like. The AFLW won’t see growth by building a few superstar clubs and a bunch of also-rans. We’re not going to have an Arsenal or FC Barcelona dominating the league.
How do crowds grow? A lot is probably just waiting a generation or so for massified attendance habits to build and culture to develop among the current generation of new fans, but I would suggest one of the biggest controllable factors is a regular, convenient, and well-liked home ground.
Overseas, whether it’s Arsenal at Emirates or Seattle and Portland inner city venues, the home ground matters. In the AFLW the biggest drawing teams have popular venues like Windy Hill, Henson Park and Alberton Oval to call home.
Teams playing at the same ground as the mens team, such as the Newcastle Knights and Geelong, can also do quite well building on existing habits at a known ground.
It seems obvious but building the habit of attendance means making a venue appealing to go to in the first place. In other words, get the vibes right.
Around the grounds
Here’s plenty more stuff that isn’t from here but is good to take in about footy
ESPN draft expert and occasional TWIF contributor Jasper Chellappah has his updated draft power rankings with a firming leading pack for fans to start getting their head around as club fortunes become clearer this season.
The Squiggle power rankings is starting to show some signs of movement. It looks like there might be a small group clubhouse leaders amid an 11 team contending pack.
The Swans and Essendon both announced they will be hosting the Pride Game this year, with St Kilda no longer involved.
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.
Got an idea or want to contribute? Email thisweekinaustralianfootball at gmail dot com
This week marks the 10th Sir Doug Nicholls Round, and the 19th AFL Indigenous Round. The week marks the culture of Indigenous Australian and recognises their contribution to the sport.
Yesterday the AFLPA released this year’s Indigenous Players Map.
With a combined three Coleman medals between them, Carlton’s royal duo of Prince Harry and King Charlie are a handful for opposition teams to contend with.
They don’t just kick goals, they also take massive clunks, with the pair having produced over 4 contested marks per game combined through the last three seasons. Their opponents this week Sydney are averaging only 5.7 as an entire team.
Their numbers as a contested marking duo relative to the rest of the league, over a sustained period of time, are striking.
Each of Harry and Charlie have finished a season with the most contested marks per game – Harry in 2021 and Charlie in 2023 both with 2.6 per game. They also won winning the Coleman (respectively) in that same year that they lead the league in contested marks.
Since 2021 Harry has been seventh per game in contested marks or better. Charlie has been around the same mark since 2022.
This is a well known Carlton strength, and one which is often talked about. Carlton are the number one team contested marking team in the competition, at 11.3 per game, with a differential of +3.6 per game. They’re also the second highest team for marks per game and marking differential per game, at 96.6 and +13.3 respectively.
Much of this marking value comes from the back half setup, with Nick Haynes currently leading the league in marks per game at 8.8, along with Jacob Weitering at 8.5 marks per game.
But what is less commonly talked about is the value provided by the forward pair of Harry and Charlie as general marking targets, with their combined marks per game leading the competition amongst pairs of key forwards for the last four season.
In 2022 they were a shade above Jeremy Cameron and Tom Hawkins, while the closest duo in 2023 and 2024 was Brisbane’s Joe Daniher and Eric Hipwood.
This year? As Joe Cordy covered in Round 4, this year the loss of Daniher ahead of the ball has changed some parts of their ball movement. Instead, the closest forward pair is technically Mason Wood and Cooper Sharman, but Wood has seen a lot of usage up the ground as a winger as well.
If you look more strictly for genuine forward types, then the next closest pairing is the emerging duo of Sam Darcy and Aaron Naughton, who average a combined 11.9. There’s also Adelaide’s interesting forward triple threat of Thilthorpe (5.2 per game), Fogarty (5.1) and Taylor Walker (5.0).
Despite having arguably the best key forward duo in the league, Carlton need to get better at finding easier ways to score. In trying to address this over recent seasons, there has been a slight reduction year on year of the proportion of marks the duo have been getting which are contested, from a peak of 36% in 2022 down to 31% this season.
This may be reflective of Carlton’s adjustments in trying to use the pair higher up the ground and find them more space at times.
This is a critical adjustment, because while Carlton fans like myself may love seeing Harry taking big contested clunks down the line as the outlet, the numbers actually show that the key to victory for Carlton may be finding him in space.
Harry has averaged fewer contested marks in victories from 2021 to 2025 than he has in losses. It sounds obvious, but reducing Harry’s contested situations may be an important ingredient in getting more wins.
While this week might see Carlton try and attack Sydney’s contested aerial deficiencies (they are currently second worst for contested mark differential at -4.1 per game), over the course of the season, Carlton’s ability to kick consistent winning scores may come down to how effectively they can utilise their key pillars to retain possession with more easy marks, especially late in games.
This was on full display in the last quarter of Carlton’s tough victory over the Saints last Friday night, with the pair taking a combined 6 uncontested marks, and no contested marks between them. Big Harry was the more influential of the pair, taking four uncontested marks in his clutch fourth quarter, with one resulting in the set shot that sealed the match for the Blues.
Often it is Charlie who gets the plaudits, but after some of the challenges he has faced off the field earlier in the season it was perhaps fitting that it was Harry who stood up in Spud’s game.
If Carlton can continue to find him space and those easier uncontested marks, it may help them find a way into the 8.
Draft picks are one of the primary resources available to an AFL club – maximising them can lead to dynasties, whiffing on them can leave a club in a very dark place.
Our first chart looks at each top 10 pick from the last 10 drafts. It’s organised by how many years into their career a player has reached – so the first column has the first year output of every top 10 pick, while the last column has the outputs in years 8-10 for the 30 players selected in 2014, 15, and 16 (being the only ones in the system long enough to have had an 8th, 9th, or 10th year).
We can see a couple of things immediately:
Of the 100 players drafted in the top 10 since 2015 all but 4 were still in the system by their 8th year. The exceptions being Fisher McAsey drafted by Kuwarna, Sam Petrevski-Seton and Lochie O’Brien by Carlton, and Jaidyn Stephenson by Collingwood.
They’re generally still at their original drafted clubs, the main exception being the older group of Suns and Giants like Callum Ah-Chee, Jack Bowes, Izak Rankine, Jack Scrimshaw, Jacob Hopper, Tim Taranto, and Will Setterfield.
There’s a fair bit of variance in how many games first year top 10 picks get, but most clubs range around the 50-75% of possible games played.
As you’d expect, a small proportion of those games are rated elite. The impact of Connor Rozee and Nick Daicos here is amplified by Collingwood and Yartapuulti only having taken 1 other top 10 pick between them in the last decade (although the other, Jaidyn Stephenson, had three elite rated first-year games – as many as Nick and one more than Connor)
As they move forward in their career the proportion of games played and proportion of elite games played lifts – both as players settle into their career, and at the risk of putting things too harshly the average stops getting dragged down by players who weren’t making it and have left the club.
Gold Coast has taken 16 top 10 picks in the last decade – literally breaking the axis of my chart.
North are the only team to have lost a top 10 selected player after only 1 year – Jason Horne-Francis. If we look to players leaving after two years we also pick up Josh Schache from Brisbane, Jack Scrimshaw from Gold Coast, and Will Setterfield from the Giants.
Josh Gibcus’ injury struggles are clearly visible on Richmond’s chart.
Now the top 10 isn’t the whole of the draft so here’s something for the real sickos. I have attempted to chart every club’s entire draft haul over the last decade, from the top of the national draft through to mid-season drafts, supplementary picks, even the Essendon top-ups.
There are a couple of bugs I know about but haven’t had the time to iron out yet – Marty Hore (Narrm), Matt Carroll (Carlton), and Derek Eggmolesse-Smith (Richmond) hold the distinction of being drafted by the same club twice. In Marty Hore’s case it wasn’t even a case of shuffling the rookie list as he spent time delisted inbetweeen. They each appear twice on their team charts.
The other requires an apology to Sam Fisher, not the Euro-Yroke player, but the one who spent one year on Sydney’s list in 2017. For whatever reason he kept breaking Sydney’s chart every time I tried to render it so I’ve expunged him from the records. Sorry Sam.
Beyond that, have a look – it’s broken down into categories of draft picks and shows games played at the club or subsequent clubs, as well as highlighting elite rated games.
If you want to engage with me or tell me I’ve got something horrendously wrong, the best place to do so is Bluesky.
Perth Bears is a bad name for a football team
Sean Lawson
The recently announced NRL expansion to Perth is partly an overdue return, to tap into a big potential market. It’s rife still with possibility after the Western Reds were a victim of the ruthless logic of consolidation, after the ARL expansion and Superleague schism left rugby league trying to fit too many teams into too few spots in the late 1990.
They’re also, partly, an effort to revive another victim of that process of team cutting, the North Sydney Bears. Perennial strugglers on the wrong side of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, who also tried to make a go of a merger with Manly and a move to Central Coast, North have been left languishing in the NSW Cup alongside the likes of the Newtown Jets.
There’s an interesting experiment here to see whether the composite identity will work along the lines of the Sydney Swans’ ability to retain fans in Melbourne via plentiful away games bringing them home, but I want to talk about the aesthetic problems created by forcing together this club identity into this city:
Perth Bears simply has too few syllables to be a good team name.
Here’s a statistical breakdown of the sounds behind team names in most of Australia’s major sporting codes.
Most Australian team names have a sort of easy rhythm to them. Team name, mascot name. The most common syllable schemes for major Australian sporting teams is a pleasing trochaic pair of syllables, stressed syllble followed by unstressed for both components, a couplet each for location and mascot. MELbourne DEMons, RICHmond TIGers, CANberra RAIDers, SOUTHside FLYers, and the like.
Weirdly, the inverse pattern, an iambic name, is relatively rare. Among geographical names it’s mostly just GeeLONG and (arguably) the soccer term “FC” is one of the few suffixes with an unstressed syllable followed by a stress.
Geographical locations which present the monosyllable problem are pretty uncommon in Australian sport, with basically just Perth and Cairns bringing a bare single vowel to the affair and Wests in the NRL making things a bit awkward for themselves. The Taipans, Glory and Wildcats show how a two syllable name can work to balance a short town name here.
The only other dual monosyllable name in Australian sport is Perth Lynx in the WNBL, not a terribly catchy name, but at least the mascot is unique with that final X sound to spruce things up and give some emphasis. We can sort of count the Dolphins as only containing two syllables as well, if we choose to ignore that they’re definitely Redcliffe even if they’re officially claiming not to be.
This new venture presumably can’t stop being the Bears, but the side could solve this critical branding problem either by doing the usual WA team trick of substituting in a more rhythmically pleasing “West Coast” or “Western” for Perth, or perhaps insisting everyone always uses the word “The” in front of the name, as will probably happen anyway just to add some emphasis to a tricky little name.
Is Essendon defending the whole ground?
Cody Atkinson
As most footy fans know, the eternal hypemeter surrounding the hopes of Essendon to break their finals drought continually oscillates between “lol right” and “it’s coming home”. There are no middle measures, no sensible middle ground.
Last week saw a firm switch to the latter camp, with the Bombers notching their fifth win in the last six games. They’ve tightened the screws defensively in the last five weeks – conceding the fewest points from stoppage and third fewest from clearances .
Spoiler – their last five games haven’t exactly been a murderer’s row. It’s likely only two of those sides will make finals – Collingwood and either Sydney or Melbourne.
They’ve also limited opponents to very hard shots during this time, with the lowest xScore per shot of any side in the competition over that period.
Without pouring too much cold water on the hopes of Bombers fans, there are a couple of things (schedule aside) that seem to be a little concerning.
Essendon have allowed the third most transitions from defensive 50 to attacking 50 over that hot streak, and only trail West Coast in allowing full court transitions. That full field defence was a weakness last year, and seems to have gotten worse this year.
The Bombers’ defence seems to thrive when they can reset at stoppage, or aren’t as stretched straight down the ground.
They’ve also struggled to stop opponents from taking marks inside 50 – albeit they seem to concede them in tougher locations to score from. With that type of defensive philosophy it makes sense that deep attacks might be harder to defend against, as allowed breaks and covering defense would find it harder to cover.
They’ve also been quite poor at moving the ball from D50 to their own arc – second worst in the league so far this year. Continuing to hand over territory like that puts any team at a disadvantage.
Being 5-3 is undoubtedly better than 0-2. Things appear to be improving for Essendon generally. But these troubling signs could turn into legit problems unless issues are addressed.
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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On Tuesday SEN’s Sam Edmund reported something that has been a long time coming – a crackdown on injury list reporting from clubs.
The AFL's email to club media departments today regarding injury lists and vague terminology. "Clubs are reminded that as part of the Media and Broadcast guidelines, injury updates need to provide fans and media with a clear understanding of injury return timeframes. Recently we…
“It is not permissible to provide general availability windows, ie. short term, medium term, long term,” the AFL confirmed in its 2024 policy.
So this week isn’t so much a new crackdown, but a crackdown on a crackdown.
TWIF also understands the perspective of clubs. Injury management is hard, and the expectations of those who rely upon injury reports for personal gain is sometimes unrealistic. But there also has to be some transparency in a league where there are meant to be guidelines and standards for almost anything imaginable. What may be a more palatable solution is some type of middle ground – one that doesn’t provide definite dates but instead windows of availability.
Mastering the dark arts of defending the control game
The Brisbane Lions won the 2024 premiership on the back of some of the best ball movement we’ve seen since the Clarkson-era Hawks. They sliced and diced through opposition zones with quick-release kicks —finding uncontested marks in tight spaces to suck in defenders and opening space for their dynamic forward line to exploit.
In what is typically a copycat league, you’d expect more clubs to adopt Brisbane’s blueprint in 2025. Yet, surprisingly, many teams appear to be zigging when we expect them to zag.
Consider the question: Are opposition defenses tightening the screws to nullify the strengths of the reigning premiers? Or is there a broad acknowledgment that Brisbane’s style is difficult to replicate without the right personnel?I lean toward the former—led by the likes of Collingwood, teams are beginning to master the dark arts of stalling opposition movement without conceding a 50m penalty. So much so, Brad Scott requested a please explain to the AFL umpiring department.
"It just seems there's been a bit of creep on the stand and the protected area."
If we revisit each team’s use of quick-release kicks in 2025, similar patterns emerge.
Quick-release kicks are defined as kicks to and from an uncontested mark occurring in under 3 seconds. Note: The available data is rounded to the nearest second and may lack precision depending on capture timing.
Most of last year’s leaders—Brisbane, St Kilda, Essendon, and Fremantle—have experienced a noticeable drop in their ability to find uncontested marks through quick-release kicks.
With a shift back towards chaos across the league this year – 54% compared to 44% in 2024 – the control brigade, led by Brisbane, will be hoping the umpiring department are listening.
Rucks have a lot of responsibilities in football, and arguably many of the most important ones happen outside of the ruck contest. Different players have different strengths – and the best rucks in our game are multitalented – but we decided to drill down into what some of these roles entail and who excels at them.
The numbers below are based on the 21 players who have appeared in at least four games this season, and attended more than 50% of ruck contests.
Defensive Ruckwork – Using height as a shield
There are a few ways in which rucks can defend. You may have heard recently some commentators talking about how well Darcy Cameron intercepts opposition possessions down the line, and though most of this is done in the front half, it is a key aspect of team defence.
There are currently seven rucks who average more than 2.5 intercepts a game, and only two who average more than two intercept marks. Darcy Cameron and Max Gawn leading the way with an average of 2.63 and 2.38 intercept marks respectively.
Another way rucks are able to assist with team defence is dropping back to help out with spoils and one percenters to help create stoppages where they can utilise their ruck craft.
Matt Flynn has averaged five spoils a game form his appearances for West Coast this year, while a total of eight rucks average more than two spoils a game.
Rucks as a Midfield Weapon – Using rucks as an on-baller
Modern rucks are notable much more agile and skilled than the rucks of yesteryear, and the best rucks are able to rack up as many disposals as some midfielders.
There is an old adage of “don’t handball to a ruckman,” but the game has evolved past that in many cases, and there are multiple rucks receiving upwards of five handball receives per game.
As well as racking up touches from handball receives – or more commonly marks – the more agile of our modern game’s giants are able to pick up the ball below their knees and create attacking possession chains for their teams.
As many as six rucks currently average 4.5 or more ground ball gets per game, and Brodie Grundy averages a whopping 3.25 post-clearance ground ball gets.
Attacking Through Rucks – Creating scores through ruckwork and possession
Which rucks contribute most to the score? Of our 21 nominal rucks, ten average 4.5 or more score involvements a game, some off their own boot, some goal assists, and some involvements in scoring chains.
While some rucks average more scores themselves, these ten are involved in the most scores for their teams.
Big Targets up Forward – Using Rucks as keys
While some rucks rest forward, some also drift forward after a contest to create an option – think the way Petracca or Heeney does, only a foot taller and significantly slower – with ten rucks taking a mark inside 50 at least every second week but only Sam Draper averaging better than a goal a game.
Where do they get their footy?
Looking at possession locations, we can see that the majority of rucks get their ball in the front half, with just the following nine players receiving more footy in the defensive half of the ground.
From the others – the majority of rucks who average 50% or more front half possessions – just four average 60% or higher front half possessions. This obviously makes sense with Jackson and Darcy sharing duties, but speaks to the team structure of Geelong and Brisbane that Stanley and McInerny spend so much time down there.
But what does it all add up to?
While all of these skills are individually valuable, the best rucks in the competition string multiple of these together to become more than just a hitout and mark player.
You will notice that the best rucks in the competition appear on multiple of these lists of roles and skillsets – players like Max Gawn, Rowan Marshall, Darcy Cameron and Tom De Koning – and this is what makes them so valuable in relation to their peers.
The days of the tap only ruck are well and truly behind us, and you have to be talented at much more than just ruck craft in order to be picked over a lesser ruck who outperforms you in other parts of the ground.
What might Dean Cox be adjusting?
Sean Lawson
In a radio interview this week, Sydney Swan Matt Roberts summed up the experience of a successor coach, noting the change that comes with a previously subordinate internal voice taking over as the primary voice.
Where previously Cox “had to listen to Horse” and couldn’t “put his full spin on it”, now he can be fully clear about his own preferences about how he wants the team to play.
Even without a new coach, one imagines that a big source of change for the Swans would be addressing the way they lost the grand final last year and were also soundly beaten on some other occasions. We can assume that changes this year pushed by the new coaching team are heavily driven by those experiences.
So after two months of football, against the backdrop of poorer performances, what can we glean about the changes Cox might be implementing?
First up, the Swans seem to be taking the game on more. No team has taken more running bounces per game in the last five years than Cox’s Swans, and they’re also gaining a bit more ground per disposal.
This may be a response to the way opponents sought to cut off Sydney’s transition game with a high defensive line and corridor density last year. If short kicking options are cut off, the running game can be a risky but rewarding alternative method of transition.
The run and bounce by Blakey, Bice, and Warner (all in the top 20 for most bounces) are most notable and visually striking, but Wicks, Florent, Roberts, Heeney and Campbell all chip in here with a variety of options. Most are also among Sydney’s preferred distributors, the better to put opponents in two minds.
Second, the defence is… changing.
Dean Cox has talked of a new defensive approach multiple times this year, and famously tried to move McCartin forward to cover injuries while leaving new players like Paton and Hamling to cover the gaps.
Watching live, there have been notable moments of confusion about handovers and trade-ups, despite many of the same personnel involved. This suggests changes in role assignments, a shift in philosophy about when to hand off, when to provide help, when to come up or sit deep, and so forth.
What we can say from the statistics is that this new approach, so far, seems to be resulting in more isolated defenders and more defensive contest losses. Sydney last year spoiled more than just about anyone, relative to the defensive load faced, they feasted off spilled ground ball in rebound, and they kept moments of defensive isolation to a minimum.
The Swans after two months with Cox at the helm, are facing more 1v1 contests per game, and losing more of those than in previous years. They’re also spoiling less, and although as Cody notes below, spoils are down across the league, Sydney have also slipped from having the most spoils to merely 4th most.
Last year, Sydney were notably vulnerable to possession and control games, most dramatically in the grand final when the Lions’ uncontested marking was off the charts. Clubs looked to deny the turnover game by keeping the ball away from them.
This year, Sydney appear to be making more of an effort to push up and apply pressure and deny that possession game. Opponents are marking the ball less often, and the average metres gained point to longer ball use and perhaps less shorter and more lateral options.
All of these things are very preliminary, and occurring in the context of significant midfield and forward line absences, and and unsettled defence, but they are elements to watch as Sydney tries to find their feet under the partial break with the past represented by their successor coach.
Where have the clunks gone?
Cody Atkinson
I got into a discussion yesterday.
On the internet.
So not a discussion but more a character limited amalgam of words, ideas and preconceived notions. Not an argument either, although the internet is good for them – and the line is often fine between fight and discussion.
When researching some items around ball movement, something glaring stood out.
A lack of clunks. What happened to the big men, and their ability to fly and take big grabs?
It’s still early days this season, but the 8.8 taken per team per game this year would be the lowest in the era we have records for. It was 9.6 last year – which doesn’t seem like a huge drop, but it’s been as high as 11.5 per game in the last five years. That’s almost two a quarter across both teams.
The first reaction is to look at whether it’s an attacking strategy symptom – going for more open targets down the ground – or a defensive improvement. All up, there’s a slight downtick in the number of overall marks, but nothing dramatic that would indicate a massive course correction.
Looking at the number of spoils, we have some indications that it might not be a pure – or traditional – defensive cause either.
This season has also seen the fewest spoils per game of any season since 2012. There’s about seven fewer spoils per team per game than in 2019. That’s 14 per game across both teams, or nearly four a quarter.
If you take the spoils and contested marks together there are twenty fewer contests than in 2019, or 20% fewer.
Kicks are down in that time period as well, but only about 5%. Total marks are down about 5% too – which makes sense. That’s proportionate.
The easiest conclusion is that in the past few years there has been an emphasis towards teams finding open short and intermediate targets at the expense of bombing the ball long to packs. Football is a battle between position and possession, and the former may be taking precedence over the latter. This has happened before – note the massive rise between 2005 and 2010 in that first graphic. It could be a sign that the tide might be turning leaguewide, as James alludes to above.
There could also be some personnel issues. There’s been a number of noted contested markers missing time this year, from Sam Darcy to Jesse Hogan and Harry McKay. As availability shifts for the league this number may rise.
But it is worth tracking over the coming weeks. Keep a look out for the clunks and the fists.
Around the grounds
Here’s some more stuff that isn’t from here but is good to take in about footy
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.
Got an idea or want to contribute? Email thisweekinaustralianfootball at gmail dot com
We’re not quite a third of the way through the season, winter is starting to make itself felt, and footy is starting to become a routine grind after the flashy baubles of the early season fixture.
Conventional wisdom would say that this is a good time to take stock of the ladder and how it’s starting to take shape.
Plenty of pundits like to whip out hot takes that only handful of teams can win the flag. Some have already shouted that the season is over for teams – such as Sydney – just because they have a negative win loss record two months into the year.
However at this stage of the year there are a lot of caveats that need to be considered. Firstly, there are some real sample size issues. Teams have also played against very different opponent sets.
It’s still early, and things change. Some of the hottest teams have not yet faced the full weight of opposition analysis finding counters and exploiting their weaknesses. Other teams are starting to work on emergent flaws in their game. Some teams are starting to rally and settle, others maybe falling apart after early friskiness.
Work undertaken by Max Barry’s Squiggle power rankings shows us a more nuanced picture.
This paints a picture not too different to expectations at the start of the year. There’s a large group of 12 teams not too far apart from each other, separated as much by injury fortunes, close game luck, tactical quirks and scheduling as anything else.
Then, the universally expected three rebuilding stragglers at the bottom, and a group emerging who are struggling to keep pace – perhaps most surprisingly, including Melbourne.
The ladder doesn’t exactly lie, even at this relatively early stage. But it can do with some extra context.
Not long ago on Twitter, I shared a strange little story from the margins of AFL history -a forgotten era, and a tale of a missing name.
Between 1965 and 2005, the AFL went through a major Jack shortage, a period that I now call The Jackless Era – a staggering 40-year stretch where the name Jack all but disappeared from the league.
It’s especially odd when you consider just how central Jacks once were to the game. Think Dyer. Titus, Clarke, Hawkins. These weren’t fringe players, Jacks were champions of the game. Then, suddenly, they vanished.
This wasn’t just a blip. It was a full-blown drought – a naming recession that stretched across generations. And while the game kept evolving, Jacks stayed behind.
At the peak, from 1939 to 1941, the AFL saw three consecutive years where 11 players named Jack – a full 25% of the field – took to the ground in a single game.
But sometime in the early 2000s, something shifted.
Demographer Mark McCrindle suggests Australians tend to bring names back from the past and have a preference to go for colloquial, down-to-earth names.
There could also be a generational skipping effect, where recent children are named after a grandparent or great grandparent.
Data suggests AFL names rolling in trend with US babies, albeit with a slight lag.
And one can’t help but see a role of the titular 1997 Oscar winning motion picture Titanic, with the heartthrob Jack Dawson playing a role.
Whatever the reason, Jack was back in cribs – and soon after, back in clubrooms.
By the mid 2010s, the Jack Renaissance had well and truly begun, and it has had non-insignificant impacts to win-rates.
Historically, of the 6,986 games of AFL played with a ‘Jack Differential’ (one team having more Jacks than the other), the more Jack-endowed team has won 50.4% of the time.
A basic regression suggests that each additional Jack your team has over the opponent increases your chance of winning by ~0.14%.
Now, the AFL is once again full of Jacks. St Kilda notably leading the charge. Jacks are to St Kilda as to lengthy headbanded blonde hair is to Geelong.
We even saw the greatest ‘Jack Off’ in the modern era occuring in Round 1, 2019 where St Kilda (6 Jacks) defeated Gold Coast (4 Jacks).
But not every club has embraced the return.
In fact, one club now holds a rather unwanted record: Essendon. The Bombers haven’t fielded a single Jack since 1980. That’s 45 years without a Jack – the longest current Jack-less streak.
It’s a curiosity. A coincidence? Maybe. But given their finals drought it might be starting to feel like a curse. Could a deliberate Jack recruitment strategy be the key to breaking Essendon’s drought?
Only time will tell. But for now, one thing’s for sure.
The Jacks are back and Essendon is on the clock.
Reports of the death of tackling have been greatly exaggerated
It’s that wonderful time of year again. After 130 years of V/AFL football the tackle is dead, and with it goes the game we love.
You can’t even lay a good hard tackle anymore without being suspended, so how on earth are these players supposed to play the game – or so a handful of pundits (and North Melbourne players) would have you believe.
Or is this all a little bit much? Is the tackle really dead?
If I asked you what percentage of tackles this year had been deemed dangerous enough to warrant a penalty, what would you guess? What if I asked you what percentage had been deemed dangerous enough to warrant a suspension?
Would you guess 5%?
Maybe a little more conservative and guess 1%?
Well, we painstakingly went through all of the rough conduct reports from the start of 2024 to find which ones were dangerous tackles, and either of those guesses would be way off.
Just 0.1% of tackles have been cited this year – the same as it was for the whole of 2024. And of those 33,000 tackles since the beginning of 2024 just 0.04% have resulted in a suspension.
That’s around one in every two and a half thousand tackles.
Is it true that the matrix could take more things into consideration? Sure, but with the knowledge we now have around concussions, when tackling you have a duty of care to your opponent.
Tom Atkins has placed a record pace 76 tackles so far this season without having been cited once. Last year H&A leader Matt Rowell and overall leader James Rowbottom both went the whole season without so much as a fine. So it certainly is possible.
*Data taken from available footage of rough conduct charges on MRO reports and checking match video for incidents
Approximately halfway through the last quarter of Saturday’s clash between the Lions and Saints, Zac Bailey slotted his 3rd goal of the day to extend the lead to over six goals. If there was the faintest sliver of hope for a comeback up to this moment, it had just been extinguished.
It left everybody in the ground with the question of what they do with the last remaining ten minutes of play.
For Jonathan Brown and Dermott Brereton the answer from the Brisbane perspective was obvious: put the foot down.
They were clearly the better team on the day, and now they had an opponent with nothing left to play for. It was obvious to both commentators that they should boost their percentage, as about half of the top eight places would come down to a tiebreaker from teams on equal premiership points.
Instead of piling on the score, though, the Lions largely just saw the game out. They stopped chasing or applying as much pressure as they had been. The Lions put on another three goals but let another three through.
This allowed St Kilda their highest quarter score of the night, and the margin ended up in much the same place as when Bailey put the game to bed.
This decision to preserve energy isn’t unique to Chris Fagan. Last weekend also saw:
After completing a streak of twelve unanswered goals, Gold Coast brought key players to the bench and conceded their first major in nearly an hour against Sydney.
Following their dominant third quarter the Bulldogs gave their captain and current best player in the game the last term off.
Most conspicuous was Melbourne’s decision to rest their captain and allow Richmond to score the last four goals of the game.
None of these decisions put the potential result of the game into question, but they all cost their team an opportunity to increase their percentage.
It’s likely they’d made the same observation of a trend around percentage: it’s exceedingly rare for percentage to come into play, and even rarer for it to have any consequences.
Of the 234 ladder positions decided in the 18-team era, 71 belonged to teams who had fallen behind another on percentage. Of those 71, only 20 made a difference in September.
Broken down further, the most common consequence is missing a home final in the first week (i.e., teams finishing 3rd, 4th, 7th or 8th on the same number of points as 1st, 2nd, 5th or 6th). Only four teams in the last 13 seasons have realised the nightmare scenario of missing finals completely because of their inability to run up the score on their day, or play out the four quarters on their opponent’s.
When put side by side a clear trend can be seen in the variability between where percentage will put a team on the ladder:
…and where collecting premiership points will put you:
With the introduction of the Opening Round, Gather Round, and the pre-finals bye, men’s seasons are longer than ever measured both by games played and the days between the first and last bounce. Players are also expected to cover more distance at higher speed, with less opportunities for a spell on the bench.
For teams aiming to go deep into September, they now need to not only manage the games they’re in, but the weeks and months ahead as well.
While you may see coaches flip magnets around, even so egregiously that their counterparts take exception to it, we’re unlikely to see teams breaking any scoring records in the near future.
It seems we’re in marquee season right now. We’ve got the Q-Clash and the Sydney Derby coming up this week, and across the last two weeks we had the Easter and ANZAC matches.
What better time to rile everyone up by ranking the various marquee fixtures across the league.
I’ve detailed my methodology over at CreditToDuBois if you want to have a look, but I’ll present the end results here.
In brief, I’ve ranked each clash across the last 10 instances across criteria of competitiveness (50%), investment from fans (25%) and investment from players (25%) to come up with a completely objective and scientifically rigorous order.
The methodology linked above goes into far more detail about how I reached these rankings, but this gives a quick overview of how the different components contributed.
What it’s like doing a post-match press conference
Full disclosure: I’ve collaborated with Gemma in the past and she’s one of the best minds in football media going IMO.
I’ve been paid to go to the football for several years now, including getting the opportunity to learn from coaches. Given the discussions of the week, I thought it would be worthwhile to talk about how at least one journalist sees the process.
The game after the game
After the siren blows the next phase of a football game begins. If football is the action, the post game is the reaction.
Fans tend to look for either the exits from the ground or the way onto the field for kick to kick. The players eventually float towards the rooms to get a brief debrief before cooling down in front of the inner circle, friends and family.
Staff and security start to pack down and secure the venue, turning the haven of activity into a ghost town once again.
A small handful of individuals head the other way, into a typically dark hidden room in the bowels of the grandstands.
Post-match action deep under the SCG grandstands
The results are typically broadcasted live across the nation and uploaded to youtube shortly after.
This is what happens at an AFL post-game media conference.
Before it begins journalists tend to work up their questions. Sean and I tend to dial up our data and look if it matches with trends we’ve observed across the game. We also try to weave any questions interested onlookers have fed us through the match.
Setting up before the cameras roll
The sound and camera guys have to set the room up beforehand, with one inevitably playing the role of coach. Journalists that are kicking around often help set the room up at smaller grounds.
The board room at Manuka doubles as the press conference room.
Different journalists have different motivations at these events. Most are there for filing match reports or instant analysis for quick consumption. Very occasionally you’ll see someone from the host broadcaster down to dominate the early proceedings – a practice that seems to have stopped in recent years. There’s a few that are looking to fill out articles about broader topics of the day – think reaction to tackles or the like.
Even rarer still are journalists who are looking at deeper issues or trying to fill insights for other articles. That’s where Sean and I usually fall.
That means generally you’ll see three different types of questions:
Surface level on the who, what, where of a game, including injury concerns.
“Gotcha” questions trying to get a quote to base a “topic of the day” article on.
More strategic, deeper questions on how footy is played in 2025 and the roles of different players.
Coaches also have different motivations in these press conferences. They realise that, due to the potential audience, they have some responsibility to provide an explanation for what we have just seen.
For losing coaches, there’s always a natural undertone of disappointment and anger. Winning coaches are almost always happier.
When the cameras are on.
Pre conference preparations
It’s important to note that the behaviours of both coaches and journalists tend to shift before cameras are turned on and once they are turned off. There’s joking, light tomfoolery and the like. It’s a workplace, after all.
Speaking their language
As someone who tends to ask the more strategic questions, it often takes time to signal to coaches the line I want to take. As it differs from the usual line of questioning, making sure that language and terminology that Sean and I use is correct is critical.
I got it embarrassingly wrong once with Sam Mitchell, using lingo from another club to try to talk about the Hawks’ choices.
The one thing I’ve learned from doing it for the last few years is just how willing coaches are to just talk about how footy is played (within reason). Once they know they can talk about spares, stoppage, swinging the ball and spreads, they are extremely willing to elaborate. They – like most reading this – are footy nuffs or nerds.
I’ve also talked to Ross Lyon, who gave me a similar “grilling” when we started asking questions. Like last week’s press conference, the Saints had just lost a game. I was relatively prepared, and able to swing it back where I wanted to go (including getting a couple of quotes I needed for upcoming pieces) but there was a moment of uncertainty at the start. It felt like a battle, but a fun one.
I understand Ross may have enjoyed it too, especially as we started to get into the nitty gritty more.
But my motivations were pretty different to most journos, and certainly to the role that Gemma would have played at the presser. It’s an odd task – asking about how someone just publicly lost.
In my reading that press conference would have been far better if Ross engaged with the questions straight up, and given Gemma the chance to ask follow ups (or lead her there). But I also didn’t lose by 45 points in front of an audience of hundreds of thousands of people.
Overall, some see the process as a waste but I strongly disagree. I’m very biased though.
The best kicks: Are the most threatening and the safest kicks the same players?
Sean Lawson
Last week Liam showed off his updated alternative to the AFL’s kicking efficiency stat, where two values, kicking threat and kicking retention, show how damaging players are compared to the average for their kicking context, and how well they retain the ball. This got me thinking about to what extent these two types of “good kicking” come from the same players.
The top quartile of most frequent kicks (currently having at least 67 kicks so far this year) are spread across all points of the spectrum, but it’s relatively rare for high volume kickers to be equally very strong on both score threat and ball retention. This stands to reason – it requires a player to produce scores from their kicks at a rate elevated from usual for their position, and also to have kicks that don’t get turned over as often as typical. Balancing safety and threat is hard, since intuitively players generally need to take risks to lead to scoring, but those risks also raise turnover potential.
Pat Lipinski, a key linking component of Collingwood’s ladder leading play, currently sits at the top in terms of combined threat and retention rating, with other standouts including the all-rounder Isaac Heeney, and Dylan Moore and Isaac Cumming, both also members of very effective offensive midfield/forward setups.
At the other end of the scale, perhaps fairly emblematic of Melbourne’s issues with the ball, Christian Petracca is using it much less threateningly and with more turnovers than would be expected from where and how he’s operating. He’s never been a high retention player but his threat rating is through the floor in 2025.
Three other things we can observe looking at the quartile of players who kick the most are:
A bit over a third of high-volume kickers are both threat and retention positive, what we might consider to be the all round effective kickers.
Most are better than average on at least one side of the ledger. Only a quarter of the 100 most frequent kickers were negative for both threat and retention
Safe but less threatening kickers are more common than the reverse.
This all tends to suggest that despite the clear difference between kicking to avoid turnovers, and kicking to produce scoring opportunities, the two skills aren’t entirely separate from each other.
Around the Grounds
Here’s some more stuff that isn’t from here but is good to take in about footy
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.
Got an idea or want to contribute? Email thisweekinaustralianfootball at gmail dot com
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.
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.
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,”
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.
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.
As audiences attention span reduces the debate will continue with the AFL quarter lengths. It’s Time to reduce them. – cue outrage 🤬 https://t.co/hT8KSF5nb3
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.
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.
Hardwick fires back, and Hinkley on Wines' health.
“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 shouldhave 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.
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.
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.
Thank you very much to Liam for his work developing the threat and retention kick ratings. These are now available on Wheelo Ratings for players and teams from 2021 onwards.
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.
This clip of former umpire Ray Chamberlain explaining how holding the ball actually works is very handy to all footy fans. Ray goes a step further and suggests some commentators learn the rule.
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.
Got an idea or want to contribute? Email thisweekinaustralianfootball at gmail dot com
Building on commentary in recent weeks, including Jasper’s piece last week, this week I’m going to take on the difficult task of dissecting bubbles.
In the modern game teams generally defend space more than they defend players. Cody and Sean wrote about this back in 2020. In the broadest and simplest terms, a defence will be relatively happy if they can make close options risky, and long options easy to neutralise – the attacking team want to do the opposite.
To maximise their chances, the attacking team needs to pose as many credible threats as possible. Even if you don’t use them on a given play, the more places a team feels like it needs to defend, the weaker its defence will be in any one spot. This is where the idea of the bubble comes in – it represents the area on field you can threaten. Initially you have a small bubble, through aggressive ball movement you can expand your bubble quicker than the defence can redeploy to defend it.
I’m putting forward one (still very much in progress) method of looking at how well teams create credible threat, by looking at where the ball has tended to go.
For this week at least, I’m limiting my scope just to intercept possessions at centre half back, which I’m defining as 40-60 metres from the defensive goal and within the width of the centre square.
Let’s cut straight to the chase and dump a great big chart and then go through some through a few observations. I’ve chosen 6 seconds after the point of intercept as our reference point because that offered one of the better points of differentiation between teams. As you go further forward in time, the majority of all ball ends up in the forward sector (the vast majority of the field is in the forward sector at longer ranges, so this makes sense regardless of game style).
A couple of quick things to consider:
Wedges are drawn at the 80th percentile of distance from the point of intercept in that sector – that is, for 4 in every 5 intercept chains the ball will be within the drawn areas 6 seconds after the point of intercept. Wedges are shaded darker based on the proportion of chains that are within that sector.
For every team other than Essendon (and St Kilda very marginally), the front sector is the most used
For every team other than Essendon, the front sector is the most used for their opponents.
Carlton and the Giants’ opponents aren’t going forward quickly – 80% of chains in the forward sector have travelled around 12 metres or less – contrast to Essendon, Richmond, and Sydney where that’s around the 50 metre mark.
St Kilda have one of the most balanced threat profiles, pretty well spread across front, lateral, and right 45s. They are also still in the back sector, but with the distance involved it looks like this is probably more from being behind the mark rather than actively moving the ball backwards.
Richmond favour long, lateral movement to the right.
There’s a few important provisos here to keep in mind:
This is very much a work in progress, and it’s something I’ll likely keep iterating on through the season
The chart presented here doesn’t differentiate between intercept marks and non-marks
This is primarily about style, not effectiveness. I haven’t represented retention rates at all here.
We are still early in the season so sample sizes are low – things will be impacted by single game anomalies and which opponents a team has faced.
The 2025 version of the Melbourne Football Club is historically inefficient. They have the 5th worst Scores Per Inside 50 Rate of any team since 2012. If you remove the 2020 COVID season, they’re the worst.
You might recall the shot map I released last week, where you could observe an abundance of white space around Melbourne’s hot spot. In reviewing their inside 50 kicks so far this season, you can see it’s not for a lack of trying.
Melbourne ranks:
18th in Kicks Inside 50 Retention, and
1st for Kicks Inside 50 resulting in a contest/stoppage
1stfor Offensive 1v1s
So where is it going wrong?
I noticed a pattern in their first-quarter entries vs Essendon. Watch the video below and keep an eye on:
Which forwards are sliding?
Which forwards are hitting up at the ball?
Melbourne’s inside 50 kicks – Keep an eye on who’s hitting up and who’s sliding
Let’s review these entries through a skill vs decision matrix, before overlaying the system component I touched on above.
Skill: There were a few clear execution issues, but it’s hard to find fault in the long bombs to the hotspot.
Decision-making: Largely okay.. Maybe a missed opportunity to use Petracca (Langdon – example 8)
System: Melbourne’s ability to transition was exceptional. But upon entering the 50, every forward wanted to slide. These kicks to moving targets towards goal require elite skill and elite athletic profiles. That’s not Melbourne’s forward line.
This issue highlights the importance of an improved balance in Melbourne’s leading patterns. Forwards who are willing to stretch the ground vertically and horizontally to maximise the space inside 50 and know when to hit up with the intent to get used or to create a vacuum of space. This is fixable. The game against Fremantle this week presents itself as a last chance saloon to salvage their season. Melbourne’s efficiency inside 50 will go a long way in determining the outcome.
Last week Cody accurately pointed out that Melbourne’s once lauded defence seems to be hanging on by a thread, even with Petty back there helping out May and McDonald. In that article he mentioned in passing Melbourne’s issues going forward, and this article builds on that, finding the KPIs that make Melbourne tick.
In 2021, when Melbourne won their breakthrough premiership, they were ranked #3 for Clearances, #1 for Contested Possessions, #2 for Inside 50s, #2 for Scores per Inside 50 and #2 for Marks inside 50.
They got it inside 50 more than almost anyone else, and they kept it in there until they scored. Much was talked about their all-star backline, but their attacking power was their secret asset.
Their forwardline was already their weakness on paper, but through great positioning, good field kicking, and a great plan, they managed to spread the load – thanks to 11 players kicking double-digit goals – with medium-tall Bailey Fritsch and breakout small Kysiah Pickett kicking 99 goals between them.
In 2025 – after five games – Melbourne currently sit #17 for Clearances, #12 for Contested Possessions, #15 for Inside 50s, #18 for Scores per Inside 50 and #18 for Marks per Inside 50. Their contested possessions, Inside 50s and Clearances were improved against Essendon on the weekend, but are still a dramatic decrease from their prime.
These five stats, which identify and showcase the synchronisation between midfield and forwardline, are the ones Melbourne have to get right in order to be at their best. Let’s call them Melbourne’s KPIs.
In 2018, when Melbourne surged into September and won their first final in twelve years – making their first preliminary final since their 2000 grand final loss – they were top six in the league for all of these KPIs. In 2021 they were top four in all five KPIs.
Clayton Oliver is doing the lion’s share of clearance work at Melbourne, currently ranked sixth in the league for average clearances, but is the only Demon in the top 50.
With a midfield mix that starts Max Gawn, Clayton Oliver, Christian Petracca, Jack Viney and Kysiah Pickett, you have to wonder how they aren’t able to at least extract the ball and get it into the underperforming forwardline (as was the issue in their doomed finals runs of 2023 and 2024).
In 2024, there were serious issues around Melbourne’s midfield that we all recognised and understood, but with the full midfield mix back – and seemingly in full health – many expected 2025 to be a different story.
The loss of Alex Neal-Bullen and Angus Brayshaw can’t be underestimated, but Petracca pushing hard forward to create a target instead of focussing on winning the clearance seems akin an effort to solve world hunger by figuring out the logistics and transport before you figure out where the food is coming from. His frustration was on display for all to see against Geelong, and it was understandable.
Whether the major issue is a poor gameplan, a lack of cohesion from a recently very disgruntled playing group, or the fact that these stars just aren’t the same players they used to be – Max Gawn is 33, Jack Viney is 30, and Petracca almost died last year – remains to be seen, but whatever it is, it needs to be fixed in a hurry or this is going to be a very long season for Melbourne fans.
Inspired by Australian sports trivia doyen Sir Swampthing’s recent tweet pointing out that Gather Round was the highest-scoring weekend of footy since Round 2, 2017, as well as persistent claims by pundits that the game is becoming ever faster and more open, I decided to dig into the numbers and divine some truths: is footy actually becoming higher-scoring? How is the composition of scoring changing? And what conclusions – at least tentative ones – might we draw about the future direction of travel?
Some findings were as expected. Others, meanwhile, cut against the grain of expectation.
The first and most banal conclusion is that, yes, we are in the midst of a clear upward trend in scoring.
The chart below shows how many points sides have scored per game since 2017. Shortened quarters from 2020 are prorated for comparability throughout this piece.
Early in, 2025 is the highest-scoring season since 2017. That’s a reasonable sample size. At the same point last year, scores per game were within a point of the final season average.
Let’s turn our attention to score sources – which holds the first finding I’d describe as mildly counterintuitive. Despite the frequency of claims that ball movement is the crucible of modern footy, chains beginning from stoppage wins have contributed an increasing share of scores in every season since 2021.
Just because an increasing share of scoring is coming from stoppage chains doesn’t mean that ball movement isn’t becoming more important. Getting the ball from the inside of the contest to the outside and then advancing up the field surely counts as “ball movement” just as much as affecting a turnover. That feeds into the next chart – where scoring chains originate.
This may be the first indication of a true shift in how footy is being played.
Ignore centre bounce. It’s a peripheral and, as Cody and Sean flagged in their piece last year, flukey source of scoring.
The steady increase in scores from back-half chains is suggestive of teams placing a greater premium on the offensive (and defensive) value of moving the ball from back to front. It’s just a shame that publicly accessible data for this metric only dates back to 2021, immediately after the peak of Damien Hardwick’s famously forward-half intensive Richmond side.
The evidence for “ball movement” showing up in overall league scoring is somewhat ambivalent. The share of scores generated from turnovers is declining while scores from back-half chains are increasing. Surely, though – surely – the game is becoming more transition-oriented? After all, that’s what every pundit has been saying. Actually… the evidence for that is mixed. The chart below shows the average number of possession chains per side per AFLM game since 2017.
Possession chains count how many times a side begins with the ball. Right now, despite 2025 being the highest-scoring season since 2017, it also features the fewest possession chains per game.
Clearance numbers have remained very steady in the entire observation period. Instead, most of the observed decline in the number of possession chains is driven by declines in the number of intercept possessions per game. Again, a chart – and again, the 2020 caveat.
I interpret this as robust although perhaps slightly counterintuitive evidence for the significance of “ball movement” in today’s game. Possession isn’t just a sword. It’s also a shield. The better you are at keeping the ball, the fewer opportunities the opposition will have to score.
The average number of opportunities a side will have to generate a score is in decline. But the evidence suggests that sides are becoming much more adept at scoring when they win the ball – regardless of how they win it.
2025 marks at least the fifth straight year where the expected value of winning a clearance has increased. The expected value of turnover chains are a similarly strong upward trend. Teams are better at keeping the ball partly because the cost of losing it has probably never been higher.
What about shot type? With thanks and credit to Andrew Whelan, creator and keeper of the extraordinary Wheelo Ratings website who personally supplied me with the shot type data:
Since 2017, set shots vs general play have been very consistent, so it’ll be interesting to see whether the large shift between last season and this season persists.
A related trivia question: one side has clearly scored more of its points from general play shots than set shots to date in 2025 (another is about 50/50). A shout-out in the next edition of the One Percenters newsletter to anyone who correctly guesses the identity of that side.
Assuming these numbers a) are accurate; and b) hold, I think the most salient question to ask is how are teams becoming so much better at generating scores? Here’s where I agree with the common wisdom: players today are more skilled, attacking schemes are more mature, and (this bit is slightly more speculative) the defensive schemes to nullify them perhaps haven’t quite advanced at the same pace.
However – this is where it gets properly impressionistic – I wonder if we’re seeing the evidence of something deeper: a shift in the overarching philosophy of how we view and play the game. The evidence is there in a more qualitative way, if you look.
The best sides are lauded for their aptitude and speed with the ball. Winning “the contest” has never been more weakly correlated with winning actual games. It even feels like the value of defenders is increasingly measured, both in analytical spaces and also the digital pub surrounds of Bigfooty et al, by how much they contribute in possession. There have been higher-scoring seasons and eras. But I’d argue they were functions of either a tactically immature game (prior to the early 2000s) or super-dominant sides which overwhelmed the competition by stacking tactical and talent advantages (see: Alastair Clarkson’s Hawthorn).
This feels slightly different, almost as though the fruit is both riper and more evenly distributed. In that regard, our current direction of travel reminds me just a little of the attacking revolution that swept through elite club soccer around the end of the 2000s – and hasn’t really abated since. Long may it continue.
Who hasn’t lost a defensive one-on-one contest this year?
One of the more enigmatic statistics Champion Data and the AFL publish is the contested defensive one-on-one, with the catchy acronym of CDOOO. A one-on-one contest is defined like this:
One-On-One Contest: A 50-50 contest that occurs after a kick, and involves only two players – a target player and a defender. Each player must have a reasonable chance to win the ball in order for a one-on-one to be recorded. Winning and losing percentages refer to how often a player wins the ball or concedes a possession to his opponent. A neutral result is recorded when the ball is spoiled or results in a stoppage.
CDOOOs are those that occur in the back half for a given player, and they do have limitations under this definition. Most obviously, weaker team defences can concede more solo contests, which even if won well, may not be what the team wants.
And that requirement for a reasonably even chance in the contest also matters. If you as a defender can’t get into an even-money position and are simply fully beaten, you may not even be tabbed with the contest and loss, but can’t really be said to have done your defensive job.
Regardless, though, they contest stats have become a nice way to try to evaluate the defensive prowess of individuals who are often pretty difficult to measure and track.
A quick look at last year’s leaders shows that it mostly passes the eye test – Harris Andrews and Sam collins facing a lot of these one v one battles with aplomb, losing very few. Less accomplished defenders spreading upwards into higher loss rates, some well organised cover defences like the Swans and Saints facing relatively few isolated 50:50s at all.
It’s a quirky number, though. The requirement for the contest to be approximately 50:50 and isolated keeps the numbers relatively low, which makes assessing things tricky early in the year.
Currently, Darcy Moore has faced the most 1v1 contests this season, 20. Poor Harry Edwards sits second and looks beleaguered, having lost almost half of his contests.
Moore, interestingly, is seeing contests at double the rate per game he faced last year, which suggests his role may be worth watching as part of the Pies’ more winning approach so far this season. Leaving him more exposed may be enabling more aggressive positioning elsewhere, relying on his individual talent to cover some extra risk-taking
And Moore has delivered, with only the lost one contest. When did he lose this? Contested losses are difficult to pin down in the AFL app’s generally well tagged statistics-based highlights, because if a player is beaten, they usually don’t record anything taggable (unless they lose by giving a free kick).
What we can say is Darcy Moore’s only contested one-on-one loss so far this year came against the Bulldogs. I suspect it may have been whichever of the six Sam Darcy contested marks was deemed something approximating a 50:50 contest:
That brings us to the question here. Which players in 2025 are yet to lose a one on once defensive contest and how long can they last?
In 2024, for comparison, the most contests without a loss was 8 by Jarrod Berry. It’s hard to sustain a fully clean sheet.
Here’s everyone who’s seen at least 5 one v one contests without losing one:
Player
Team
CDOOOs without loss
Jacob Weitering
Carlton
9
Sam De Koning
Geelong
7
Lachie Jones
Port Adelaide
6
Jeremy Howe
Collingwood
6
Max Michalanney
Adelaide
6
Brady Hough
West Coast
6
Brodie Grundy
Sydney
5
De Koning and Grundy are playing a different game to everyone else, both being players largely defending their opposite rucks and being notable for beating them on the deck. That may keep them in good stead against the rest of these defenders who could at any point find themselves out of position, pinned to a mismatch or needing to concede a professional free kick.
Who holds out the longest? Which new contenders will emerge? We may check back later in the year.
Kicking with width
Cody Atkinson
The ABC yesterday published an article about handballing – no need to read it…if you insist…but one thing that intrigued was that in recent years the share of handballs to kicks had actually plateaued a little. Not a great deal, but the mountain may have crested a decade or so ago.
That raises the natural question around the other part of the equation – that of the kicking game.
Last year’s Brisbane Lions kicked it more than any other side proportionally. This year it’s another recent premier that is leading the way.
Brisbane’s ability to shift defence by foot has grabbed the attention of opposition teams – as well as some that have begun to ape the trend. For Geelong this kick heavy style is nothing new – it’s how they have been moving the ball over in recent years.
The Suns represent the antithesis of this tactical shift. Their games have fewer kicks than any other teams, and a lower kick to handball ratio to boot. The Suns not only mark the ball less than any other side but they also allow fewer marks than the rest of the competition.
That unspeakable ABC article above included one interesting item at the start – the longest goalscoring handball chain of the year from Port Adelaide. That shouldn’t come as a huge shock – the Power is firmly in the Hardwick school of handball heavy play (despite being strong for marks).
The longest kick chain that has ended in a goal this year? Well, that would be the Dons – another normally kick-resistant side.
Of particular note is the Dons use of width and patience in moving the ball. Even as the commentators egg the Dons via telepathy to use the handball the Dons mostly hold firm. With 13 kicks to just one handball, and a couple of fairly large shifts across the ground, the Dons slide the Hawks around with ease.
Geelong in their longest kick-exclusive scoring chains show a similar steadfastness in their speed, while utilising the whole width of the ground. Shannon Neale’s goal to open the fourth quarter against Melbourne saw the Cats go the full width of the (narrow) Kardinia Park twice.
Making sides defend the full field is critical to finding space and mismatches in the modern game. The handball – and actual footspeed – isn’t the only way to do so.
Are the 2020s becoming the decade of the old bloke?
“Age is just a number” has long been the sentiment generally only offered by the most punishing exercise guy that you still follow because you went to high school together.
But watching Patrick Dangerfield steamroll Adelaide last weekend at an age that would normally have commentators talking about him like an archaeologist would a well-preserved dinosaur fossil made me wonder: is 30 becoming the new 28 in the AFL?
30 has always been perceived as the footy cliff; the Great Dividing Range where a player goes from In Their Prime to Wizened Old Sage (or worse: Over The Hill), but the best players now seem capable of squeezing every last drop of juice out of their bodies – and perhaps more pertinently, minds – to a greater degree than ever before.
Clearly it’s likely to be due to advances in professionalism and conditioning, as well as the players’ own personalities – it’s hard to imagine Scott Pendlebury spending his offseason mainlining Bintang and mushy shakes in South East Asia for example.
Arguably as a big a factor, however, has been a willingness on the part of both player and coaching staff to adapt. Dangerfield is the perfect example: With Tom Hawkins and Gary Rohan both moving on, the Cats needed another presence inside 50 and the decision wouldn’t have been made on a whim.
The Cats would have reasoned that Dangerfield has the explosive speed and power, overhead ability, ruthlessness and contested marking to be a genuinely difficult matchup inside 50, rather than a player who had an attribute mismatch against their direct opponent that characterises most midfielders who push forward to impact the scoreboard.
It’s easy to be cynical about such a switch – moving a great one-on-one player forward of the ball isn’t exactly rocket science – but the fact that Dangerfield started the first game of the season inside 50 rather than at the centre bounce was a flex that both club and player are on board with the ploy. It’s not just Dangerfield who is redefining himself in the post-30 landscape either – a torn Keidean Coleman ACL last year famously led to Dayne Zorko moving to half back at 35 years old and making the All-Australian team in a flag year.
Other 30+ players have had career seasons and moments in the 2020s – Tom Hawkins was a 4x All-Australian and won a Coleman and a flag after 30, Isaac Smith was a Norm Smith Medallist at 33, Scott Pendlebury calmly orchestrated a Collingwood flag in the fourth quarter of the hottest grand final of recent memory as a 35 year old, and Steele Sidebottom stretched every millimetre of his 32 year old soft tissues to kick the sealer in that same game from platform 1 at Jolimont station.
Incidentally, Pendlebury is now 37 and seems to be cruising towards Boomer Harvey’s all time games record – and who knows how many more games he’d have had to his name if player and coaching staff could have found a middle ground at the end of 2016?
Around the Grounds
Here’s some other good looks from elsewhere this week.
For a less gamestyle and numbers oriented companion to our looks at The Melbourne Question, Jonathan Horn tries to read the mood and psyche of the team.
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.
Got an idea or want to contribute? Email thisweekinaustralianfootball at gmail dot com
This week the entire footballing world congregates in the city of churches to watch as much top level footy as is possible in one weekend (outside of Melbourne). Nine games in nine timeslots in one city(ish) offer the most dedicated of footy fans the opportunity to overdose on on-field action.
It’s also rare that all eighteen clubs are in one place at roughly the same time. It provides the opportunity for discussions great and small between footy staff – hopefully away from the gaze of the tabloid media. Loose lips sink ships, or so the saying goes.
Week five is also getting preciously close to the point in a season where there’s enough information to really form opinions about teams across the league. This holds even stronger for clubs that have changed coaches or methodologies over the summer. A month and a half provides enough tape and data for opinions to form, and become concreted in. Opposition analysis gets easier to run after this point, and teams will increasingly start to adjust to these changes.
There’s also the real chance that a team or two comes out of Gather Round with their finals hopes severely dented, if not scuppered entirely.
This Week In Football we have:
False Starts and Flag Fancies (on Fremantle)
Eppur si (non) muove (also on Fremantle)
Elements of Speed (you’d be shocked but also Fremantle)
The fresh ball movement data underlining Carlton’s horror transition game (surprisingly, about Carlton, not Fremantle)
More is not always better (not Fremantle)
What is the real Gather Round cost? (also not Fremantle)
The breakdown of a breakdown (about Melbourne, not Fremantle)
False Starts and Flag Fancies
Ryan Buckland
If I were shown a picture card of the current AFL ladder as part of a psych evaluation and asked for the first thought that popped into my head, it would be the disappointment that is the Fremantle Dockers.
With the team tucked away safely on Sunday afternoons, you probably haven’t been tortured the way I have so far this year. A team with top talent on every line, a credible and settled back six, adding Shai-frickin-Bolton, just can’t seem to Put It Together.
That’s my diagnosis. For fits and starts, the Dockers are breathtaking in their endeavour, their speed, their skills. But when the synapses need to fire on a balmy Perth winter’s afternoon in June, the drool starts pooling and the thousand-mile stare sets in.
Coming into the season Fremantle was a consensus top four selection. Bolton was the finishing touch on a team coach Justin Longmuir had spent five years curating, and it was all supposed to work. The results so far have been anything but the play of a team bound for September. The groans of a weary Dockers crowd – so conditioned to disappointment, so ready to feel it, but still not accepting of it – are already ringing in my ears.
Something said on the Sunday broadcast piqued my interest, and not (just) as a chance to sink the boot into little brother: the Fremantle Dockers haven’t grown up.
In a league which the excellent Cody and Sean are telling us is getting older by the year, the Dockers are getting younger. In fact, in the Longmuir Era, Fremantle’s selected team age profile has been below the league average every single week.
Ross Lyon, still the only coach to take Fremantle to a Grand Final, oversaw the early years of deleveraging once it became clear the team wasn’t quite good enough to win it all. Between 2015 and 2019 the average age of the selected Fremantle side declined from a peak of 26.7 years (~1.5 years above league average and the oldest team in the league) to a low of 24.3 years (~0.8 year below league average and amongst the youngest).
Hence, the team has bubbled along below league average, rising and falling but staying anchored in the depths of inexperience.
All things being equal, if a club picks 23 players and the team doesn’t change from one year to the next, the average age will go up by a year. The fact Fremantle’s age has continuously fluctuated around the same marker for each of Longmuir’s five seasons hints this isn’t happening.
This is a significant contrast to teams who have contended for flags for long periods of time over the past decade.
Consider Richmond, from 2016 to 2022, Brisbane from 2018 to 2024, or even West Coast from 2014 to 2020.
That’s a few selected examples (you can play with the data here). But pick any team who has been at the top for a sustained period over the last ten years and the same broad pattern repeats. Settled coach. Core team forms. The age and experience of the selected team grows by the week, and the contention window opens.
The Dockers have been hit hard by player departures over the past few seasons. Bradley Hill, Blake Acres, Lloyd Meek, Liam Henry, Jesse Hogan, Adam Cerra, Rory Lobb, Griffin Logue, Darcy Tucker and Lachie Shultz all left the club between 2019 and 2023. None of them are out of the league yet, suggesting they could have been critical cogs in the Longmuir machine.
They have been replaced by some experienced players coming through the doors, but in the main the Dockers have leaned into the draft. Murphy Reid, a strong Rising Star candidate for mine, is the latest in a line of quality players taken in recent years.
Fremantle want to play a very precise, controlling game. This is evidenced by an excellent observation of Emlyn Breese this week: the 2025 Dockers have the highest rate of kicking from behind the mark of any team since this stat is available to mere mortals. The second highest is the 2021 Dockers.
Longmuir himself moved over to a permanent employment contract with the Fremantle Football Club before the start of this season proper, ala Brendon Bolton at the Blues before him. Interpreted as a sign of comfort between coach and club, could it have been tacit recognition that there’s still a ways for the Dockers to go before they reach their apex?
A fortnight of opportunity to show us what they’ve really got awaits, with the young Tigers on neutral ground and hapless Dees on the wide expanses of the MCG on the slate. Anything less than eight quarters of excellence will be a resounding answer to this question.
In news that will surely make David King’s heart sing, Fremantle are by one metric the most stop-start team of any from 2021 onwards.
In the season to date, only 26.4% of frees or marks to Fremantle sees them do something other than taking the kick from behind the mark.
The next lowest is also Fremantle – in their 2021 incarnation – at 27.5%.
This year has an outlier at the other end also – This year’s Giants are the highest from 2021 onwards at a rate of 38.7%.
Now, the lowest from 26.4% to the highest at 38.7% gives a relatively narrow band, so let’s see if we can unpack it a bit more. A decent chunk of frees and marks in the forward half will be in viable scoring range. Most of the time a team is going to go back and take the shot – or at least think about doing so and then potentially find a pass in a better position.
If we only take marks/frees in the defensive half the differences become far more apparent.
Fremantle in 2025 are still the lowest we’ve got on record at 28.2%, but the highest we’ve got is up at 52.3%, and they’re another 2025 team.
In fact, the four highest on record are all from 2025 – Gold Coast (52.3%), Port Adelaide (46.0%), Essendon (45.2%) and GWS (44.3%).
If we limit it even further just to defensive half intercept marks and frees Freo are yet again the lowest in our records (17.6%), and four 2025 teams are on top, although not all four are the same – Port Adelaide (43.5%), Sydney (43.0%), GWS (41.9%), and Collingwood (41.7%)
Now, this may change over the course of the season. Small sample sizes will often lead to outlier results, but it’s certainly something worth keeping an eye on.
Off the back of Emlyn & Ryan’s analysis, let’s continue with the Fremantle theme. Here is a snapshot of how long it takes each team to dispose of the ball from a mark.
Fremantle are clearly the slowest team in the comp across all three zones leading into the forward 50m, closely followed by Collingwood. Essendon, Brisbane and Geelong like to keep the ball in motion. St Kilda, Richmond and West Coast appear to speed up as they move the ball up the ground, while the likes of Gold Coast and Carlton get slower.
These stylistic differences can part personnel, part where the game is being played. If you’re a front half team generating intercept marks high up the ground, you may need to be patient, rather than blazing the ball back into congestion. If you’re winning the ball in your back half with elite foot skills at your disposal, you may prefer to slice your way up the ground with quick release kicks.
If you’re neither of these, you may prefer slow long-down-the-lines while over-indexing at the contest to win the chaos game. There’s no right or wrong if everyone’s on the same page.
The fresh ball movement data underlining Carlton’s horror transition game
Jasper Chellappah
New ‘speed of ball movement’ captures from Champion Data in 2025 present a clear summary as to where Carlton’s transition footy is at. These metrics need to be unpacked, but they back up a fair bit of what you can figure out watching the 0-4 Blues yourself. They routinely panic bomb the ball on top of their key forwards’ heads, neglect to create overloads in transition and frustratingly go slow when they have the opposition on their heels.
Thanks to CD’s Chistian Jolly on the ESPN Footy Podcast for these fresh numbers.
To start, the Blues move the ball fastest of all 18 teams from an uncontested mark. That is to say, from the point that an uncontested mark is taken anywhere on the ground, Carlton players gain the most metrage in the least amount of time. Conversely, the Blues are the fifth slowest team in moving the ball from a contested mark. Let’s dive into what that means in a footballing sense.
When the Blues find an uncontested mark they throw the game back into chaos more than any other team. There’s little regard given to retaining possession, picking holes through defences and methodically working up the ground. In reality, AFL defences are best set up when allowing an uncontested mark – it often means midfielders have rolled behind the ball and allowed the open space. It’s been rare to see the Blues retain possession and work the ball up the ground through switches and the ‘45’ corridor kick. It shows in the fifth least uncontested marks per game.
Given they’ve struggled to retain the ball, it’s mind boggling to consider that Carlton would consistently bomb the ball forward to outnumbered situations. With no method to the madness, the Blues are systematically kicking long into set defences and turning it over from positions of advantage.
The game is quicker than ever before. But moving the ball quickly isn’t always wise, and the best teams pick their moments. For example, moving the ball long and direct when the opposition is well set up is not the method of Brisbane, Collingwood or Geelong, our three most recent premiers.
Michael Voss shoulders as much of the blame for this as his charges. It’s a game plan contrived from the ideals of territory footy and metres gained, where winning the midfield battle would more often than not win you the game. But footy has changed and the Blues haven’t changed with it.
What makes these numbers all the more confounding is the fact that Carlton is the fifth slowest team to move the ball from a contested mark. You can probably envisage those moments – where a bruised and battered Charlie Curnow has taken his time up off the ground after a big pack mark on the wing, or where Jacob Weitering’s intercept hasn’t kick-started transition but rather led to a slow-play bomb down the line.
They take the third most contested marks per game so it’s not a rare aspect of their makeup. Carlton win the aerial 50-50s better than the vast majority but concede any advantage they gain.
The Blues have elite aerialists in Curnow, Weitering, Tom De Koning and the returning Harry McKay. The upside of contested marks around the ground is opposition defences are typically unset. There’s space out the back or pockets of open grass in the corridor to exploit. These are the moments where good teams go quickly, take ground with handball chains or inboard kicks and drive the ball deep inside 50 over the back of the scrambling defence.
Adam Simpson explained this concept on AFL360; the ‘small bubble’ and ‘big bubble’ in relation to the fastest ball movement side in the AFL, Brisbane. As soon as they took a mark the opposition wasn’t willing to concede “the bomb goes off” and scoring opportunities present.
Adam Simpson's latest masterclass on team defence and how the extra man can heavily influence the game.
Applying this to the Blues, as soon as they take a contested mark they expand the bubble and the bomb should explode. But it doesn’t. Instead, Carlton becomes the slowest team in the league to move the ball. These are rolled gold scoring opportunities being snuffed out by a lack of recognition and impetus.
The Blues are playing transition footy the wrong way around. They kick long to shallow inside 50s off uncontested marks and go painfully slow after opening the ground up with contested marks. It therefore makes sense that the club is top four at intercepting the ball in the air, but bottom two for scores from turnover. This group sits at the bottom of the league for disposal efficiency and leads all comers for clangers per outing.
There’s an issue of personnel, but on these metrics the Voss game plan simply isn’t stacking up with modern footy standards.
Cody makes some great points about the potential benefits of allowing certain players extended stints on the ground.
But after reading his piece I couldn’t help but think about the fact that just because a player spends a lot of time on the ground doesn’t guarantee they will have a significant impact on the game.
For example, Ben McKay, who averages 99% time on ground across the three games he has played this year, has copped it from all angles over his performances thus far.
Which leads me to ask the seemingly obvious question: who has spent a lot of time on the ground but had little to no impact on the game?
(I will admit that I originally wanted to look at the relationship between distance covered and impact, but that question will have to wait for another day as detailed Telstra Tracker data are not publicly available, as far as I can tell.)
It’s worth noting the AFL Player Ratings only measures direct impact. For key position defenders a lack of impact can often be a positive – a sign that an opposition side is unwilling to attack them, or unable to due to superior positioning. Until there’s further development in this space (such as from including player tracking information), there’s missing information for the effectiveness of defenders.
The AFL have an official measure of the direct impact each player has on a game – player rating points – so we can use that in our attempts to find an answer.
The table below displays the minimum, maximum, and average AFL ratings points for players who average at least 95% time on ground across at least three games. As Cody highlighted last week, the list features a lot of key position defenders.
McKay doesn’t have the lowest recorded player rating in terms of an individual game – that “honour” goes to Brisbane’s Harris Andrews for his 12-disposal effort in the Lions’ 28-point win against Richmond over the weekend.
But he does have the lowest average player rating, with scores of 6.4, 5.9, and 4.0 from his three games to date.
Essendon fans will be hoping the week off will be just what McKay needed ahead of their Gather Round clash against Melbourne on Saturday night.
At the other end of the spectrum, Carlton’s Jacob Weitering just edges out Sam Taylor (Greater Western Sydney) and Tom McDonald (Melbourne) as the player who has spent the most time on the ground and had the greatest apparent impact on the game during said time on ground.
The Blues have left their fans frustrated this year, sitting with a 0-4 record despite leading at half time in each of their matches. If the same happens against the bottom-placed Eagles this week, Weitering’s consistency will be of little comfort.
Gather Round is generally regarded as a success for the South Australian government, with the whole city seeming to get decked out with inflated footballs, club colours, and advertising boards, while several thousand travelers roll in to fill the hotels, and the eyes of the footy world fall on Adelaide for a few days.
All this comes at a monetary cost, however, with the ABC currently estimating 16 to 20 million dollars a year being spent by the government on the event. This is a fair chunk of money, easily the most ever forked out by a government other than Victoria’s on the rights to host footy games. The SA government outlay was enough to get the AFL to quietly put aside any plans of using its answer to the NRL’s Magic Round as a tool for footy promotion in New South Wales, an idea that eventually became the much more watered-down Opening Round concept without the actual addition of extra games to the schedule.
But how does the Gather Round expenditure, as reported, actually stack up with other outlays by state, territory and local governments for AFL content?
The Gather Round deal, taking $18 million as the median of the most recent reported values, costs almost double any other AFL content deal on a per game basis, with the WA government spend to bring North Melbourne to Bunbury and Perth, and the Hawks’ new Launceston deal the other contracts currently costing over one million dollars per game.
However, Gather Round caters to some fairly large crowds and when looked at on a per-attendee basis, looks about middle of the pack with the most comparable deals, roughly on par with what the ACT government spends bringing footy to Canberrans.
This also means that if other states do try to force the issue with the AFL before Gather Round gets entrenched as a permanent fixture in South Australia (and a permanent fixturing leg-up for its teams), another state is probably going to have to outbid the total expenditure, and in doing so they’ll perhaps do it without any guarantee of comparable crowds in isolated Perth or non-football heartland Brisbane or Sydney.
The breakdown of a breakdown
Cody Atkinson
Zero and four is not a good start to a football season. This is where Carlton, Melbourne and West Coast fans start to wince in unison.
But for all the issues to date with the Blues and Eagles in 2025, let’s turn our attention instead to the side that has most recently been premiers.
Most would point to Melbourne’s forward line as being the biggest source of their issues. After all, they’ve struggled to get the ball forward, mark the ball up forward and score at all.
The three teams at the bottom there? Yep, the 0-4 club. But let’s ignore that for a second – just a brief one.
When Melbourne was at their competition beating best it wasn’t because of their attack but instead their defence. Led by Steven May and Jake Lever, the Demons were as solid down back as any other side – providing room for their sometimes sputtering attack to…well, sputter. Between their defence and the weight of ball they could win from stoppages, the Demons could grind sides into submission.
This year their defence has struggled to find its rhythm through personnel issues and what seems to be broader communication problems.
This is ugly stuff. There’s at least five errors in the clip above – from not denying space for the lead, to not communicating who should be marking who, and even the poor kick at the start. Despite all of this Melbourne still spoil the kick (partially due to Stengle cutting the lead), but don’t have effective support at ground level to stop Dangerfield.
Again – how do you leave PATRICK DANGERFIELD so open in the forward 50?
The Demons are struggling in stopping both raw volumes of opposition scoring shots, and allowing high quality shots against them. Melbourne is bottom four in both these measures – usually a sign of a very, very, very bad defence.
At times Melbourne seems stuck between a more zone based defence – protecting space instead of players – and a man defence with spares utilised for protection. At times – from the comfort of the couch – it appears that exact roles and responsibilities aren’t getting communicated on the field effectively.
To be fair to Mebourne they have struggled with availability. However, with Jake Lever out for up to two months, this may not get better any time soon.
Melbourne are running out of time – if something doesn’t change soon, their season will be over early.
Around the Grounds
Here’s some more stuff that isn’t from here but is good to take in about footy
