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.
Banner images by Polly Porridge of the True Bloods Podcast. Check out her other design work.
Before the Bounce
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.
This week in football we have:
A deeper dive into the Threat Index
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.
Where it all begins
Emlyn Breese / CreditToDuBois.com
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.
Around the Grounds
- Jonathan Horn at the Guardian looks back at Sam Docherty’s storied career upon the occasion of his retirement
- The AFL website covers new footy boss Greg Swann’s intent to shorten game duration without reducing play time
- Ricky Mangidis on his website Shinboner breaks down how the ruck battle unfolded between North and Sydney, which featured a record hitouts differential
- Andrew McGarry at ABC celebrates the ersatz rivalry round of this week’s fixture with a look at some memorable games from each non-Victorian derby
- The Tasmanian election has thrown into doubt the legislative manoeuvres previously planned to push the stadium past the approvals process quickly
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