This Week In Football

So this is going to be a bit different from me, a bit about process.

This is a hobby. My general approach is hoping a bit of inspiration strikes during the week. A healthy groupchat of footy nerds helps immeasurably. Sometimes it’s a particular piece of play, a random bit of trivia, something I’ve heard that didn’t sound right and I wanted to check.

Often it’s something that I think would be interesting to do in and of itself - figuring out a new way to either analyse or display the data I’ve got. That’s where this week’s piece started. For this kind of piece I’ll usually start writing while I’m going through the data - it’s an exploratory approach so the story I end up with might be pretty different to what I assumed coming in.

I remembered back to opening round, there were a few clips of Carlton looking particularly impotent at defending Sydney’s ball movement. Thanks to the stand rule changes Sydney were able to easily release a handball to a player after a mark multiple times - the defender who contested the mark had to stand, they couldn’t back outside of the protected area to better guard space like they could previously.

I wanted to find out to what extent I could measure that. To give you a slight peek behind the curtain, working with the data available becomes a fair bit trickier when instead of looking at a single event you’re looking at a chain of events.

How many times does a team take a mark on the wing? Easy. How often do they score from a possession chain involving a mark on the wing compared to all chains? Again, easily done.

When you get into X happens, then Y happens, with Z result, it can start to be a bit complex. You can get caught out by edge cases in the data throwing up some weird results (not adequately accounting for an edge case is why I had a three week backlog of data for my inside 50 visualiser).

I wanted to see how well I could track these catch and release plays.

Imagine how excited I was when I ran the code and found that Sydney were off the charts for releasing a handball from a mark.

Sydney are, using a simple opponent adjusted points for and against model, the team of the season so far.

They’re also a really good handballing side (and there’s been a lot of talk about the importance of handball more generally). They handball a lot (top 2 for handballs per game), they handball effectively (top 5 for handball to handball receive) and they handball with purpose (top 2 for total handball metres gained and metres gained per handball).

After a few iterations, the metric I landed on was a mark on the wing followed by a releasing handball to a teammate. To keep things simple I had a really simple definition of the wing - wider than the centre square, but within its length.

Now, an important note is that I wasn’t treating this as a cause and effect relationship - the handball on the wing opening up the opposition.I was looking for correlation though. Generally you’d expect a team to utilise this handball when there’s an opportunity to take advantage of a poorly positioned defence. The handball might help to facilitate that, but there’s a lot of selection bias going into when the handball occurs.

Sydney were releasing a handball from 23% of the time from a mark here, compared to a league average of 15%. I also wanted to differentiate between handballs towards the corridor (closer to the fat side of the ground) and towards the boundary (the skinny side). Again, Sydney were massively in front. 12.9% of the time they were releasing a handball to the fat side (9.9% to the skinny side).

I had a look at the change over seasons too (again, prior assumption being that the change to the stand rule may have influenced this)

The rate of utilising a handball (hbRate) after these kind of marks was up, but a bit bouncy year to year. Proportionally though more of these handballs were going to the boundary side (widerRate) and this was a clearer trend.

I was moving towards wrapping up the article when I decided to take things a step further - are teams more or less likely to have a scoring opportunity when they release a handball like this.

(An aside: I prefer to use scoring opportunity rather than score to judge the outcome of a chain. It includes chains that either result in a score).

Looking at it over the past 6 seasons I ran into a problem.

This year 31.2% of chains with a mark on the wing resulted in a scoring opportunity.

31.1% of chains with a mark on the wing wing followed by a handball release resulted in a score or shot at goal (a very small decline), and ones that involved a handball to the fat side (towards the corridor) were less likely to produce a scoring opportunity than those to the skinny side.

The numbers for Sydney in particular were even worse.

37.5% of all those marking chains resulted in a scoring opportunity compared to 26.1% where a handball was given off. Handballs to the fat side were going at 23.1% compared to handballs to the skinny side at a flat 30%.

I think there’s an interesting story to explore regarding the season by season and team by team figures. However with some work commitments I was running pretty late so I didn’t have the time to pivot to that.

I thought it would useful anyway to document a bit of the process I follow. Publication bias (only publishing where your research confirms your hypothesis) is a problem in science, I imagine it’s even more severe in less formalised areas like sports analytics. It’s a timely reminder to check your priors and to refer back to “what impact does this actually have” as a touchstone for what’s real and what isn’t.

In the meantime, have some trivia I uncovered about the higher profile handball - taking a mark from in or near a scoring position and dishing it off to a teammate to have a ping.

[These stats are a bit more prone to error, as you take into account inside 50s and shots on goal there’s more variation in the data - does it record a contest target, how does it record the inside 50, etc. I’m less worried about that given this is purely for trivia, but if you uncover dusty footage of Harry McKay giving off a handball in 2021 please don’t yell at me]

Since 2021 Harry McKay leads the league for most times taking a mark in a scoring position without ever giving the handball off to a teammate who takes the shot.

The top 5 is rounded out by Peter Wright, Jamarra Ugle-Hagan, Kysaiah Pickett, and Sam Darcy.

Jesse Hogan and Matt Flynn have shared it around more often than any other players in the same period.

Overall this season has seen it decreased to 3.3% of opportunities, part of a relatively steady decline from 4.4% in 2021.

Of those benefiting from the give off Jeremy Cameron leads the way with 22 at a goal rate of 54.5%.

Behind him are Mason Redman (19 at 36.8%), Dan Houston (17 at 41.1%), Jordan Dawson (15 at 46.7%) and finally Kane Farrell (13 at 38.5%).

Nick Daicos as Derek Jeter

Cody Atkinson

If you haven't heard already, Nick Daicos played his 100th game this week.

An AFL.com.au journalist even had the absolutely insane job of trying to rank his first 100 games. There is no doubt that Daicos is one of the better players in football right now. Ranking players is somewhat of a fraught exercise, but many have Daicos within the best three players in the game right now. Your scribe doesn't love ranking players, but that might be a little high in our eyes.

The spotlight Daicos draws by being the most famous name in the most famous team in the league is undeniable. Which made me think of Derek Jeter.

Jeter was unquestionably one of the greatest players of his era, a near-unanimous Hall of Famer who won five World Series with the most famous baseball team ever. Jeter was known for making the big plays in the big moments on the biggest stage - a bit like the rep Daicos has built over his time in the league.

Jeter was a player built for the highlight reel, with seemingly sensational plays being made day on day.

But highlights can sometimes be deceiving. This is where the Jeter comparisons are useful. For much of his career Jeter was considered one of the best defenders in baseball at its hardest infield position - short stop.

Across his career he won five Golden Glove awards for being the finest defender in his league at his position. Jeter was known for his jump throw, a highlight reel worthy put out that was regularly cut up into sizzle reels to advertise the game.

This is the juicy stuff - the stuff that gets fans through the gate.

It was also symptomatic of why Jeter was one of the worst defensive baseball players of all time. Sport is often about making the spectacular look routine (head nod to Wemby), but Jeter's style often meant the routine plays were missed so all we were left with was the spectacular.

Jeter's style often impacted the substance.

Jeter ranked relatively highly in one of the only early defensive measures - fielding percentage. Fielding percentage looks at the number of chances converted against errors. It does not look at how many plays that you miss due to speed, range and poor positioning - Jeter's relative weakspots.

Stitching together the two advanced (and more complete) defensive metrics Jeter gave up more than 200 runs with respect to his defence - the worst infielder of his era.

This is where everyone gets angry while reading this, especially after one of Daicos's finest quarters so far.

Daicos's biggest value at this point may be the style with which he performs and the amount of time he accumulates with the ball. The disposal numbers are often high, and the highlights are plentiful.

Disposal numbers have little value or meaning in modern footy (we don't have time for that deep dive here), so let's look at the other side.

There are few players that look better in a highlight reel than Daicos, especially when he is allowed space to pick a target out by foot.

Daicos's running ability means that he can usually burn off any opponent that sits behind him and beat him to the next contest (or for a handball receive). Collingwood's system has been designed to open up as many opportunities as possible for their second layer mids and outside users - like Daicos - to impact the game.

But (most of) the other teams in the league don't rest on their laurels, and that biggest asset has become potentially a weakness.

For the first three quarters Carlton largely negated Daicos' influence, and Collingwood ability to go forward and score. But Carlton's extremely intensive defensive method (written about here) is unsustainable across four quarters. It means that every week they lose their defensive shape from lack of communication, energy and variety.

Daicos is nearly the perfect player to exploit these weaknesses. Daicos is an excellent runner, especially with defences trailing him.

But even with this excellent performance, Daicos has not been what many think he is this year.

Daicos is sitting near the bottom of all players when looking at the percent of ball retained when kicking inside 50. There's filtering here for his rough role (using clearances, hitouts and raw kick numbers), but even when expanded he is close to the least effective kick inside 50 this year in a raw sense.

Even in that last quarter there were loose kicks going inside 50, especially when confronted by any pressure from ahead of the ball.

Last year Daicos was closer to league average, but still below the break even mark. This aligns with how defenses have changed to play against him, and make his life harder.

The Kick Retention and Threat measures (as developed by Liam Crowhurst) paint a similar picture.

Part of this is the type of kicks that Daicos increasingly tries to bite off. Like Jeter, Daicos seemingly has a flair for the spectacular over the simple, making life harder for himself. Back in 2023 and 2024 Daicos rated far higher on these measures, and his kicks were largely more...measured.

In 2024 his average kick distance was about 25m, with that distance increasing to above 29m this year. In that year his retention rating was above water, and his kick inside 50 retention rate was one of the better ones for volume users.

While Daicos isn't the only Collingwood player who uses the ball, his decline is emblematic in Collingwood's scoring issues since 2023. Their defence is stellar, but their use going up the ground is deliberately chaotic and often poor.

This is just looking at what we consider to be his strengths. There aren't great defensive metrics that exist for individual players in football, but Daicos is a player opposition teams have tested going the other way.

It's not his job to defend hard away from contest, but when I've seen him live that side of his game is noticeably less developed. Some of the other names in his vicinity on the charts above are more known for their defensive sides of their game.

Some footage I've seen has shown opposition sides running players targeting his usual reception zones, or to run off him completely. This is nearly the opposite of a tag - forcing him to be accountable the other way.

This defensive side is largely unaccounted for in metrics like the AFL Player Ratings, so is hard to specify in a concrete manner.

There's other prominent names that ping on some of the numbers above - most notably Pickett and the Bont. But both those players are more versatile and more able to provide value without the ball. If the Bont isn't hitting kicks up the ground, he can play as a deep forward or a spare behind the play. Pickett can isolate opponents up forward.

Daicos doesn't have the same level of positional flexibility - he often gets deployed loose behind the ball but more in a designated user sense instead of a defensive role.

None of this is to say Daicos is a bad football player. That would be heresy. He provides significant value in his mere presence in how he forces opposition teams to adjust. When he is on, he can absolutely break games open (like last Thursday).

It's very hard to evaluate players in one look - either live or on TV. Footy is a expansive game with a very high number of contributors. Much of a player's game happens away from the ball, which makes it even harder.

As a result it's easy to be seduced by the highlights - something that's usually a mistake. Even someone like Shannon Brown can look an MVP with the right editing.

He might not be in the "greatest first 100 games" argument (that's Haydn Bunton pretty comfortably), or the debate about the best five or ten players in the game right now (don't make me list them).

Jeter is still a Hall of Famer, and was probably robbed of a MVP trophy. Daicos is still an absolute force when on.

But he isn't the guy we think he is (right now, or anymore).

(Retained) Possession is Nine Tenths of the Law

Jeremiah Brown

Being a Carlton supporter over the last three decades has been painful. Last night was yet another example of this, going down in yet another fourth quarter comeback to a side that simply ran over the top of them. But a hallmark of the Voss era has been an overemphasis on defence, at the expense of being able to move the ball effectively. Carlton are second in the competition this season for rebound 50s per game, at 45, suggesting that the defence is somewhat resilient. The problem is that the ball just comes straight back, Carlton are league worst at inside 50s conceded per game.

As mentioned above, for Carlton, part of the problem is ball movement, with the team struggling to retain the ball once it clears it from defensive 50. It has the worst transition rates to F50 and to scores when transitioning out of defensive 50.

While Adelaide has far better returns in terms of points generated from the defensive half (37 per game), and has had a much tougher schedule to date, it profiles similarly to Carlton in ways that are worth keeping an eye on. Crucially for Adelaide though, it has a pair of weapons to help it improve its transition rates in Worrell and Milera. The pair are right up at the top of the competition in terms of retained meters gained, offering multiple reliable pathways out of defence.

GWS are right up the top for transition rates from D50 to F50, led by the top player in the competition for retained meters gained, Lachie Ash. Ash is the only player to top 400 meters retained per game, retaining around two thirds of the territory he gains per game, and he has added almost 100 onto what he was doing last season.

While the 300 (meters retained per game) guys are mostly defenders, there are 5 midfielders taking plenty of grass and keeping a fair bit of it. Petracca will provide a welcome return for the Suns this week after his blistering start to the season, although it will be interesting to see if he can keep up the efficiency levels he started with, given it was a weakness for him during his last year at Melbourne.

While Bailey Smith has often copped criticism for his at times wayward disposal, it is interesting to see Nick Daicos as somewhat poor for retention, retaining less than half of the meters gained. While Daicos was the difference against Carlton on Thursday night, given how central he is to how Collingwood play, his retention compared to meters gained may be something that needs to be addressed if Collingwood is to challenge the better teams this season.

Shifting to look at who is at the top of the other positions highlights the gap between the different roles and the utilisation of different ball users. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the rucks are the lowest grouping for retained meters gained, with the currently injured Tim English leading the way there with 130 per game. Shoutout to Tristan Xerri who averages 21 meters retained per game but still manages to be in the top 10 players in the competition for player ratings.

Lincoln Tracy / lincolntracy.substack.com

It seems that no one has adopted the adage of good kicking is good football quite like Hawthorn, who have a great spread of quality ball users across the list. Looking at the forwards signals to some of the engine driving the potency of the Hawks forward line, and shows just how valuable the pair of Connor MacDonald and Jack Ginnivan have been at moving the ball for Hawthorn this year. They are two of the top three forwards at retained meters gained, and both are in the top 20 in the competition for score assists.

Another week of starting out with something Carlton struggle at, and transitioning to something that makes the Hawks so good. How grim.

Round 5, 2026

Joe Cordy — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 16:13:34 GMT

Before the Bounce

Carlton understood Good Friday far better than North Melbourne (it's the crucifixion, you save the resurrection to Sunday).

Christian Petracca dodged the dees as they put a dint in the Suns record, while the dogs limped to a disappointing 5 goal win.

The less said about the bird battle the better. Adelaide was robbed by Fremantle not receiving a warning with 7 minutes to play.

Oh yeah and on Monday the Hawks and Cats put on yet another one of *those* games to pretty much everyone's amazement yet noone's surprise.

We've got figures reported at face value that are, quite literally, too bad to be believed.

And we're all auctioning off our kidneys to fill the tank up and make the road trip to Adelaide.

This week in football we have:

Joe Cordy - Quality & Execution
Lincoln Tracy - Gather Round for More Fixturing Quirks
Emlyn Breese - The Footy is Good, Actually

Quality & Execution

Joe Cordy

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.

Gather Round for More Fixturing Quirks

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 5^th 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).

For example, Jon Ralph opined about how Brisbane, the back-to-back premiers, have been disrespected since the inaugural Gather Round back in 2023 by not getting the opportunity to play at the Adelaide Oval.

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 Footy is Good, Actually

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.

Crowded out

Crowds are plummeting, even the esteemed AFL Fans Association says so (picture below).

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?

Around the grounds

Two great reads on the draft and equalisation
- Mimi Birch: Sympathy for the Saints
- One Percenters: Empire of the Son
Ricky Mangidis’ writing on North Melbourne’s win
Sean Ross on Richmond
Sophie Welsh on AFLW and AFLM double-header announcement

Round 4, 2026

Joe Cordy — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 05:39:00 GMT

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

Before the Bounce

Big weekend of footy for xScore enjoyers.

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.

This week in football we have:

Joe Cordy Is a Bad Ruck Better Than No Ruck?
Emlyn Breese: Age isn't a number (Its a scatter plot)
Seb Morrison: Competitive Advantage
Jack Turner: The AFL Needs a Better Clash Policy

Is a Bad Ruck Better Than No Ruck?

Joe Cordy / @JCordy37

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.

Age isn't a number (it's a scatter plot)

(Credit to Sean for the title)

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 2^nd oldest to 10^th! 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 4^th youngest to 3^rd 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 3^rd youngest list, by median they’ve got the 6^th 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 2^nd 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 80^th percentile or above for oldest teams they’ve fielded, with Carlton the oldest they’ve been since 1944.

League-wide it’s the 7^th oldest and a trend emerges with 2023, 2024, and 2025 coming in between 8^th and 11^th 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.

Seb Morrison / Changing Angle

Opening Round Competitive Advantage

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

Jack Turner / The Back Pocket

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.

The AFL Needs a Better Clash Policy

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.

Round 3, 2026

This Week In Football — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 16:29:09 GMT

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

Before the Bounce

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.

This week in football we have:

Cody Atkinson: Rescuing Footy
Jeremiah Brown: The Shifting Marking Market
Lincoln Tracy: The Early Season Spike in Scoring isn't as Big as you Think it is
Emlyn Breese: Tracking the Tracker
Joe Cordy: Setting Up The Board
Around the grounds

Rescuing Footy

Cody Atkinson

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’.

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.

This Russell Jackson piece is always worth re-reading on the latter issue.

That addresses the “what” but not the “why”.

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.

The Shifting Marking Market

Jeremiah Brown

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

Lincoln Tracy

Earlier this week Jon Pierik wrote an article for The Age exploring whether the AFL’s latest batch of rule changes have bought about the desired effect and led to more scoring.

“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.)

But when I posted about seeing this story on X, fellow TWIFer Emlyn Breese weighed in with two very valid points.

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.

Tracking the Tracker

Emlyn Breese / CreditToDuBois

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)

For a start we’ll look at the raw figures.

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.

open chart

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.

open chart

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.

open chart

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.

Setting Up The Board

Joe Cordy / @JCordy37

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.

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.

Around the Grounds

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Round 2, 2026

This Week In Football — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 03:55:43 GMT

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

Before the Bounce

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.

This Week in Football we have:

Emlyn Breese: For young and old
Joe Cordy: Anchoring the Defence
Jack Turner: We’re losing sight of what makes footy awards fun
Emlyn Breese: Inside inside 50s

For young and old

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 13^th 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
— Emlyn Breese (@EmlynBreese) March 16, 2026

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 3^rd fewest intercepts, their 6^th fewest contested possessions, and their 5^th fewest tackles.

If we dive a bit deeper, Melbourne recorded their 5^th 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 6^th highest ball use equity (see Joe’s piece last week for a discussion on this metric), 11^th highest post-clearance equity, and 3^rd highest ball use equity per disposal.

It was their 3^rd highest xScore, 4^th highest shots at goal, 5^th highest rate of scoring from chains and 8^th 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 5^th most disposals Melbourne has allowed an opponent at the 6^th highest disposal efficiency. St Kilda recorded the 9^th lowest intercepts of Melbourne’s opponents, the 5^th highest shots at goal, the 8^th highest expected score, the third highest rate of scoring from chains and scoring from the defensive half. It was the 18^th highest ball use per equity, but the 18^th 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 3^rd 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.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/AMGdu/2/

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.

We’re losing sight of what makes footy awards fun

Jack Turner / TheBackPocketAU.com / TheBackPocketAU

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.

https://www.datawrapper.de/_/5cgZ6/

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.

https://www.datawrapper.de/_/GTF7y/

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.

https://www.datawrapper.de/_/Y16Y2/

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.

https://www.datawrapper.de/_/uNqdm/

https://www.datawrapper.de/_/YKEZm/

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.

Inside inside 50s

I’ve been working on something I think is pretty cool – a new way to visualise inside 50s.

You can see the beta version of that at https://charting.football/i50/ loaded up with the data from 2026.

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.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/930NB/3/

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.

Around the Grounds

Want to submit something? Get in touch!

If you’d like to contribute to This Week in Football feel free to get in touch via email on: ThisWeekInAustralianFootball@gmail.com

Round 1, 2026

This Week In Football — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 06:15:26 GMT

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

This Week in Football we have:

Joe Cordy: Winning and Using the Footy
Emlyn Breese: Greener Pastures
Jeremiah Brown: Looking to the End of the Bench

Winning and Using the Footy

Joe Cordy / @JCordy37

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.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/A7iF5/2/

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.

Greener Pastures

Emlyn Breese / CreditToDuBois

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 4^th 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 6^th 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 10^th 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 11^th season playing (12^th 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 11^th 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).

Looking to the End of the Bench

Jeremiah Brown / @JeremiahTBrown

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).

Around the Grounds

Round 0, 2026

This Week In Football — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 22:06:13 GMT

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

Changes to the board

A quick note before This Year in Football begins.

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).

Other than that though, we’re back in business!

This Week in Football we have:

One Percenters Season Previews
Lousy Smarch Football
Football on March 5? Tell ‘em they’re dreaming
Homegrown or Headhunted
Around the Grounds

One Percenters Season Previews

Mateo Szlapek-Sewillo / OnePercenters

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.]

Lousy Smarch Football

Jack Turner / TheBackPocketAU.com / TheBackPocketAU

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.

Football on March 5? Tell ‘em they’re dreaming

Lincoln Tracy | lincolntracy.substack.com

If you feel like it’s too early for “real” football to be back, then you’re not wrong.

As Swamp posted on X over the weekend, 2026 is the first season in V/AFL history where matches will be played on March 5 and 6, making tonight’s game between Sydney and Carlton the earliest day of the year that teams have played for premiership points.

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.

Homegrown or Headhunted

Emlyn Breese / CreditToDuBois

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.

Around the Grounds

Grand Final, 2025

This Week In Football — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 23:00:00 GMT

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

Before the Bounce

It’s finally 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

Image: James Ives

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.

A Lions game sees them controlling play by executing kicks to uncontested marks around the ground. No side takes more uncontested marks than the Lions, and only two prefer to kick rather than handpass more (Geelong and Adelaide).

There are differences however. The Cats play noticeably quicker than the Lions – with a few important caveats.

“They are certainly a team that can shift the ball, they’re also a very powerful go-forward team with speed, so you know they can do it multiple ways,” Melbourne coach Simon Goodwin said after his side’s round-four loss to Geelong earlier this year.
…This malleability is at the heart of the Cats’ success this year.
They switch up the speed at which they move the ball on a week-to-week basis as much as any other team.
The Cats can shift modes with ease and possess several core elements designed to put opposition sides off their game.

The Lions also try to establish the corridor as a cornerstone of their success.

In their two wins against the Cats earlier this year, Brisbane forced the game through the middle about 50% more than an ordinary game. This opened the Cats defence up in a way that few other sides have been able to do this year. It’s also noteworthy that the Cats have struggled against the Giants, another side to target the middle of the ground.
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.

Image: James Ives

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.

No team is better at winning the ball and using it effectively than Geelong.
The Cats lead the league from scoring from intercepts across the course of the season.
Teams that have finished top three in total intercept scoring differential have won the flag in 18 of the past 19 seasons.
While the Cats lead the league in that number (by some way), Brisbane are only ranked fifth across the year.

Image: James Ives

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.

Image: James Ives

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.

Image: James Ives

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

Emlyn Breese / CreditToDuBois.com

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.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/QYyBb/1/

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.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/ZQQOV/1/

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.

Poor Nick Daicos, polling exactly as expected

Liam Crowhurst

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?

Lincoln Tracy / lincolntracy.substack.com

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.

Preliminary Finals Week, 2025

This Week In Football — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 01:48:39 GMT

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

Before the Bounce

And then there were four.

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.

Enjoy the last three games of the year.

Geelong v Hawthorn

Geelong

Jack Turner/The Back Pocket

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.

Not going down with the ship

Emlyn Breese / CreditToDuBois.com

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.
Kaitlyn Ferber at the AFL website looks at North’s AFLW unbeaten streak in global context as they charge towards all time records
Jonathan Horn talks wily old veteran players at Collingwood at the Guardian

Finals Week 2, 2025

This Week In Football — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 00:58:19 GMT

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

Before the Bounce

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 – 4^th youngest, Melbourne – 5^th youngest). Sitting just behind the undefeated sides is the 3-1 West Coast. They happen to be the 2^nd 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?

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/8psV0/3/

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 21^st shortest (alongside a further 17 teams from previous seasons).

Finals Week 1, 2025

This Week In Football — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 00:56:15 GMT

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

Before the Bounce

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?
— Emlyn Breese (@EmlynBreese) September 2, 2025

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.

Pre-finals Bye and AFLW Round 3 2025

This Week In Football — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 00:42:04 GMT

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

Before the Bounce

Finally, a break.

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).

This week in football we have:

The TWIF MVP

Adrian Polykandrites | fromthetopdeck.com | @fromthe_topdeck

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.”

Who was the biggest All Australian snub?

Jack Turner | The Back Pocket | TheBackPocketAU

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.

https://www.datawrapper.de/_/WoMVe/

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.

https://www.datawrapper.de/_/PiQRc/

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.

https://www.datawrapper.de/_/ACOUg/

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.

Estimating score assists

Andrew Whelan / WheeloRatings.com

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).

More on the best and worst sport cities

This week for the ABC Cody and I ran a piece looking over the terrible sporting history of the booming city of Gold Coast. As a spoiler, the Suns did indeed break their finals drought with a win over Essendon, which means they slightly improved the city’s nation-worst record of elite men’s football teams making finals in just 13% of the seasons they compete in (it’s now 15%).

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.
It is very funny that the AFL Coaches Association awarded a “best young player” award to a 28-year old.
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.

Round 24, 2025

This Week In Football — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 04:13:07 GMT

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

Before the Bounce

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

Andrew Whelan / WheeloRatings.com

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.

https://www.datawrapper.de/_/d0Yjv/

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.

https://www.datawrapper.de/_/u2zBt/?v=2

Here are the leaders this season.

Diving into the first week of 2025 AFLW

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:

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/pNZp1/2/

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.

For historical contracts, extra payments outside the cap are obviously a difficult to identify factor. The Anthony Koutoufides contract reported in 2003 of $4m over 5 years turns out according to his agent at the time to have also involved 750k in under the table payments.

Warwick Capper’s Brisbane Bears deal, already massive, was supplemented by valuable gifts from Christopher Skase such as a $200k vase and a clothing shop.

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.

Round 23, 2025

This Week In Football — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 01:32:19 GMT

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

Before the Bounce

There’s hype, then there’s this.

Friend of TWIF Len Phillips found one of the weirder articles written on a AFL club website in recent years. Here’s a sample of it:

going to be tough to top this as the saddest paragraph to appear on a club website pic.twitter.com/20vo7ZTUS4
— Lenny Phillips (@lenphil29) August 14, 2025

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.

Peter Blucher wrote that article, and one with a very similar tone about the snubbing of Harris Andrews from the All Australian team.

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.

That case was the linchpin on a crackdown on the behaviour of agents as well, although the actual face used for the crackdown was that of Ricky Nixon.

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.

This week in football we have:

How each AFLW side has been constructed

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.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/kRNxI/1

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.

We cannot wait to see what Zippy Fish can do for @SydneySwansAFLW in 2025. #AFLW #Bloods pic.twitter.com/I5IeD8VmXj
— AFLW Today (@AFLWTodayAU) August 10, 2025

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.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/xoUPH/2/

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).

Ready to recommence the “is he doing enough?” chat
https://t.co/DhJTAyCbnR— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshMedia) August 12, 2025

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

James Ives

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.

English transition pic.twitter.com/dPAk6pv3i9
— James Ives (@JamesIves17) August 14, 2025

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.
Ever see a scorpion kick goal kicked by a player jumping for a hanger? Now you have.
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.

Round 22, 2025

This Week In Football — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 00:24:07 GMT

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

Before the Bounce

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.

This week in football we have:

Breaking Down Brisbane vs Collingwood

James Ives

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.

Luke Beveridge, enigma of the West

Jack Turner | The Back Pocket | TheBackPocketAU

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.

https://www.datawrapper.de/_/unXcR/

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.

https://www.datawrapper.de/_/GJKug/

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.

https://www.datawrapper.de/_/7ZhsJ/

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

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/J5D6F/3/

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.
Razor Ray Chamberlain is returning from retirement to officiate the AFLW season, a league which notably does not have physically taxing centre bounces.

Round 21, 2025

This Week In Football — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 00:55:27 GMT

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

Before the Bounce

Sometimes good moments in footy are good.

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
— 10 Sport (@10SportAU) July 28, 2025

Lyon. Nas. Pub. Shoulders.

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).

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/XapDl/1/

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.

@sportsgrad_
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 ♬ original sound – SportsGrad

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
— James Ives (@JamesIves17) July 27, 2025

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?

In the margins

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 r² as 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.

Around the Grounds

Marnie Vinall for ABC reports on AFL plans to increase AFLW crowds, such as they are.
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.
For some reason, regarding attempts to improve the AFLW’s standing, it has been reported in the Herald Sun that a room full of AFL executives were made to shout “Taylor Swift” in unison at a summit about the topic.
Speaking of podcasts, here’s the complete derailment of The Footy, a podcast hosted by Dees nuff and Aunty Donna comedian Broden Kelly. They were recording during the Saints comeback over the Dees.

Round 20, 2025

This Week In Football — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 03:36:24 GMT

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

James Ives

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