New episodes of 110 Percenters are published here. You can also find us wherever you get your podcasts, including:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocket Casts

• YouTube Podcasts

Listener feedback will be key to making us better, so if you took the time to listen, please also consider taking the time to rate and review the show.

I’ve put links to Cody and Jonathan’s writing after the jump. Their work is the best in the business.

Links:

• Read Cody’s work here

• Read Jonathan’s work here

New episodes of 110 Percenters are published here. You can also find us wherever you get your podcasts, including:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocket Casts

• YouTube Podcasts

Listener feedback will be key to making us better, so if you took the time to listen, please also consider taking the time to rate and review the show.

I’ve put links to Cody and Jonathan’s writing after the jump. Their work is the best in the business.

Links:

• Read Cody’s work here

• Read Jonathan’s work here

Social media preview image courtesy of the AFL website.

The proper finals begin tonight. When they do, you’re likely to hear a common refrain. You’ve heard it from the man in the pub, from the commentators on TV, perhaps even from your own mouth as you make a forlorn attempt at early Spring water cooler conversation: finals footy is different. Part of what people mean, I suspect, when they make that claim (beyond repeating something they’ve heard someone credentialled say before) is that finals footy is psychologically different because the stakes are higher. Lose in September and the season is likely kaput. Embodied in that original claim is another, more interesting one: that the higher stakes of finals footy fundamentally alters the shape of the game. Finals footy is different because it’s more meaningful, yes. But it’s also tactically different. With the 2026 AFL finals now upon us, I thought I’d dig into the numbers to interrogate the truth of that old cliche. They tell an interesting story.

Finals footy is more contested

Let’s begin with the basics. It’s harder to get the ball and maintain possession in finals. Between 2021 and 2025, finals games featured an average of 28 fewer disposals and 14.3 fewer marks than Home & Away games. The numbers in finals jump around a bit, mostly because (until this season) there were only nine finals games, so we’re ultimately dealing with much smaller and therefore less robust datasets.

I suspect – but, due to a lack of facility with the statistical programming language R, cannot verify – that this basic fact of the ball being harder to win and harder to keep also shows up in deeper ways like shorter average duration (in seconds) of possession chains. There are lots of players who, in September, are eager to delegate responsibility for doing something useful to a teammate.

Closely related is the fact that finals games are much more contested than their Home & Away counterparts. Between 2021 and 2026, 36.85% of possessions in Home & Away games were contested, compared to 40.3% of possessions in finals games between 2021 and 2025 being contested.

If you think this effect would disappear when you looked only at games between the top eight sides, you’d be mistaken! In terms of how contested the games are, the 40 games between top eight sides throughout the 2026 Home & Away season (sorry, Collingwood and Carlton fans, you’re not in this club) much more closely resembled regular Home & Away games than finals. This is the first piece of evidence for a hypothesis I’ll develop throughout the piece.

The question which comes immediately to mind is what’s driving the increased share of contested possessions? Do sides in finals footy win more contested possessions, or fewer uncontested possessions? Turns out, it’s both!

Across the reference period, finals games featured 10.98 more contested possessions than Home & Away games and 39.04 fewer uncontested possessions* (refer to the explanatory note at the bottom of the graph).

Part of the reason finals games feature more contested possessions and fewer uncontested possessions is because they have more stoppages. The chart below tracks the number of ruck contests (a very good proxy for stoppages) across finals and Home & Away games.

Again, the trend is clear: the 45 finals games between 2021 and 2025 featured an average of 8.9 more ruck contests than Home & Away games over the same period. Interestingly, this is one of the graphs where you can most clearly see differences across seasons in addition to the differences between finals and non-finals. The AFL’s suite of rule changes, designed to speed up the game and reduce congestion, have worked in at least one narrow way: there were almost 20 fewer ruck contests per game in the 2026 Home & Away season than during last year’s finals series.

Let’s sum up what we’ve found so far. Across the reference period, finals games have fewer disposals (28 on average), fewer marks (14.3), more contested possessions (10.98), fewer uncontested possessions (39.04) and more ruck contests (8.9). In practice, that accords very closely with the stereotypical picture of finals footy: it’s tough, congested, and space is at a premium. Does this mean we should accord greater value to some player archetypes – say, inside midfielders – over others in finals? Not necessarily. The fact that it’s harder to get to the outside in finals doesn’t reduce the value of uncontested ball. If anything, as it becomes more scarce, it becomes more valuable. Let’s move to the next layer.

Finals footy is more chaotic

We’ve established that finals footy is significantly more contested than Home & Away games and spoken briefly about how that manifests. The next layer to excavate is how it affects the way sides use the ball.

The first chart in this section isn’t strictly about ball use, but it explains a lot about why disposal changes so much under the September glare. Champion Data’s Daniel Hoyne has, through his now-regular media appearances, done a lot to popularise the idea – at least among a specific nerdy cohort – of the ratio of ground ball gets to marks acting as a proxy for a game’s (or team’s) “control” or “chaos” profile. The basic idea is simple: if a game has more ground ball gets than marks (i.e. the ratio is greater than 1), then you’ve got yourself some chaos going. If there are more marks, there is more control. Carlton’s mid-season change of coach, from Michael Voss’s bash and crash chaos to Josh Fraser’s more measured control method, is a practical example of the differences.

Unsurprisingly, given what we’ve already discovered, finals games are significantly more chaotic than Home & Away games. The ratio of ground ball gets to marks is, if you want to get unnecessarily precise about it, about 14% higher in finals (across 2021-2025) than it was for Home & Away games for the corresponding period.

More chaos and less space is the ideal recipe for what’s shown in this next chart: kicks increase as a share of disposals in finals. This finding is perfectly consistent with what we already know: players are more likely to take possession in a contested situation and they’re more likely to actually be under more pressure – there were 8.5 more tackles per game in finals than Home & Away games between 2021-2025 – or to perceive oncoming pressure. Either way, the footy in September is a hot potato, and many players are eager to get rid of it.

This chart also shows how the game is evolving across seasons: kicks have been steadily decreasing as a share of disposals since 2024, as the game has become faster and less contested.

As with the chart that shows the shift in contested possession share in finals, it’s important to understand what’s actually driving this. There, it was both: more contested possessions and fewer uncontested possessions (with fewer possessions/disposals overall). Here, it’s overwhelmingly one over the other. Kicks increase as a share of disposals in finals mostly because players put the handball away.

The logic here is easy enough to understand. There’s less space to execute elaborate handball chains. But there’s something psychological at play here, too. As space becomes compressed, the risk/reward ratio inverts: players stop thinking about the opportunity value of handballs and think more – and are presumably instructed to think more – about the risk value of turning the ball over. A hacked kick forward might also result in a turnover, but at least you’ll have gained 40 metres of territory and a few more seconds to set up behind the ball.

The logical next step is that, as kicks become more frequent in finals, they also become longer. This chart shows the trend.

For the five Home & Away seasons between 2021 and 2025, kicks gained an average of 26.12 metres. In finals, that increased to 27.30. Slight, but real: more distance, more territory taken, more safety.

This next chart has the honour of being the first whose findings have surprised me. Anyone who’s watched enough footy and consumed enough analysis of it could have anticipated most of the findings so far: finals footy is more contested, more chaotic, and more territory-driven. But I hadn’t necessarily anticipated that handballs, as with kicks, would seek to gain more territory in finals.

This feels like a modest challenge to conventional wisdom: if there are fewer handballs in finals because a) there’s less space to execute them; and b) the cost:benefit ratio of risking a turnover to a (presumably) more dangerous opposition doesn’t add up, then why are handballs in finals longer? The territory gain is negligible – barely a metre – and surely the risk of turning the ball over increases with handball length? Maybe there are other things going on that the data doesn’t fully capture: a greater share of handballs to open space, or to neutral contests, or (the least likely theory) looser spacing between players. I’m not totally sure what the answer is. If you have a theory, I’d love to hear it.

It’s worth also noting that this is another chart where you can clearly see the effect of a shifting meta in how the game is being played: handballs have been gaining more territory since at least 2021.

Because they tend to be tight and contested, and players, on the margin, are more likely to opt for territory with their disposals, finals feature more turnovers. But the absolute difference isn’t as great as you might think. To get a true sense of how much more common turnovers are in finals, we need to look at disposals per turnover.

Between 2021-2025, Home & Away games averaged 5.38 disposals per turnover. In finals, that number drops to 5.05. That’s a function of nerves, occasion, and opposition quality. A watch for this finals series: chain length, as measured by disposals per turnover, has been trending up since 2024. A flash in the pan or the Brisbane effect? This September will tell us more.

We’ve established that finals are more contested and chaotic. We’ve established that that chaos causes players to kick more, kick longer, handball less (much less) and handball it longer. There’s one more piece of the puzzle I’d like to explore: how do patterns of scoring change in finals?

Finals footy rewards ground level scoring

We’ve learnt a lot already about how September footy is different to the Home & Away season. Most of it has confirmed rather than challenged our priors. What about how scoring shifts?

The first thing worth noting is that there’s basically no difference in scoring in Home & Away games compared to finals. Because each finals series consists of only nine games (11 this year if you include the Wildcard games), the numbers tend to jump around from year-to-year, but zoom out far enough and the absence of any real trend – except for, perhaps, the increase in scoring this season – is clear.

However, this masks some significant changes in the composition of scoring. As the below chart shows, scores from stoppage win chains tend to increase in September, while scores from turnover decline.

Scores from turnover typically account for between 55-60% of all scores in games. That share drops in finals. In last year’s finals series, there were almost more total points scored from stoppage chains than turnover chains.

These aren’t huge absolute shifts, but they reinforce what we’ve already seen: while finals average about four more total turnovers, that increase is dwarfed by the increase in total stoppages. It’s also not a coincidence that one of the strongest indicators of finals performance is the ability to defend turnover. The sides which fare best at that tend to go deep.

The next question to ask is what happens to scoring based on the location of where the scoring chain began? In layman’s terms: how do scores from the back half, forward half, and centre bounce change in September?

Again, the logic here is easy to grasp: if it’s harder to put together long, uninterrupted chains of possession, then it stands to reason that a greater share of scores in finals will come from chains which begin in a team’s front half – i.e. closer to goal.

If time and space are at a greater premium in finals games, then it logically follows that key forwards would contribute a smaller share of scores in September. That’s precisely what the data shows.

During the Home & Away season, key forwards (the big beasts like Riley Thilthorpe and the slightly smaller types like Logan Morris) kick about as many goals as general forwards (a broad descriptor which covers both medium forwards like Ben Keays and genuine smalls like Nick Watson). But that changes in September. Deprived of as much space to lead into, key forwards can’t generate as many scores. The smaller operators, meanwhile, tend to feast. To repeat something I’ve said before in this piece, however; that shouldn’t diminish our perception of the value of the work done by key forwards in finals. It’s just traditionally harder for them to dominate. The best still find a way.

The final chart in this piece shows how the share of goals kicked from set shots vs. open play shifts between the Home & Away season and finals.

Once again, the numbers are both fairly clear and not exactly surprising: with less space and time on offer, set shots become a less viable means of kicking scores. That’s because of what happens upfield, not because of a decline in accuracy. Set shots are mostly (but not always) the product of marks inside 50. They’re harder to come by in September when packs are bigger, defensive structures are more organised, and leading lanes are closed off.

What does it all mean?

These findings carry a small caveat – between 2000 and 2025, finals series were only nine games long. Each carried significant meaning, but that’s a small sample size to reason from. Of course, most of the events I’ve looked at – disposals, turnovers, scores, etc – happen dozens or even hundreds of times per game, which makes me confident that the numbers are robust. But it’s still worth keeping in mind.

There are also hunches I wanted to verify but couldn’t, at least this time around. Some event types, like marks on the lead, require a knowledge of R I don’t have. Other hunches I have, like a higher share of goals coming from contested marks, or player ratings exhibiting a higher standard deviation (greater distance between observations) in finals, I just couldn’t fit into a piece that’s already long enough.

Have I spent 2,500 words empirically verifying what every keen footy fan already knew – that finals are tougher, scrappier, and more contested than Home & Away games where the stakes are lower and opposition defences are slacker? Pretty much. There isn’t much here that genuinely surprised me. If anything, it’s the magnitude of some of the differences (total disposals, share of points from stoppages/turnovers, to cite two examples) surprised me more. One exception is that the numbers, at least based on the 40-game sample size from this season, suggest that Home & Away games between top-eight sides are more like other Home & Away games than they are like finals. I guess you just can’t fake pressure and stakes.

Ultimately, though, I still think this was a worthwhile exercise. Finals footy isn’t really about generating more of anything. It’s about suppressing the low-risk, high-volume actions (uncontested possessions, handball chains) under pressure, while the higher-value/lower-risk actions (contested possessions, kicks) hold roughly steady. That’s what happens when one wrong move could spell the end of your season. Nerves jangle, heroes are made, and reputations are forged. That’s September. May the best team win.

In addition to restarting paid subscriptions, I’ve also created a “Buy Me a Coffee” page so you can show your support for One Percenters with a one-off (or recurring) donation. Here’s the link.

New episodes of 110 Percenters are published here. You can also find us wherever you get your podcasts, including:

• Apple Podcasts

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• Pocket Casts

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Listener feedback will be key to making us better, so if you took the time to listen, please also consider taking the time to rate and review the show.

I’ve put links to Cody and Jonathan’s writing after the jump. Their work is the best in the business. I’ve also added a link to now-delisted Collingwood ruck Iliro Smit’s amazing website. We hardly knew ye.

Links:

• Read Cody’s work here

• Read Jonathan’s work here

• Big Roo – The New Breed Ruckman

New episodes of 110 Percenters are published here. You can also find us wherever you get your podcasts, including:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocket Casts

• YouTube Podcasts

Listener feedback will be key to making us better, so if you took the time to listen, please also consider taking the time to rate and review the show.

I’ve put links to Cody and Jonathan’s writing after the jump. Their work is the best in the business.

Links:

• Read Cody’s work here

• Read Jonathan’s work here

New episodes of 110 Percenters are published here. You can also find us wherever you get your podcasts, including:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocket Casts

• YouTube Podcasts

Listener feedback will be key to making us better, so if you took the time to listen, please also consider taking the time to rate and review the show.

I’ve put links to Cody and Jonathan’s writing after the jump. Their work is the best in the business.

Links:

• Read Cody’s work here

• Read Jonathan’s work here

New episodes of 110 Percenters are published here. You can also find us wherever you get your podcasts, including:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocket Casts

• YouTube Podcasts

Listener feedback will be key to making us better, so if you took the time to listen, please also consider taking the time to rate and review the show.

I’ve put links to Cody and Jonathan’s writing after the jump. Their work is the best in the business.

Links:

• Read Cody’s work here

• Read Jonathan’s work here

Last Saturday’s inaugural international AFLW game, between Australia and Ireland, illustrated just how far women’s footy has come in the nine and a half years since that balmy February night when supporters had to be turned away from Ikon Park before Carlton and Collingwood crossed swords. Saturday was electrifying. The Aussies burst from stoppages while the Irish unfurled elaborate running handball chains. Tahlia Randall slotted a snap on the run from 30 metres. Niamh McLaughlin, the first Irish-born captain of an AFLW club, fashioned an outrageous instinctive goal from the top of the square. Although Australia eventually proved far too strong, the 9,000 fans in attendance didn’t particularly seem to care. They were more interested in celebrating Irish contributions to women’s footy and the growth of the game. Behind the justified cheer, however, one could still discern some of the issues that have contributed to the sense that, on the eve of the 11th AFLW season, it still isn’t quite what it could be: ambivalence about the choice of venue, doubt about the sincerity of AFL House’s promotion of the game, uncertainty, in other words, less about the overall direction of travel than the league’s urgency to arrive at the destination most believe it can.

Unsurprisingly, several of Saturday’s best individual performances were delivered by women who, during the AFLW season, wear the blue and white stripes of North Melbourne. AFLW has had dynasties before, but none so dominant. Since a three-goal defeat to arch-rivals Brisbane in the 2023 Grand Final, the Kangaroos have gone 29 games unbeaten, a streak which includes 27 consecutive wins. It is a formidable record. My interview with Gemma Bastiani, writer for the AFL website, commentator for the ABC, and co-host of the W Daily podcast (so many hats!), therefore began in probably the only place a conversation about the upcoming season could: will anyone lay a glove on the champs?

“I don’t think they’ll go through the season undefeated again,” Gemma began. “Melbourne showed in last year’s prelim [Mateo: very possibly the best game of women’s footy ever played] how to beat them tactically. It’s just about doing it for long enough. I still think they win the flag, and they’re the most dominant team in the competition, but I don’t think the winning streak survives the home-and-away season.” In any elite sporting competition with an ultra-dominant side, the meta converges on finding ways to erode their superiority. You can see it in the men’s competition, where opposition coaches have designed defensive spacing and pressing schemes to disrupt Brisbane’s kick-mark game. It’s a sign of North’s dominance that predicting even a single defeat feels like a mildly hot take. But it does feel as though a blueprint to beat them – keeping them in the inside layer, denying them clean handball exits from contest – exists where perhaps it previously didn’t.

Crucially, that blueprint has been drafted and will eventually be executed by coaches that regard the AFLW as their primary vocation. In the AFLW’s early years, it felt like most coaches had either served a long apprenticeship in the VFLW and other state leagues, or were using the fledgling women’s competition as something of a stepping stone into men’s coaching. A decade in, there’s a distinct third category – coaches who understand that women’s footy is different, and appreciate those differences.

“A big part of that,” Gemma said, “is understanding the differences W actually brings. Dan Lowther [former Geelong AFLW coach] told me this about two years ago: the moment it clicked for him was realising you can’t just run the men’s game plan with women players. One, there are only 16 on the field instead of 18. There are fewer links in the chain. Two, biomechanically, the kicks are shorter and the ball is smaller, so it doesn’t travel through the air as well, so it takes more disposals and more possessions to move the ball up the ground. The moment they laid that out and understood it, everything changed in the way they moved the ball out of the back half.” Perhaps it sounds obvious in hindsight. But the differences are real: if you scale AFLW up to the length of the men’s game, there are about 20-30 more disposals per game, and two fewer metres gained per disposal. It’s not hard to see how a coach schooled in the ruleset of men’s footy might need some time to adjust their priors about what works. But in the likes of Lowther, Mick Stinear – who coached Melbourne in that epic 2025 prelim before decamping to Geelong’s AFLW side – and, of course, Darren Crocker, you can see coaches who’ve developed game plans which are well-suited for different constraints.

Beyond the basic mission of chasing down North, I was interested in understanding what Gemma saw as the main tactical themes of the upcoming season. “The big growth area in W over the last couple of years,” she said, “and something North Melbourne does exceptionally well, which is why everyone’s chasing it, is clean handball receive out of a contest. Ash Riddell is very good at it, but the league-wide challenge is finding more players who can do that. It lets you release better and get players on the run.” Gemma identified contested marking as the other one. Both strike me as attempted solutions to the same basic problem: the highly fragmented nature of the women’s game. There are fewer disposals per turnover in the AFLW compared to the AFL (3.9 to 5.6 when comparing the respective 2025 seasons). North is the best side in women’s footy at keeping the ball yet still turn it over more often, measured by number of disposals, than West Coast, the most profligate men’s side. “North Melbourne have both of those things in spades: clean handball at the contest through players like Riddell, Garner, and Ruby Tripodi, and reliable long targets like Tahlia Randall and Emma King. Having both is huge.” If you’re interested in reading more about what makes North’s AFLW side so good, Gemma’s piece in the ABC from last October is the best place to start.

Because we both have eyes, Gemma and I agreed that North will remain the benchmark in 2026. But what about other potential risers and sinkers? We’re both bullish on West Coast’s prospects this season. The Eagles made the finals for the first time in 2025. Daisy Pearce has made an impressive start to life as a senior coach while Ella Roberts has emerged as one of the stars of the league. While it’s true that their maiden finals campaign didn’t go to plan – the Eagles were smashed by Carlton in their elimination final – Gemma is confident the group has more room to grow. “Their biggest weakness is playing in the wet,” she said. “As a tall, aerial team, that changes everything for them – but they’ve actively recruited over the off-season to fix it.” In addition to acquiring three players in trades (including WA local Ella Slocombe from North), the Eagles drafted inside midfielder Mia Russo and Victorian forward Jovie Skewes-Clinton. Gemma doesn’t hesitate to name Skewes-Clinton as one of the new draftees she’s most excited to see in action. “I think she’s a real dark horse for impact this year. She can play literally anywhere on the ground. West Coast are very bullish on her, and she fits exactly what they want: flexible, tall players who can take a mark but also do damage on the ground. It’s just about finding where she can settle in her first year, because being a utility as a rookie can be disconcerting if you’re thrown everywhere. If they can bed her into one position this year and build from there, she’ll be really good.”

Unfortunately for this Adelaide-supporting writer, the Crows loom as the most obvious candidates for a decline. In truth, the decline had already started: Adelaide finished sixth on the ladder in 2025, its lowest-ever position in a complete AFLW season. The Crows have been knocked out of the finals by Brisbane and Melbourne in the last two seasons, and haven’t beaten North since 2023. Last season saw significant turnover. There’s a new coach (Ryan Davis), a new head of football, a new list manager, and Chelsea Randall and Anne Hatchard departed the club (the former forced into retirement due to persistent concussion issues). The club has acknowledged it is exiting one era of its women’s program and entering another. Gemma sees reasons for optimism. “I don’t think it’s the worst thing in the world for the Crows to take a step back. They had fallen behind the very best sides, so it’s time to replenish through the draft. There’s always good South Australian talent in the draft so I think they’ll bounce back pretty quickly.”

List management is precisely the topic I wanted to turn to next. Casual fans may have missed the news that AFLW players can now sign beyond the expiration of the current collective bargaining agreement in 2027. I ask Gemma if that’s shifting how clubs operate. “I think it already has,” Gemma began. “Eden Zanker signed with Fremantle until the end of 2029. You don’t get a player like her to move states without that kind of long-term commitment. It gives struggling clubs the ability to lure important players, but it also helps young clubs trying to find continuity.” The stability that signing players long-term helps to promote can create a virtuous cycle where it becomes easier to entice other players to join because the future looks clearer. It also gives clubs more ways to express confidence in a player long-term, with all the downstream effects that has on professionalism, not to mention the significant effects it can have on a player’s personal life. It’d be much easier to get pre-approval for a mortgage when you can show the bank a multi-year playing contract.

The next step in the professionalisation of the AFLW is the introduction, most likely in 2027, of a salary cap. Women’s footy is also being recognised within the league executive for the first time, with Laura Kane taking on the newly created role of Executive General Manager of AFLW, Health and Football Operations. It’s a slightly awkward one to spin given Kane’s redeployment was widely regarded as a de facto demotion when it was announced last year, but the silver lining is the new focus on the AFLW. I asked Gemma if those two announcements – particularly the coming salary cap – changed her beliefs about how seriously the league is treating the AFLW. “I think the cap is a realisation that the tiered pay model doesn’t work for what are increasingly full-time athletes,” Gemma said. “The old model works fine if you’re only asking players to train and perform for six months of the year, but for a year-round program, players need more negotiating power. There will probably be growing pains, because a lot of AFLW list managers have never worked with a salary cap before. I’d hope and expect the men’s list managers to lend a hand in setting those structures up, because we have a lot of list managers who are excellent at talent ID but have never had to operate outside of that.” That last point is a fascinating one. Today’s AFLW list managers are more likely to have cut their teeth as scouts and recruiters (if they didn’t come from the AFL) because list management didn’t really exist as a full-time occupation in women’s footy until a decade ago. AFL list management, as “Alex” attested in my piece from May, is a discipline with deep organisational norms. There is lots of wisdom to share.

One thing AFLW list managers must constantly be alert for is the requirement to absorb the loss of a player to a serious knee injury. It’s well-established in the medical literature that female athletes are more predisposed to ACL tears than their male counterparts. It has been estimated that ACL tears are approximately two to eight times more common in female athletes compared to their male counterparts in the same sport. In her piece on the subject from last month, the ABC’s Marnie Vinall estimated that, as of the end of last season, at least 15 AFLW players were recuperating from knee reconstruction surgery. The epidemic shows no obvious signs of slowing – the pre-season feels like it’s brought news of a fresh ACL injury almost every day. I asked Gemma if it felt especially bad this year, and how it was disrupting clubs’ planning. She was surprisingly sanguine. “There’s been a different pre-season structure this year,” Gemma said. “Some clubs have played up to six pre-season hit-outs, where previously the maximum was two. Typically the first two or three weeks of a season are when we see a spike in ACL injuries in the W, and then it fades away. So it could be that those injuries are being brought forward and happening in pre-season rather than in the early rounds. Obviously that’s not great, but means clubs can replace injured players before the season starts instead of being stuck with a smaller list for the rest of the year.” A club losing a player to an ACL injury is a blow both to club and player, but in 2026 it might be one that’s easier to absorb.

One part of Gemma’s answer I omitted was a reference to the AFLW soft cap – the share of a club’s budget that can be spent on coaching, administration, and support staff. It wasn’t the first time she mentioned the soft cap. So I bit, and asked if raising the soft cap would be the first thing she would change to improve the AFLW. Her response was adamant. “The limitations of the soft cap are the single biggest issue in the W right now,” Gemma began, “because it’s the root of so many other problems. Until it’s bigger, you can’t have bigger list sizes. Until it’s bigger, you can’t have your full staff available across pre-season. Until it’s bigger, you can’t have more than one doctor. I think the first step isn’t necessarily raising the cap itself – it’s introducing a mandated minimum spend on the women’s soft cap, the way there is in the men’s game. Money can flow from the men’s soft cap into the women’s, but not the other way, and very few clubs actually use that mechanism. There isn’t enough pressure on clubs to prioritise the women’s program.”

An honest disclosure, reader: I didn’t know AFLW clubs didn’t have a soft cap floor they had to hit. I suppose I can see the logic given the league’s priority in the last half-decade was on expansion, and it presumably wanted to set the bar to entry at a manageable height to ensure congruency of one AFLW side for each AFL side. But – and this goes right to the heart of the expansion vs. consolidation debate which is so prevalent in today’s AFLW – it’s also not a stretch to suggest that not setting a floor has acted as a handbrake on the tactical development and professionalisation of the competition. It’s easier to trust that a competition is worth supporting if you believe that every team is taking it seriously. Viewed this way, the soft cap begins to look like something of a master key for the AFLW: more money, better standards, better product, more interest, perhaps even a bespoke broadcast rights deal. But hey – I’m not in charge of anything.

Gemma and I spoke a few days before the Australia-Ireland game. She didn’t necessarily disagree that North Sydney Oval was the best choice of venue – and posterity will show that it produced an exciting game with a great atmosphere – but she didn’t love the process by which the venue was decided. “I sympathise with the position the league was in,” Gemma said. “But they built the situation where those were the only two options. If they’d played the game in Melbourne, they could have put it at Ikon Park and drawn 14,000 people, and made a much better spectacle of it. I don’t think North Sydney Oval is a good enough ground for professional football. It’s too small, and I don’t think it produces an attractive style of football. It might be high-scoring, but that’s only because it’s stoppage-kick, stoppage-kick, over and over. I did a breakdown a while back on ground size versus style of play, and North Sydney Oval has the second-highest average score in the competition but also the highest rate of stoppages. If congestion is the actual problem, that’s not the answer. I don’t want it at the SCG either, because I think the atmosphere there will be flat and it’ll look bad on TV. But the AFL created a situation where both remaining options were wrong.”

I feel like that last sentence could be applied to many of the league’s decisions. For what it’s worth, I thought North Sydney Oval was a better option than the SCG. It would have looked strange hosting a marquee game, a game pitched as a celebration, at a mostly empty stadium. And besides, while I appreciate that this is in slight tension with the AFLW’s self-professed desire to professionalise, I believe the suburban character of women’s footy is one of its most valuable assets. It is part of why the AFLW often feels so much more inviting and approachable, especially for young families, than the men’s competition. Being able to take your mum or dad, who remembers when men’s footy games were played at places like Moorabbin, to an AFLW game, is an underrated drawcard. Gemma agreed, with one caveat: “I think we should be consolidating around a handful of good venues,” she said. “Let’s get it down to four Victorian venues – GMHBA, Ikon Park, RSEA, and Whitten Oval. Get rid of Victoria Park entirely; the toilets are disgusting, the ground and rooms are awful, nobody enjoys watching football there. People do enjoy Ikon Park.”

The natural arc of my conversation with Gemma was from in to out – from the immediate to the existential. So it felt right to end our conversation by asking her to imagine travelling a decade back in time, to before the AFLW began, and informing her younger self about the progress that a decade had brought. Would 2016 Gemma be happy? “I think we have to remember that 10 years isn’t that long a time,” she said. We’ve come a long way in a short period. But the things we’ve moved quickly on aren’t necessarily the things we should have prioritised first. Player welfare and the actual state of the game should have come before expansion. I understand the logic of expanding; I follow a club that was part of the final wave of expansion, and there’s a real appeal to having all 18 clubs involved. But prioritising trying to get men’s fans on board over prioritising the women’s fanbase we already had has set the competition back in ways that are still playing out. The AFL’s whole framing has been ‘we need men’s fans to watch women’s football’ – but in chasing that, they’ve ended up highlighting everything men’s fans already dislike about football, instead of just getting them to actually support their own club’s team. I don’t know how effective that’s been, and I think not having a clear plan across those ten years has been a real problem.”

There’s a lot to unpack in this answer. There’s pride and satisfaction. And there should be. The rise in the standard of the game has been considerable. Dynasties have been forged and dynasties have been toppled. One side currently bestrides the rest, which has accelerated tactical evolution while also creating concerns about the short-term competitiveness that feels so essential to maintaining casual supporter interest. But there’s also some regret and perhaps even some anger. In a small way, I’m part of the problem Gemma describes. The 2019 Grand Final is one of my favourite footy moments – one of my favourite sporting moments, full stop – of the last decade. But, despite now living within walking distance of Ikon Park, my engagement and attendance has waned as the Crows have faded into the AFLW peloton. One of the risks of trying to appeal so much to men’s fans, one that I’m not convinced AFL House has adequately priced in, is that by September – or even August, in many cases – people are quite sick of footy. The men’s season consumes so much emotional bandwidth that, even acknowledging that they are different sports with different stakes and different storylines, it’s normal to want a sabbatical from people kicking an oval ball around for a while. And by the time the hunger to watch returns, the AFLW season is close to being over. It’s not a simple problem to solve. But Gemma and I agree that the AFLW could be promoting itself much more effectively.

“There’s no marketing built around how strategically the game has evolved, how close the contests are, or how genuinely fun they are to watch,” Gemma said. I suppose that a critic would say that of course people like Gemma and I – unreconstructed footy nerds – would think this way. We would lament that much of the marketing for the AFLW feels… fluffy. But there’s a real dilemma here: trying to appeal to traditional footy fans, most of whom are men, by simultaneously pitching that it’s a serious, innovative competition and one that’s fun, while also striking the delicate balance between attracting new fans and appeasing the ones who were there before there was ever an AFLW to support.

“I think there’s a middle ground here,” said Gemma. “Not every footy fan is going to love what I do or find the same things interesting that I do, and that’s the benefit of having a range of voices covering it: people who can push the lighter side, and people like us pushing the football itself, and finding a balance between the two. I don’t think we’ve ever struck that balance, and I don’t think the people in positions of power across the media and the AFL are being encouraged to find it. It feels like the men’s game is actually swinging back the other way – using tactical analysts doing proper film breakdowns and livestreams – but the women’s game has never really had the other side to swing back to in the first place. I’d like to see players, teams and coaches seen as athletes and tacticians and strategists, and at no point in this competition’s history has that really been encouraged. People can care about tactics and about a player’s TikTok videos. Both things can be true. That’s the gripe I’ve been banging my head against for my whole career in this industry. But I’m genuinely grateful for W – it’s my favourite thing in the world, and all I want is to help it grow. I think we could be doing a better job of that.”

The AFLW’s footprint is growing. The chart below shows the trajectory of total attendance at games. The main driver of this is that there are a lot more games these days. There were 117 games in last year’s AFLW season, compared to just 29 in the inaugural season.

How one chooses to interpret these numbers is probably related to one’s overall disposition about the trajectory of the league. The pessimistic view is that per-game attendance last season was 60% down from the inaugural season. Each game feels like less of an event. The optimistic argument is to flip that: each game feels like less of a special event – and that’s good. This is what it looks like when a league is establishing itself as a normal part of the sporting landscape.

Expansion is a very difficult plane to land. Smart people involved with the AFLW can and do disagree about the league’s choice to expand to 18 clubs for the second 2022 season. Gemma herself acknowledged her ambivalence while happily admitting that the club she supports was part of the final tranche of expansion. From the league’s perspective, expanding was about taking one or two steps backwards – wearing lower per-game crowd numbers, and recognising that it would take years for some of the new clubs to become competitive – to ultimately take many steps forwards. Caring about women’s footy because it’s a trendy or progressive thing to do is one thing. But I’m not sure that lasts. Having a club to support – even when it means developing hostility to other clubs – is what keeps fans invested. Rivalries and the bonds they forge matter.

While putting this piece together, I eventually realised that one of the strongest emotions Gemma and other passionate AFLW fans like her are expressing is impatience – excited impatience that the footy is getting better and the stars are shining brighter every year, and frustrated impatience that not everyone (including – perhaps – the AFL itself) sees what they see. It will take a long time for the AFLW to create emotional bonds as durable as those which bind AFL fans, because it took decades for the AFL to create them in the first place. But, as Gemma rightly pointed out, incredible amounts of progress have already been made. “The AFLW began as an extension of what the state leagues were,” she said. “Coaches and players were focused on winning the ball in the contest, getting it forward, grinding out territory. That’s still what VFLW football is, what state league football is. But AFLW has progressed past that into something more nuanced – and the turnover we’ve seen in coaching and heads of football is actually a sign of how fast the league is growing and learning. We’re so desperate for the league to already be what the men’s competition is – but the men’s game has been going for over a hundred years, and we’ve been going for 10. That’s an incredibly small sample of what we could still become.”

For much of the first decade of its life, it felt like the people in charge of promoting the AFLW spent too much time emphasising its similarities to men’s footy and not enough time celebrating its differences. Perhaps that’ll change with the AFL’s recent executive restructure. It’s OK to feel cautiously optimistic about the impending changes to how the AFLW is run. Yes, there are concerns. There always are. The league is a long way from commercial independence. Players want longer seasons. But 10 years in, they feel like footnotes to the real story. The standard of play has never been higher. Players and coaches have never been more committed. Girls around Australia have a new cast of heroes to cheer on and imagine themselves one day becoming. And, beyond it all, the AFLW offers something that the AFL feels increasingly disconnected from: the chance to watch footy on a suburban ground, with your mates and their kids, while bathing in the spring sunshine.

In addition to restarting paid subscriptions, I’ve also created a “Buy Me a Coffee” page so you can show your support for One Percenters with a one-off (or recurring) donation. Here’s the link.

New episodes of 110 Percenters are published here. You can also find us wherever you get your podcasts, including:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocket Casts

• YouTube Podcasts

Listener feedback will be key to making us better, so if you took the time to listen, please also consider taking the time to rate and review the show.

I’ve put links to Cody and Jonathan’s writing after the jump. Their work is the best in the business.

Links:

• Read Cody’s work here

• Read Jonathan’s work here

You won’t find more inspiring footy stories than Sam Docherty’s. He came back from three ACL tears and two bouts of cancer to forge an outstanding AFL career and captain his boyhood Blues. His goal in his comeback game in Round 1, 2022, raised hairs on the back of the neck. Today, he’s a rising star in footy media.

Docherty has captured the many highlights (and lowlights) of his career in a new book, What it Takes, written in conjunction with the excellent Konrad Marshall.

Cody, Jonathan and I were lucky enough to speak at length with Sam about his career, getting drafted, coding his own games, how the game has changed, and what’s next.

Apologies for the mild audio issues on this one. We did our best.

New episodes of 110 Percenters are published here. You can also find us wherever you get your podcasts, including:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocket Casts

• YouTube Podcasts

Listener feedback will be key to making us better, so if you took the time to listen, please also consider taking the time to rate and review the show.

What it Takes by Sam Docherty with Konrad Marshall is published by Simon & Schuster. It’s in stores now.

We all agreed we’d try for a concise 60 minute pod and, inevitably, totally failed! It’s another long one this week.

New episodes of 110 Percenters are published here. You can also find us wherever you get your podcasts, including:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocket Casts

• YouTube Podcasts

Listener feedback will be key to making us better, so if you took the time to listen, please also consider taking the time to rate and review the show.

I’ve put links to Cody and Jonathan’s writing after the jump. Their work is the best in the business.

Links:

• Read Cody’s work here

• Read Jonathan’s work here

To celebrate our 10th episode, we invited a guest onto the pod! Marnie Vinall is a journo for the ABC who writes about the AFLW and diversity and inclusion at all levels of the game. It was a real pleasure having her on.

The four of us chatted – a lot, it was another long episode! – about Ken Hinkley’s appointment as Tasmania’s inaugural AFL coach, the opportunity cost of Essendon’s incredible upset win over the Giants, the progress that’s been made and is still yet to be made when it comes to making footy a welcoming environment for everyone, and about the upcoming AFLW season.

New episodes of 110 Percenters are published here. You can also find us wherever you get your podcasts, including:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocket Casts

• YouTube Podcasts

Listener feedback will be key to making us better, so if you took the time to listen, please also consider taking the time to rate and review the show.

I’ve put links to Cody, Jonathan, and Marnie’s writing after the jump. Their work is the best in the business. I’ve also added a link to friend of the pod Mim Birch’s great piece about Patrick Voss, and other friend of the pod SgtButane’s brilliant Footy Redraft game (not recommended if you have important things to do with your time!).

Links:

• Read Cody’s work here

• Read Jonathan’s work here

• Read Marnie’s work here

• In Defence of Patrick Voss (Mim’s Substack)

• Footy Redraft

Social preview image courtesy of Reddit.

The Crows have played 149 games since the 2020 AFL season returned from its three-month Covid hiatus. Ben Keays has played in all 149. This Thursday night, he will run out – with his characteristically upright bearing – for his 150th consecutive game and 150th in red, yellow, and blue. It is one of footy’s most satisfying redemption stories, a triumph of guts, grit, and perseverance. It is also, for those same reasons, a story rich in lessons for rebuilding clubs.

The world’s most Brisbane-coded man was born in Melbourne. At an opportune time, it turns out, because it coincided with his beloved Lions making frequent trips there on the last Saturday in September. Ben was four when the Lions broke the drought in 2001 and cried all the way home when Port Adelaide denied them a historic fourpeat three years later. By then, the Keays family had moved to Brisbane. Ben took the only path available to a talented junior footy player at the time: he joined the Lions’ Academy. It was there he established himself as one of the most promising midfielders in the 2015 draft pool. In his draft year, Keays captained Queensland to the Under-18s title, averaging nearly 29 disposals in the process. The strengths and weaknesses recruiters identified then are still present today, 11 years on: Keays knows how to find the footy but doesn’t always capitalise when he does. He runs all day but rarely at a speed that makes opponents nervous. Despite that, he was then, and is now, as honest as the day is long. Keays was selected with Pick 24 in the 2015 draft. It was a dream come true for the boy who lived just down the road from the Gabba.

But dreams don’t always come true. Keays was delisted after four seasons. His last two years on the Lions’ list yielded just four games. It was a typical story: he was edged out by better midfielders. Lachie Neale’s hands were cleaner. Hugh McCluggage’s kicking was more penetrative. Jarryd Lyons and Jarrod Berry ran just as hard. After years of toil, the Lions were finally climbing out of the footy basement. Keays wasn’t quite quick enough or slick enough to go where they were going.

Getting delisted by the club you’ve loved since you were old enough to love must be close to the worst feeling in the world. If something that devastating happened to me, I’d probably just stare at the ceiling for months. But Keays was made of sterner stuff. Instead of lamenting what might have been, he nominated for footy’s last chance saloon: the Rookie Draft. He was selected with the seventh pick, right after Fremantle selected Jarvis Pina (I confess I’m unfamiliar) and immediately prior to Port’s selection of Jake Pasini.

It’s very important to understand the condition of the ship attached to the life preserver Keays caught. The Crows were at their lowest-ever ebb. The tripartite trauma of the murder of former coach Phil Walsh, the 2017 Grand Final defeat, and the debacle of the Collective Minds camp – which Mitch McGovern called a cult in a recent podcast interview – had created a maelstrom which enveloped the club and came close to destroying it. Staff were sacked. Players couldn’t leave quickly enough. The best team in footy for all but one week of 2017 became the worst environment off-field, and one of the worst sides on-field, in two years – brought low by hubris and a fundamental misunderstanding of why the Grand Final went the way it did. It’s not a contest. All rebuilding sides are in bad shape. But the Crows were in uniquely bad shape because, as the Collective Minds camp demonstrated, the entire club – not just the list – was in need of serious reform.

Ben Keays left a rising club and, because he had no other choice, joined a shattered one. His job was to help piece it back together, step by step. He approached his task with the fidelity and dedication of a bright-eyed private. In Keays’ third game for Adelaide, he attended 90% of centre bounces. Only Matt Crouch and Reilly O’Brien who attended more across the entire season. 2020 was a very bad season for the Crows. They lost their first 13 games on their way to winning their first-ever wooden spoon. The list was desperately short on talent. The best players were Rory Laird, a Taylor Walker who looked ready for the knacker’s yard, and a post-peak Rory Sloane. Despite that, it still felt better than the two preceding years, because it felt like the tentative beginning of a new arc rather than the wretched end of an old one. One Adelaide player apparently said that “the culture was better at 0-13 in 2020 than it was at 13-8 in 2019.”

Keays finished fifth in Adelaide’s best-and-fairest count in his first season at the club. He was also named the winner of the Players’ Trademark Award, given to the player who has “best upheld the core values of the team on and off the field”. A tin pot? Maybe. But it was also recognition of the work Keays was doing, even then, with his own playing career at a precarious point, to maximise his and his team’s potential: showing up early, leaving late, bigging up teammates, busting a gut during games. He was the earliest instantiation of the style and culture Matthew Nicks was brought in to build: hard-working, physical, unglamorous, a pain in the arse to play against.

After Brad Crouch left the Crows after 2020, Keays became part of footy’s blondest, most workmanlike midfield, together with O’Brien, Laird, and Sloane. It wasn’t always pretty. But it got results. Adelaide won as many games in the first month of the 2021 season as in the entirety of the prior season. Keays was in the Crows’ top five-rated players in all four of those games. He recorded seven coaches’ votes in Adelaide’s famous one-point win over Melbourne in Round 10 and finished second in the best-and-fairest, just three votes behind Laird, as Adelaide finished 15th. The Crows weren’t yet a good side, but Keays was playing a leading role in making them a competitive one.

Although the addition of Jordan Dawson and Josh Rachele added some firepower, Adelaide remained a workhorse side in 2022 – a fact exemplified by Laird, Keays, Crouch, and Berry attending the vast majority of centre bounces. But then something really interesting happened. In the Round 20 game against Carlton, Keays didn’t attend a single centre bounce. He didn’t play in the midfield at all. Instead, he was redeployed to half-forward, with a specific brief: bring the same energy, pressure, and unconditional effort to the forward line. With eight minutes remaining in the second quarter, Keays kicked what has become his trademark goal: from the goal square, without an opposition defender in sight. His second was virtually identical. So was his third. That night was the first time Keays had ever kicked three goals in an AFL game. It was, also, fittingly, the beginning of the third act of his career. He’d been a fringe midfielder at his boyhood club. He’d been a culture-builder and standard-setter in the earliest days of a rebuild. Now, just as it looked as though he’d be squeezed out of the midfield rotations, he was asked to evolve.

Like all successful player role changes, Keays’ reassignment to half-forward feels obvious in hindsight. But, although we’ve all become more acquainted with the concept of the “high half-forward” in recent seasons, it didn’t feel obvious that a burly midfielder with weak overhead marking and indifferent disposal would flourish closer to goal. Keays became a very good AFL half-forward because of his athletic and psychological traits. He’s a ferocious tackler who uses his remarkable aerobic power to get to contests, manufacture space, and provide an outlet for teammates. He also understands how precarious life in the AFL is, and chases every lost cause as though his career depends on it. But he’s also become a very good half-forward because Adelaide’s coaching staff correctly recognised the way the game was trending.

As the game has accelerated, and the speed of a side’s ball movement, especially after it affects a turnover, has become increasingly paramount, the attacking half-back has become a potent weapon. But sometimes they turn the ball over. Sometimes they don’t run as quickly back towards their defensive goal as they did towards the goal their side is attacking. In other words, they’re exploitable. And Ben Keays is the perfect player to exploit those lapses in skill and work rate. He is a hard counter to unaccountable half-backs. If you watch the highlights of that first game Keays played as a half-forward, you can occasionally see a forlorn Adam Saad about 10 metres behind him. That’s no coincidence. Keays was asked to stay close to Saad when he had the ball, and to exploit his defensive running when Adelaide won it. Since that night, Keays has become an acid test for opposition transition structures. He will always keep running. Will you?

It’s no coincidence that Keays performs best against the sides which fail that test most often. The three sides he’s kicked the most goals against are Carlton, North Melbourne, and Essendon. Yes, worse sides concede bigger scores. But they also don’t defend with as much discipline. Opposition supporters will frequently lament how their side allowed Keays to kick three or four goals on them. “How was he by himself in the goal square?” is a common complaint. The answer is simple: he wanted it more than his opponents did. It’s possible no one has ever wanted anything more than Ben Keays has wanted to carve out the AFL career he has. The trademark Keays goal, the one he must have kicked 50 times in Crows colours, isn’t a coincidence. It’s him using his attributes to their full effect. And one of his best attributes is his desire. When Keays shuttle runs up and down the field, he’s putting yards between everyone who ever told him he was too slow, or not skilful enough to make it.

Adelaide has become a good side. But, despite having better players to rely on, the Crows are still moulded from the same clay Keays helped to mine in his early days at the club. They win by applying manic pressure and generating volume rather than moving the ball precisely. Their best work is done off the ball. They win when they out-work, out-tackle, and out-compete their opposition. Keays’ role has changed – he has attended just 29 centre bounces since the start of the 2024 season – but he still sets those standards. Because he does, he has come to embody lessons which every rebuilding side should heed, but not all do.

The first is that culture and character matter. The Adelaide Football Club was a deeply unhappy workplace when Keays arrived. He has helped make it a happier and more professional environment, both because he never compromises on his professionalism and because he encourages his teammates to never neglect theirs. Keays appears to be completely earnest at all times. Sometimes that manifests in corny ways. On the “Crows Show”, a magazine program dedicated to club-related light entertainment, Keays hosts a segment where he drives teammates around in a sponsor vehicle and talks to them about their footy journey. His earnestness is also apparent in more serious forms. Keays’ great-grandfather Fred and great-uncle Desmond both served in the Australian army (they also both played for Fitzroy – very likely the origin of Ben’s love for the Lions). Great-grandfather Fred was at Gallipoli and, later, fought on the Western Front. Ben admits that, had footy not worked out, he’d probably have followed the family tradition and served. He has often been involved in the design of Adelaide’s ANZAC Round guernsey. Footy and the army are very different. But the values that footy clubs profess to exhibit are strikingly similar to the ones soldiers talk about: mateship, camaraderie, duty, loyalty, sacrifice. Perhaps you think this is absurd. What is clear is that Ben Keays, and the footy team he’s played 149 games for, do not. He has maximised his own potential, and he’ll be damned if his teammates don’t fulfill theirs.

The second lesson Ben Keays can teach footy clubs is that there’s talent to be found in unlikely places. Supporters, sometimes immediately after claiming there isn’t enough talent to sustain 18 professional clubs, will often lament that their club isn’t scouring the state leagues for moneyball prospects. Keays was one of those prospects. Although he was on Brisbane’s AFL list for four years, he only played four senior games in the last two. He was a force of nature in the NEAFL, recording four goals, 27 disposals, and seven tackles in Brisbane’s reserves premiership in 2019. Adelaide’s recruiters didn’t cover themselves in glory at the 2019 National Draft, but they correctly identified that Keays possessed traits which could translate to AFL level.

Culture and character matter. Leaving no stone unturned for talent matters. So does a player’s psychological make-up. One of the traits which enabled Keays to become a good AFL player is that he never relented in the face of adversity. Remember: he was delisted by the Lions and lost his first 12 games at Adelaide. A less resilient person might have wilted. We know that recruiters and list managers value this. In my recent interview with “Alex”, a current AFL list manager, he discussed the importance of mental strength in player development:

Keays was never quite a blue-chip draft prospect. But he was still taken in the top two-dozen following an illustrious junior career. He must have believed the first four years of his career would pan out differently. Instead of bemoaning what might have been, his response was to master the things within his control. Perhaps Keays will never be the most talented player on a footy field. But he will almost always be one of the most committed.

The fourth and final lesson of Ben Keays is that adaptability matters. After Adelaide spent a few years accumulating midfield talent through the draft and hit the jackpot with the recruitment of Jordan Dawson, Keays’ days as a permanent midfielder were numbered. That late-season game against Carlton was his audition for a different role. Had he not passed with such flying colours, there’s every chance I wouldn’t be writing this piece. Again, the success of his redeployment as a blue-collar half-forward wasn’t anywhere near as inevitable as hindsight makes it seem. As rebuilding sides improve, the guys who were there to set standards in the early days often get squeezed out for more talented players. That’s usually a sign of progress. But the risk is that without those standard-setters, standards, well, decline. It’s a huge credit to Keays, and his coaches, that he has used the attributes he’s always had to adapt to a different role – one that’s almost inarguably a better fit for him and team.

I laughed when I learnt that Adelaide staff presented to the AFL Commission about its rebuild on the day of last year’s Brownlow Medal ceremony. The Crows have done many things right since 2020. But the two most consequential moments of the rebuild – persuading homesick boyhood Crows fans Jordan Dawson and Izak Rankine to come home – simply aren’t replicable for a side like, say, North Melbourne. Luck and timing play a bigger role in any side’s success than we like to admit. But there was nothing stopping other rebuilding sides from drafting Ben Keays – or persuading him to join as a delisted free agent – following his time at Brisbane. The career he has manufactured at the Crows is a 95th-percentile outcome. He’d be the first to admit that he doesn’t quite have the talent of his more illustrious teammates. But he might just be the single most important person in Adelaide’s rebuild.

No one could have reasonably predicted what’s happened. But what was possible to predict is that bringing in a guy who carries himself with integrity, and refuses to give up, will yield benefits that are likely to flow through a club. Rebuilding clubs must confront many important questions on the journey back to competitiveness. The one which generates the most media attention and supporter clamour is always which elite prospect to draft with the coveted high pick. But arguably just as important – although much less discussed – is how to find those guys who want it so badly they will run through a brick wall to make it happen. And then run some more.

It’s possible to read Keays’ career in vaguely tragic terms: delisted by his boyhood club, incorrectly denied what would have been a career highlight by a goal umpire, being part of a side which summarily failed its finals test last year. But I don’t see it that way, and I don’t think he would either. The correct reading is that Keays is emblematic of footy’s vast emotional richness. He has faced great adversity and disappointment. And instead of giving up, he has wrung every drop of blood, sweat, and tears out of himself. This Thursday night, a Collingwood half-back will slow to a jog, believing he has a moment to breathe. He won’t notice Ben Keays until it’s too late. No one ever does.

In addition to restarting paid subscriptions, I’ve also created a “Buy Me a Coffee” page so you can show your support for One Percenters with a one-off (or recurring) donation. Here’s the link.

Social preview image courtesy of the ABC website.

Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country is wrong in the ways 60+ year-old nonfiction books tend to be: it is too confident in its conclusions, too intolerant of other points of view, too ignorant of confounding evidence. But the things that make it outdated, from the perspective of 2026, are also – paradoxically – the same things that have given the book its cultural staying power. Its bold central thesis is encapsulated by the opening words of the final chapter:

In much the same way as some Reaganite conservatives misunderstood Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA as a patriotic hype song, some Australians have chosen to interpret Horne’s book as endorsing a particular kind of complacent homegrown nationalism: whaddya mean, mate – we’re the bloody lucky country! But Horne wasn’t especially interested in those comforting bromides. Instead, he argued that Australia’s prosperity was the product of luck – luck of geology, luck of political inheritance – not the quality of its leaders or the scope of its ambition.

If Australia is the lucky country, rich and safe despite only sometimes mustering the energy and smarts usually required to be so, then the AFL is the lucky league. The quality of its decisions and the people making them have never been under more scrutiny. The disgruntlement of many of its stakeholders and consumers, at least on social media, feels like it’s at record levels. Fans are unhappy. Clubs are unhappy. Even players and umpires have expressed discontent. It seems the only exception is broadcasters and content creators, who have abundant amounts of raw material to work with. Andrew Dillon has tried to fix it. He’s thrown Laura Kane overboard and parachuted in Greg Swann to buy himself some political capital. That ploy seems to have failed. People are as mad as ever about the way footy is being run. But commercially, the AFL has never been in ruder health. The line keeps going up. I want to explore this tension.

Before considering why people are so angry at the current AFL administration, there’s a preceding question to ask: was there a world in which people weren’t going to be angry? After all, take a look around. Everyone, everywhere, seems to be angry about almost everything. It’s not clear to me why footy, a sport which both exerts huge influence on people’s emotional – and, in the gambling age, financial – wellbeing and is not immune to broader social currents, should be any different. We get mad because it matters. So does the medium. Saying that people are mad at the Dillon regime is tantamount to saying that they’re mad at the Dillon regime on social media. Even what remains of the traditional footy media is increasingly shaped by and for social media. It’s clear enough that this has perverse incentives: social media is both a vessel and an amplifier of our frustrations. We’ve seen this play out hundreds of times: a pundit, podcaster, or provocateur uncorks a performatively angry take. Their audience finds a new reason to get angry. That anger is expressed through shares, replies, and arguments. Lots of heat, not much light.

There’s also a narrower form of the argument that everyone is already angry, which is that everyone is already angry at all the people who run major sports. Perhaps claiming that the AFL is unusually poorly run is provincial or self-absorbed thinking. There is, as far as I can see, not much love out there (from supporters, at least) for Gianni Infantino, Adam Silver, or Roger Goodell, or whoever is currently running the A-League. (Peter V’Landys is a possible exception here, but it seems like much of his political capital is derived from taking pot shots at the AFL, and even then, lots of NRL supporters seem annoyed by some of his wheezes like taking the game to Las Vegas.) Some of the issues assailing these sports are different from the ones facing footy. No one is calling for Andrew Dillon’s head because of the second apron or petrostates buying clubs or because Albo pressured him to overturn a star player’s suspension ahead of a knockout final. The AFL also faces some unique problems, which I’ll touch on later. But the people running the world’s major sports are mostly facing discontent about similar issues: officiating, parity, the influence of gambling, and disquiet about their role as social actors.

Social media and the ambient discontent which permeates life These Days are part of why it feels like the AFL administration is under siege. But they’re amplifying a signal that already exists. The main culprit for the discontent footy fans feel with the AFL is undoubtedly the AFL itself. I first had the idea of writing a piece like this after the fallout from the Lance Collard case. A quick refresher for readers who, understandably, are having trouble recalling the details given that April may as well be a year ago: the young Indigenous forward was suspended for using a homophobic slur against an opponent in a VFL game. St Kilda successfully reduced the suspension following an appeal. Tensions, already high, were further inflamed after the appeals board, the body which administers the process, wrote that it is “commonplace that players can employ language from time to time which is racist, sexist or homophobic whilst on the field.” This, to quote Douglas Adams, made a lot of people very angry and was widely regarded as a bad move. A head needed to roll. One was found in the form of Will Houghton, the silk who had chaired the appeals board for two years. Predictably, the summary dismissal of an independent advisor for saying something inconveniently true didn’t solve the problem in the way the AFL had hoped. But the league had, at least, found a scapegoat. The fact this all happened concurrently with the AFL sanctioning Zak Butters for drawing attention to an umpire’s paid employment with a betting company was just the icing on the cake.

It’s probably futile to try and capture all the reasons so many different stakeholder groups are unhappy with the Dillon administration. But I’ll give it a go anyway. Supporters are unhappy about umpiring. They’re unhappy about the league’s defence of umpiring. They’re annoyed at perceived inconsistencies at the tribunal. They’re angry about the AFL rolling out the red carpet for betting companies. Many are unhappy about draft concessions – some for narrow, sectional reasons, others because of broader concerns about competitive integrity. Some supporters are unhappy because they believe the AFL has conceded too much ground to progressive political causes. Others, meanwhile, are unhappy because they believe the AFL has not conceded enough. Fans are annoyed about the fixture. Some, like me, are perturbed by the capriciousness of rule changes and the league’s willingness to turn the dial towards openness and transition. Many in my quaint corner of footy nerd twitter are puzzled by the behaviour of the AFL’s social media accounts and the preoccupations of some of the league’s house journos. Concussion and CTE. The ARC. Goal songs. The opacity of the league’s illicit drugs policy. Ticket and membership prices amid a cost-of-living crisis. I’m sure I’ve missed some things, but this already sounds enough like We Didn’t Start the Fire as it is. The anger is palpable. And the end result is twofold: widespread dissatisfaction with how the Dillon administration runs the show, and deep scepticism whenever it proposes any sort of reform.

Ultimately, though, one tendency of the current administration frustrates more than any other: it is hopelessly reactive. The AFL feels like it’s locked in a cycle of patching a leak somewhere to get through the day or appease a disgruntled interest group, only for the hull to spring another leak somewhere it hadn’t anticipated. This sense of frustration is felt at AFL clubs, too. One club staffer, who spoke to me off the record for this piece, bemoaned the AFL’s tendency to “layer in fixes in which they create a problem, they create a fix which creates more problems, and they create a fix, and so on.” This is especially apparent in recurring tweaks to both interpretations of rules like holding the ball (which I could write an entire essay about – including how pundits and commentators contribute to misunderstanding) and the draft. The fancy term for the AFL’s problem is that it’s systemically incapable of recognising second-order effects; the thing that happens as a consequence of the thing you do in the first place.

Although I assume a small number of the supporters who have dramatically threatened to stop following the game because of umpiring/rule changes/Laura Kane have actually done so, the main cost to supporters is just that it’s annoying to see the AFL make these sorts of blunders. But for people who work at AFL clubs – including players – it can significantly impact their ability to do their jobs. Changes to bid matching criteria interfere with draft strategies which are often planned years in advance. Changes to the ruck rules rendered a certain class of ruck virtually obsolete at AFL level overnight. The discontent expressed by the staffer I spoke to is not an uncommon sentiment. That should probably concern the AFL, especially considering the decision to appoint Greg ‘Common Sense’ Swann, who’d spent 11 years at Brisbane, was widely interpreted as a move designed to mollify clubs.

Disgruntlement with the current administration goes beyond supporters and clubs. The AFL Umpires’ Association expressed its unhappiness with the league following the Round 17 incident where Collingwood’s Brayden Maynard and Gold Coast’s Touk Miller made contact with umpire Nick Brown. According to Channel 7 reporter, Tom Morris, several umpires were shocked that Maynard escaped a ban, but also weren’t surprised, “given the lack of support they’ve felt from the AFL in the past.” In the past day, it’s even emerged that umpires are (reasonably) unhappy with a social media post from the AFL’s account which highlighted that Matt Stevic – the umpire at the centre of the controversial 50-metre penalty awarded against Adam Cerra at the MCG on Saturday night – will be umpiring this weekend. One major stakeholder group being unhappy? That can happen. Two major stakeholder groups being unhappy? That’s careless. Three major stakeholder groups being unhappy? Even if you subscribe to the theory that if everyone is equally unhappy that means you’re doing something right, that suggests you’ve got a problem.

It’s worth briefly contemplating whether any of this could have been avoided. Can you possibly have a widely respected, or at least tolerated head office in any major sport in 2026? I’m not sure thinking about the Wayne Jackson or Andrew Demetriou days is helpful here. They existed in a time before social media and before a 24/7 media cycle fed by content entrepreneurs, when footy was a pastime, not the totalising social institution it is today. That may as well have been a century ago.

Instead, it’s more instructive to compare the AFL to cricket, soccer, rugby league, and the big US sports. Again – with the significant caveat that I don’t follow any of them as closely as I do footy, and in the case of league I barely even know the rules – none are immune from scandal and stakeholder unrest. Cricket’s problems are existential: the pull towards franchise cricket and growing power of Indian interests is threatening domestic competitions and traditional forms of the game. (For what it’s worth, I do think the AFL is facing its own existential problem – concussion – but I don’t think that’s what’s generating much of the current discontent.) FIFA is, uh, amenable to financial inducements [when you are your own editor and lawyer, it’s best to err on the side of discretion]. The other sports are slightly more comparable in the competing interests they try to appease and the major issues they confront: revenue distribution, player welfare and remuneration, gambling, officiating. These are Normal Problems, in the sense that any capable administrator should anticipate them arising. But their specific instantiation is almost impossible to predict. Here’s where I have some sympathy for the people who run the AFL. They oversee a dynamic game, with a vibrant media ecosystem, where edge cases are the norm. No holding the ball adjudication or dangerous tackle is ever quite the same. Consistency is impossible, common sense a chimaera.

Would the frustration be less palpable if AFL House was better at communicating the case for rule changes, better at explaining umpiring decisions (and supporting umpires), better at balancing competing social justice claims, and better at gradually introducing changes to the draft to minimally disrupt clubs? Probably. But, as I’ve already said, to a certain degree, the whole system is optimised for maximum attention and outrage. All publicity is good publicity. There’s another problem here. The costs to the AFL of the AFL making bad choices isn’t very high. Sure, some execs sometimes get demoted or quietly shuffled out of the deck. But accountability stops a couple of rungs short of the top. Gillon McLachlan walked out of the top job and into a sinecure with a betting company (I would prefer if he was not allowed to do that!). The global search for his successor stopped at the guy just a few doors down. Hiring from within, especially to an idiosyncratic organisation, is often the right choice. But the AFL certainly didn’t waste much time trying to persuade the footy public of the merits of the appointment.

The AFL is also less accountable than you would hope or expect an institution of its size to be because it wields a virtual monopoly over the sport. If you’re disgusted by the financial inequalities of club soccer, you can invest emotionally in the international game (while holding your nose when it comes to FIFA). There are other basketball leagues, other cricket competitions, other places where rugby league is played. Perhaps none are as good as the morally compromised, apex-level competitions, but they’re a decent substitute. That’s not the case with footy. You can still find the odd state league diehard who’s resisted the lure of the national competition, but they’re more of a curio than a genuine constraint on the conduct of the AFL.

The American economist Albert Hirschman identified three means of self-expression in an organisational setting: exit, voice, or loyalty. Exit means withdrawing from the relationship. Voice means speaking up. Don’t feel comfortable with the actions of your employer? You can exit – quit – or exercise your voice by calling for change from within. Are you worried about the actions of your government, or anxious about your economic security? You can vote for the opposition or emigrate. Loyalty is what it says on the tin: sticking with your guys. Exit and voice aren’t always sufficient to drive accountability. But they’re necessary, because organisations need incentives to be responsive to stakeholder demands. When it comes to footy, the strength of our loyalty is part of why exit and voice feel so weak. Exiting is a non-starter for all but the most committed and the most furious supporters (these are often the same people). The AFL clearly doesn’t regard exit as an especially credible threat – the league has been busily trying to expand into new markets, arguably at the cost of neglecting already-saturated markets, for the better part of 20 years now. And there are few avenues to exercising our voice. We can’t elect a reformist AFL administration. Attempts to mobilise supporter interests are – with apologies to the AFL Fans’ Association – not taken seriously. The best thing we can do is probably the thing many supporters are already doing: complaining on social media.

The AFL has created its monopoly by squeezing state leagues, but it’s also done it by being the custodians of this incredible, exhilarating game that commands our emotional loyalties. One is reminded of Mark Zuckerberg’s quip about the founders of Twitter as resembling a clown car that fell into a gold mine. If you’re a fourth-generation Carlton fan, or a Freo fan that’s hoping, wishing, and praying for that maiden flag, or – like me – a kid who fell in love with the game because it helped teach him how to be Australian, then the goofs and blunders of the people at AFL House might irritate you, but they’re unlikely to seriously call your loyalty to the game into question. Footy has imperfect substitutes, but for millions of the people who follow it, nothing hits quite the same as the real thing. We’re prisoners who, at some point, walked into the cell and willingly swallowed the key.

To the extent that complaining about the Dillon regime on social media represents a concerted project to drive change, it’s failed. But, ironically, it probably fails even by the strict terms of expressing dissent. Negative polarisation drives engagement. More angry reacts, more clicks, more talkback callers, more stories catering to that base instinct. I’m sure the AFL administration would rather be loved than disdained. But so long as people keep watching, I’m not sure they care. The current administration isn’t weakened by record numbers of people using their voice to express disillusionment if those people remain loyal. Only exit would send a signal that would be heard at AFL House. That isn’t happening. The 2025 financial result showed revenue up 16%, over $1.2 billion, driven largely by the first year of the new broadcast deal, and an operating surplus of $67.9 million, up from $45.4 million the year before.

One in 20 Australians are members of an AFL club. Attendances in 2026 are tracking ahead of last year’s, with round after round setting per-game records. Last Thursday’s game between Fremantle and Sydney was the highest-rating primetime AFL match on free-to-air since 2022, reaching more than 3.3 million Australians. None of this is exactly evidence of a league in crisis. And if the league isn’t in crisis, how can we honestly say that the administration which runs it is? Discontent isn’t a metric the AFL is failing to manage. It’s a metric the AFL doesn’t care about, so long as it doesn’t mess with the metrics that do matter. Bad process and unforced PR errors are tolerable as long as they don’t show up on the bottom line or in TV ratings – and there’s not much evidence, yet, that they do.

I’ve spent the best part of 3,000 words writing about the manifold reasons so many people are unhappy with the AFL without yet discussing what many readers will have identified as the main issue: the logic of expansion into new markets. Attracting new customers is very different to retaining old ones. The AFL has clearly made the strategic choice to accompany the push into Queensland and New South Wales with a set of list concessions, rule changes, and communications practices designed to appeal to new supporters, partly by accelerating and then maintaining the competitiveness of the Northern and expansion clubs. That, inevitably, imposes costs on incumbent clubs and rusted-on fans. Part of the frustration many supporters feel with the AFL is the frustration of neglect. I would be fascinated to see how the AFL’s revenue breaks down by “old markets” versus “new markets”.

Ultimately, an organisation that captures its customers without earning them or without feeling like it has to do anything special to keep them has no structural incentive to improve. The internal metrics the AFL uses to assess the performance of Andrew Dillon are opaque. The external ones – revenue, memberships, ratings – are all trending up. The discontented supporters cataloguing grievances on Footy Twitter were never the audience that rule changes designed to speed up the game were built for. They’re for broadcasters, for the highlight reel, for the fan watching their first game of the season on a Thursday night rather than the fan who’s been to every home game since the turn of the millennium. That’s the business model. Traditional fans are a peripheral part of that.

What I suppose I’ve been trying to get at throughout this entire essay is that the AFL’s monopoly position, plus its cultural ubiquity (which, it must be said, previous administrations have built), have created a situation where second-rate governance – or at least second-rate in the eyes of the people who’ve loved the game for a long time – is the status quo. So what are we to do about it? The AFL will be responsive to supporters only when they begin to threaten the bottom line. Clubs could force a change in behaviour or leadership. There is some evidence they are losing faith with the Dillon administration. But clubs don’t always want the same things (consider draft concessions and Academy bids). Broadcasters could drive change, but why would they?

Donald Horne would warn us that incompetence eventually erodes even the strongest position. Albert Hirschman would implore us to use our voice or find the exit. But for all of us – me included – who don’t know if they can, there’s the timeless advice of another influential thinker, Donald Trump, who wrote, in a tweet from October 2012: “The Coca Cola company is not happy with me--that’s okay, I’ll still keep drinking that garbage.” For as long as the product it controls remains so addictive, the AFL doesn’t need to be good. It certainly doesn’t act as though it believes it needs to keep most of its stakeholders onside. It just needs the line to keep going up.

In addition to restarting paid subscriptions, I’ve also created a “Buy Me a Coffee” page so you can show your support for One Percenters with a one-off (or recurring) donation. Here’s the link.

We also did a fun bit after the outro, so make sure to keep listening for another couple of minutes.

New episodes of 110 Percenters are published here. You can also find us wherever you get your podcasts, including:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocket Casts

• YouTube Podcasts

Listener feedback will be key to making us better, so if you took the time to listen, please also consider taking the time to rate and review the show.

I’ve put links to Cody and Jonathan’s writing after the jump. Their work is the best in the business. I’ve also linked to listener Leigh Eustace’s Substack. It’s well worth a read.

Links:

• Read Cody’s work here

• Read Jonathan’s work here

• Leigh’s Substack

We also spoke much more about art than we had on any previous episode! It was all a little rambling – blame the tech issues which meant we couldn’t record until Tuesday night – but we had fun.

New episodes of 110 Percenters are published here. You can also find us wherever you get your podcasts, including:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocket Casts

• YouTube Podcasts

Listener feedback will be key to making us better, so if you took the time to listen, please also consider taking the time to rate and review the show.

I’ve put links to Cody and Jonathan’s writing after the jump. Their work is the best in the business.

I’ve also put a link to the excellent John Perceval exhibition currently on at the Heidelberg Museum of Art. I highly recommend you check it out if you can!

Links:

• Read Cody’s work here

• Read Jonathan’s work here

• John Perceval: All That We Are

We also had a long conversation about the harrowing Four Corners documentary about Nick Lowden, the former Casey Demons and Norwood player who was diagnosed with CTE after passing away at 23. The documentary, and other excellent reporting by the ABC’s investigations team, raises many troubling, complex questions about the future of our game, the duties of the AFL, and even our responsibilities as people who love the game.

We were determined to end the show on a lighter note, so we also shot From The Hip, delivering our takes on the future of commentary, the rules we’d politely discuss with Swanny (ripper bloke), and footy’s equivalent of Ben Stokes.

New episodes of 110 Percenters are published here. You can also find us wherever you get your podcasts, including:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocket Casts

• YouTube Podcasts

Listener feedback will be key to making us better, so if you took the time to listen, please also consider taking the time to rate and review the show.

I’ve put links to Cody and Jonathan’s writing after the jump. Their work is the best in the business.

You’ll also find links to the full ABC Four Corners investigation, a game of Calcio Storico, and a piece about how former US President Teddy Roosevelt saved (American) football.

Links:

• Read Cody’s work here

• Read Jonathan’s work here

• The CTE crisis the AFL doesn’t want you to know about | Four Corner Documentary

• How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football

• FINALE CALCIO STORICO | ROSSI VS. AZZURRI | LIVE | CROWN SPORTS LEAGUE

Finally, we wave goodbye to the byes. One imagines the AFL and broadcasters have run the numbers and concluded that staggering the byes over five weeks is the commercially superior option. But doing it this way lets air out of the season precisely at the point where things are already a bit of a slog. It also feels like yet more inequality layered over the top of an already unequal fixture. Why did Melbourne, a side which didn’t feature in Opening Round, and so therefore didn’t benefit from a bye within the first month of the season, have to wait until Round 16 for its first break of the season? The most elegant solution is also the one the AFL is least likely to adopt: give the whole league a week off and encourage people to go see their state or local league side. Or, God forbid, unplug from footy for a week.

I suppose I should be grateful: staggering the byes over five weeks has enabled me to compile these mid-season report cards. This final instalment considers the fortunes of four clubs separated by just three wins but vastly different narratives. Geelong remains steadfastly Geelong: clever, constant, inevitable. Melbourne has been perhaps the season’s biggest positive surprise: effervescent risers when most expected them to sink. As in theology, so in footy, the Saints are the mirror image of the Demons. Big name recruits created big expectations that have been partly fulfilled on the field but not on the ladder. The Bulldogs are perhaps the biggest enigma of all: good-ish when most expected them to be great, but significantly diminished by the loss of Sam Darcy. Each side is negotiating its own path to contention in its own way. Before we get into the meat of this week’s instalment, a short and sincere thank you to everyone who contributed their thoughts about their side’s progress. You’ve taught me things about your teams. Let’s get into it.

Geelong

Win-loss: 9-6

Ladder position: 4th

Next four games: Brisbane (H), GWS (A), St Kilda (H), Melbourne (A)

Jake from Chaps Chat Cats

“We won’t make it past a Prelim.” Spend enough time around Cats fans and you begin to understand how sustained success over a long period of time can erode a sense of appreciation for the journey between trophies.

The pessimists may be right. Perhaps the Cats will go no further than a preliminary final this season. Perhaps they might fall sooner, and then the anti-Scott crowd (yes, they do still exist) will fire up as the “faithful” bemoan another flag scattered away to the winds of time.

I tend to think Geelong has managed itself to a 9-6 record pretty well, negotiating a ferocious fixture, a string of lingering injuries, and a gentle turnover of the list as the club positions itself for future flag tilts with fresh faces at key positions.

While the likes of Blicavs, Dangerfield, Cameron and Stewart are headed for the last season or two of their careers, Geelong’s next generation is taking shape. With Jeremy Cameron’s effectiveness lessened due to his lingering arm issue, future spearhead Shannon Neale has averaged career-best figures in marks, goals and goal assists, including a breakthrough seven mark, two goal, three goal assist performance against long-time problem team Brisbane.

A precipitous drop in form for Brad Close has opened the door for VFL goalsneak Oliver Wiltshire to claw his way into the side. His tackling numbers need to increase to ensure he stays locked in the team, but he’s booted five goals in his last two games and begun to look more comfortable at the level.

Bailey Smith and Max Holmes have been predictably excellent again, but Geelong could scarcely have dreamed that young ruckman Mitch Edwards would make such massive strides in his first season as an AFL starter.

Down back, Connor O’Sullivan rules the air, and Lawson Humphries controls the counter-attack, while Sam De Koning is beginning to transform into the next Geelong Swiss Army knife as the post-Blicavs era approaches. All that without mentioning arguably Geelong’s most exciting star of the future, Ollie Dempsey, or a VFL side that sits atop their ladder with just a single loss despite being pillaged of two standouts at the mid-season draft. The future is bright.

The truth is, Geelong is continuing to win despite being in the midst of a fairly significant list transition. In their 41-point win over Brisbane at the Gabba, the Cats started 12 players who weren’t on the field during their last flag triumph. During the nine-point road loss to Fremantle, the Cats fielded 14 such players.

Despite the change in personnel, Geelong’s very best has proved capable of beating the competition’s very best teams. Consistency has been the issue, with the Cats struggling to find their best more often than a few other top four contenders. At their best, the Cats hunt in packs, attack like lightning, and choke opponents out of the game with their marauding swarm of headband-clad interceptors. At their worst, they fail to link up inside 50, lack cohesion defending their front half, and are scored against freely on the counter and from stoppages.

Geelong in 2026 has been shifting the blocks on its Rubik’s Cube, working out how to configure itself into a flag-contending form. The Cats own some of the season’s most head-scratching losses, but also some of the campaign’s most impressive wins. Brisbane out of the Bye won’t tell us everything about the 2026 Cats, but I believe it will give us some clues as to what they can achieve by season’s end. The future, and the here and now, remain pretty bright.

Jake’s grade: A-

My thoughts

Be honest: are you surprised by any of this? Geelong being around the mark, turning over its list, demonstrating its recruitment and coaching remains best in-class, while being linked to high-profile free agents come the end of the season? No, because the Cats have made brilliance look boring. Only the most partisan supporters would deny the systemic advantage created by a true home-ground advantage paired with a Victorian side’s lighter travel itinerary. But equally, for all except those who believe that Geelong’s ongoing defiance of gravity is the product of a massive ongoing conspiracy, you have to hand it to them.

You want to know the secret? It’s not the farms. It’s not the local media cartel. It’s the stability, and the trust that stability and success create. That’s why Geelong’s recruiters have a spectacular strike rate in the hinterlands of the draft, why youngsters serve multi-year apprenticeships in a successful VFL program without a peep of frustration from fans, and why the club remains such an attractive destination for out-of-contract stars seeking success (and affordable farmland). Replacements for key first-team pillars are identified and developed years in advance. Duds are quickly ushered out the door (be wary of any player the Cats are willing to let go). Stars are lured on the understanding that their output is worth more than the potential of a draft pick. This is the blueprint for consistent contention.

This year’s Geelong is similar to last year’s incarnation. The operating principles remain the same: a strong intercept game franked by power running, verticality, and clever forward-half scheming. The Cats are handballing a little more and taking a touch less risk and distance with their disposals. They’ve slightly regressed in their clearance work but remain formidable in the turnover game, which is where modern footy is played. The knocks, such as they are, are outcome-based rather than procedural: two one-point losses (to Hawthorn and Adelaide) mean that finishing in the top four is merely “very likely” instead of “almost certain”. Jake is right to note the side’s personnel evolution. Jeremy Cameron’s modest decline has been replaced in the aggregate. Tyson Stengle may have played his last game for the club. That’s fine, Jack Martin and Ollie Wiltshire can replicate his output. Connor O’Sullivan isn’t particularly flashy, but he’s also a likely 300-game player in a high-value role. These are the dividends of stability and strategy. I wrote in my season preview that the Cats are footy’s index fund: rarely “exciting” in the boom-and-bust sense, but always prudent, always dependable, always there. I’m not sure if they’re the best team in it. But they’re part of a group of four that looks clearly stronger than the chasing pack. They will be there when the whips are cracking. Maybe forever.

My grade: B+

Melbourne

Win-loss: 9-6

Ladder position: 7th

Next four games: Hawthorn (A), Richmond (H), North Melbourne (A), Geelong (H)

Emlyn Breese, This Week In Football contributor and friend of the newsletter

The easiest measure of this season is the degree to which expectations have changed. Coming into 2026, most Melbourne supporters wanted to see two things: evidence of a clear game style, and development of the younger players (a record ninth All-Australian selection for Max Gawn wouldn’t have hurt either).

Sitting now having (finally) reached the bye, we’re ready to have our hearts broken. Finals are no certainty, but they’re now the expectation.

Just three bad losses and a 3-4 return against the current top 10 is very respectable, and if you can only play one ground well, the MCG is the correct choice.

Red and blueprint

Steven King shares a central football tenet with his predecessor: territory is more valuable than possession.

In 2026, Melbourne is ranked 4th-lowest among all sides for time in possession differential and 5th-highest for time in forward half. This kind of mismatch reveals something about a team’s footy philosophy. If we look at the time in forward half you’d expect a team with a given time in possession to have, four of the biggest positive outliers are Melbourne – 2022 (9th), 2025 (6th), 2023 (5th), and this year at 3rd.

How are Melbourne gaining that territory though? That’s where, although there are echoes to the peak Goodwin years, the differences from last year become obvious.

Last year, Melbourne became a safe kicking team. This year, King has brought back the low-retention, high-threat kicking strategy of 2021-2023. Sydney and Fremantle both find themselves in the top 5 for xThreat and bottom 5 for xRetention. It seems a philosophy suited to the attacking-friendly rule set of 2026.

Of course, there are some big differences. Sydney and Fremantle rank 1st and 3rd for Handball receives, while Melbourne are 16th. When Melbourne do use handball, they’ve become more expansive than under Goodwin. They’re averaging double the metres gained per handball compared to 2021-23. They’re now also targeting Kysaiah Pickett with those handballs instead of Oliver, Petracca, and Viney.

Overall, the biggest difference appears to be one of freedom. Players have regularly spoken about the freedom to make mistakes in pursuing an attacking option. It’s seen them scoring 90+ points in 10 of their first 15 games, a figure they reached just eight times in 23 games last year. They’ve scored 12 points more per game while conceding just three more.

Without the ball, Melbourne are comfortable (arguably too comfortable) allowing their opponent free use. They’re deep in the negative for uncontested possession differentials and their neighbours are the properly bad Essendon and Richmond. They are bottom six for pressure acts per opposition disposal and tackles per opposition disposal, and dead last for forcing clangers per disposal. The league as a whole has seen big drops in pressure ratings in 2026. Perhaps this is King’s gambit – the rules undermine the effectiveness of pressure, so it’s best to put your focus elsewhere.

The cattle

Melbourne’s best 23 saw significant churn in the off season. The midfield was the deepest hit. Petracca and Oliver are gone, while Viney hasn’t been sighted due to injuries. The backline wasn’t unscathed either, the best full back I’ve seen wear red and blue, Steven May, is gone, as was young fan favourite Judd McVee.

So, who is filling the void? To start off, the really obvious answers. Max Gawn and Kysaiah Pickett are more important than ever to this team’s performance. Max Gawn is 35 this year and currently averaging his career highest rating points despite being played out of position in multiple games. The man is a freak and in my, admittedly very biased, view a clear-cut #1 ruck of all time. Kysaiah Pickett has taken his game to another level. When Melbourne utilises him, he is a nigh unstoppable force. His combination of extracting the contested ball himself, moving out of traffic, and then using it well is, in my opinion, unmatched.

Elsewhere, Kade Chandler has gone from a handy role player to the second most important part of Melbourne’s ball movement behind Pickett. His recent choice to opt out of free agency and sign a five-year contract extension was a boon for the build. Jack Steele and Brody Mihocek (before his horrific injury) have slotted in as exactly what their respective lines needed. Daniel Turner looks like a key defender to build around, while Jake Lever is recapturing his previous form and staying on the park.

There’s a trio of runners that have looked really well suited to King’s game plan. Harry Sharp went from a seeming permanent sub to a vital part of the group. Jai Culley (before his ACL) and Harvey Langford have created really awkward matchups for opponents with their combination of aerobic capacity and overhead strength. Koltyn Tholstrup and Tom Sparrow have both transformed from fringe players to an effective defensive multi-tool and a player embracing the new midfield minutes on offer.

Looking forward

The Demons looked dead on their feet the last three weeks. Getting over the top of Collingwood required them to dig very deep, and they were fortunately allowed to hold Essendon at arms-length without expending a huge amount of effort.

They came into their last game as the first team since the introduction of the pre-finals bye to play 15 weeks straight (excluding the oddities of the 2020 Covid-affected season). By the end of that game against Adelaide, they looked as tired as you’d expect them to be.

This is a young team. By median age of players selected week to week, only Richmond and West Coast are younger. The hope is the Demons return from the bye refreshed and looking like the team we saw earlier in the season. The fear is they fall away like many young teams do towards the end.

Even if Melbourne falls short of finals from here, you’d be hard pressed to not call the year a success. Kade Chandler and Bayley Fritsch have re-signed, it’s hoped Tom Sparrow will do the same soon. The side looks exciting after years of sludge. And a lot of it has been driven by players who will be there a long time. It is Melbourne, so there are still some off-season spectres haunting the place, but from the playing group themselves, the vibes are immaculate. It’s a genuinely exciting time to be a Demons fan.

Emlyn’s grade: A

My thoughts

Melbourne’s list, with apologies to Jack Steele, Brody Mihocek, and the club’s 2025 draftees, has less talent on it this season than last season. Losing Christian Petracca and Clayton Oliver will tend to do that. But this side is playing much better footy than the Late Goodwin Era, and the vibes are approximately a thousand times better. As Emlyn alluded to in his review, those two things are related. The vibes are better, partly because expectations have been reset and partly because the old guard has been moved on, which has helped a young side play with freedom, which improves the vibes, and so on. It’s a virtuous loop.

I’ve written before that “good” coaching, broadly speaking, comes in two different flavours: improving the culture and standards, or making in-game adjustments. Call it the strategic versus the tactical, or the macro versus the micro. Early indications are that Steven King has made real strides in both domains. His Demons don’t press very hard or high: Melbourne is equal-last for opposition clangers and 14th for opposition disposals per tackle. Instead, the Demons happy to sit slightly deeper and trust their defensive system and personnel to force their opponents to take tough shots on goal. Only Sydney and Collingwood boast a lower expected score per opposition shot. The Melbourne is exceptionally good at winning ground-level contests in its defensive 50 and using those wins as a springboard for sweeping counterattacking chains. I feel like I’ve seen Melbourne kick a goal from a move which begins inside its defensive half and features some combination of Kysaiah Pickett, Kade Chandler, Harry Sharp and Harvey Langford (at the MCG, of course) about 50 times this season.

What’s impressed me most about King’s start to coaching life is how quickly he’s added an attacking layer to what had become a very stale game plan under predecessor Simon Goodwin. Part of it, as Emlyn alluded to, is that he’s quickly grasped what had been under-utilised strengths on his list: Sharp’s running from deep positions, Chandler’s playmaking, Langford’s off-ball finishing.

Pickett and Gawn were not, it is fair to say, unknown or underappreciated talents. Any fair accounting of King’s debut season must incorporate the fact that between them (and other veterans who’ve maintained a high level, like Jake Lever), he’s not needed to spin gold from hay. But established talent has combined well with young talent. And Melbourne’s list appears to have a good supply of both. Langford looks every inch a Pick 5 in a well-regarded draft. Caleb Windsor has improved. Latrelle Pickett’s form has flagged as he’s tired from the exertions of a first AFL season, but he’s shown enough flashes. Koltyn Tholstrup has found a new lease of life as a defensive utility after failing to convince as a mid-forward. That’s a credit to the young players and a credit to the coach who’s kept playing them. More young talent will arrive in this season’s draft: Melbourne has its own pick plus Gold Coast’s first-rounder. The latter is currently looking like a much better pick than anyone would have expected after the first month of the season. The recent record of Melbourne’s recruitment team should give supporters cause for optimism.

As Melbourne’s coaches and players finally take a few days off, the questions surrounding this side are suddenly very different to the ones being asked before the season began. Is it time for a rebuild has given way to what Melbourne can achieve this season and – suddenly, improbably – is another genuine flag tilt is in reach while Pickett and [checks notes] Gawn are in their primes? While there’s every chance the accumulation of fatigue on young bodies will see results dip after the bye, it’s clear that this Melbourne side is closer to success than most observers – except for their shrewd novice coach – had understood. It’s good times at Demonland. The snow is crap this year, anyway. The real show is at the MCG on Sunday afternoons.

My grade: A-

St Kilda

Win-loss: 6-9

Ladder position: 13th

Next four games: Essendon (A), Port Adelaide (H), Geelong (A), North Melbourne (A)

Woody from Wooden Spoon Data

The 2026 season started with perhaps the highest external expectations of the club in the last decade. However, the messaging from the club itself was slightly different, suggesting this could still be yet another year of ‘growth’. Slightly more than halfway in, it seems as though the club was correct.

While the Saints have strung together a few ‘statement wins’ over West Coast, Carlton, and Richmond between Rounds 7 to 10, the broader story of their season has been one of agonisingly close misses. Narrow defeats to Collingwood, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Sydney has defined much of the campaign, with the semi-recent blowout loss to Hawthorn – where the Saints failed to kick a goal in the first half – being their only truly uncompetitive showing.

Beneath the frustrating state of the win-loss column, there have been some peripheral improvements that Saints fans have been desperate to see, one that is – or at least should – semi-successfully shifting the narrative away from complete stagnation, at least for now.

Jack Steele and Jack Macrae were mainstays of the Saints’ centre bounce crew last season. Steele attended 74% of centre bounces, while Macrae attended 67%. Hugo Garcia, Marcus Hindhager, and Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera (especially from Round 18 onward) would slot in depending on need and game state. One year on, Steele is no longer at the club and a declining Macrae has become a peripheral figure. Aside from the obvious inclusion of Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera, many were wondering who would step up in their absence. Currently, Hugo Garcia is taking the bulk of the CBAs and looks to have established himself as one of the best young clearance midfielders in the game, averaging 6.1 clearances (3.3 of which are centre clearances) – more than any other player under 23 and more than his former captain too.

Nowhere is St Kilda’s tactical shift more evident than in the development of Max Hall.

After registering just 34 CBAs for a 5% share last year, Hall has already quintupled that total with 173 attendances, pushing his CBA share to 40%. Furthermore, his centre clearance rate of 16.2% ranks him in the top 10 league-wide among all players with an equivalent or higher midfield percentile.

These changes have made St Kilda’s midfield much more effective and dynamic. Last year, the Saints were 14th for centre clearances and 13th for scores from that source. So far in 2026, they’re third for both. At the same time, they’ve become more efficient at scoring from stoppage clearances.

Questions about the quality and composition of the midfield have been answered. But others have emerged in their place. The Saints have bought in four players via trade and free agency: Tom De Koning, Jack Silvagni, Liam Ryan and Sam Flanders. The results have been mixed. Even before an Achilles injury ended his season prematurely, Flanders had been pushed out of the midfield. De Koning was starting to find some form despite lower numbers due to splitting his role, however he too is injured and looks set to miss a few weeks. That being said, Ryan and Silvagni seem to be fitting into their respective roles nicely, and touch wood it stays that way because the Saints will need them if they’re going to make a push for finals.

St Kilda’s run home features matchups against Essendon, Port, North, Carlton, and Richmond, all teams they defeated in their most recent encounters. However, securing a wildcard position will likely require more than just repeating those victories; the Saints will also need to steal a win against Geelong at GMHBA, or Sydney/Gold Coast at Marvel.

So what are the chances that St Kilda qualifies for an expanded finals series? Well, not great. Wheelo Ratings has the Saints with about a 40% chance to make the Top 10, and I’d say that’s not far off correct. If I were to have a guess, I think it’ll come down to percentage between 10th and 11th, this bodes well for the Saints still managing to stay over 100% despite only winning one of its last five games.

While many will argue that St Kilda should be getting more from their off-season acquisitions, it’s clear that if the Saints are to make finals from here, I’ll be because of the continued improvement from their younger players like Garcia, Hall, Wilson, Phillipou and alike; And when you think about it, that sounds like the exact scenario the club laid out earlier in the year.

Woody’s grade: C-

My thoughts

The Saints are trying to do two things – win tomorrow while contending enough today to retain the players who will hopefully contribute to winning tomorrow – in a league where it’s hard enough for most clubs, let alone one with such a history of misfortune, to do one. They have done a decent job. St Kilda has more “expected wins”, the number of wins you’d anticipate had each game played out according to its expected score, than Adelaide. However, given the scale of the challenge facing the club in the next 18 months, decent is not enough.

To very quickly recap: St Kilda, frustrated by the increasing difficulty of rebuilding through the draft in an environment where finalists often have access to its best talent, has chosen to supplement its young core with a group of mid-career and veteran players to patch holes in the list, drive short-term improvement, and persuade the brightest star of all, Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera, that his long-term future lies at Moorabbin. The contributions of the four new recruits have ranged from underwhelming in the case of Sam Flanders (although his season-ending Achilles injury gives him a mulligan), to fair (Tom De Koning), to good (Liam Ryan and Jack Silvagni). They’ve not moved the needle by far enough, nor have they been a problem.

Too much attention has been paid to the new guys, and not enough to the two unheralded names who have announced themselves as stars. Hugo Garcia and Max Hall were recruited for Pick 50 in the 2023 draft and Pick 4 of the 2024 Mid-Season Draft. They have become, if you consider Wanganeen-Milera a midfielder, St Kilda’s second and third-best midfielders. Their rise, together with Darcy Wilson becoming the competition’s most sought-after out of contract player (are Saints fans doomed for a nailbiting contract saga every year?) has largely offset concerns about St Kilda’s recent first-round drafting. Five first-rounders, including three top-10 picks, suited up for the VFL side, last weekend. You can mount defenses of all of them. Mattaes Phillipou has flashed good form at AFL level before. Alix Tauru is a kid still growing into his body. And Tobie Travaglia has been building and is likely to return to the senior side soon. But St Kilda has a narrower path to success than almost every other club. Every miss hurts. Given the context of Wilson and Wanganeen-Milera’s contractual situations, even every delayed win hurts.

The aggregate effect of the new recruits and organic improvement is that the Saints are a better team than they were last year.

As of three weeks ago, the Saints were seventh for quarters won. They are taking more risks with their kicks and forcing more turnovers. They are scoring almost nine points more per game while conceding almost two fewer points. Many of the old criticisms about coach Ross Lyon’s boring, risk-averse style are no longer applicable. His side is playing a much more modern brand of footy.

The problem is that motion hasn’t created momentum. For all the improvement, the Saints are just one win better off than this time last season. The clock is ticking – loudly – on the futures of star players. The problem is that the test wasn’t whether St Kilda has improved because the 2025 Saints were never the benchmark. The test was whether they had closed the gap to the competition’s best teams. Perhaps they have if you dig deep enough. But on the metrics that matter most to supporters and out-of-contract stars, the gap remains stubbornly unbridgeable. The Saints are still mired in what’s become all too natural a habitat: purgatory.

My grade: C

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Western Bulldogs

Win-loss: 9-6

Ladder position: 8th

Next four games: Sydney (A), West Coast (H), Gold Coast (A), Richmond (H)

Adrian Polykandrites of From the Top Deck

Two things I probably knew have crystalised over the past month or so: we are bad at adjusting expectations, and the footy season is bloody long.

The Dogs’ impressive road wins over the Lions and Crows – which sandwiched a customary beatdown of the Giants – are a distant memory. It doesn’t even feel like the same season.

Everything changed in Geelong on that miserable Friday night when Sam Darcy’s season ended. Ten weeks on and I’m not really sure what this team is. It was never going to be the same without Darcy. It doesn’t matter, because he’s not coming back this season, so there’s no choice but to get on with it.

The record is fine – good, even. The cavalry has mostly returned, the skipper is moving normally again, and they have been able to grind out the kind of wins good teams need to grind out. The loss to Carlton was never as bad as it seemed and the win over Port was better than they got credit for. The Hawthorn win was a fluke but the loss to Fremantle – a kick in it deep into time on in the last – was one of the Dogs’ best performances of the season. They’ve had some luck in close games but they were the better team in most of those (Hawks game, again, was a fluke).

The biggest issue is that their best post-Darcy hasn’t looked nearly as good as their bad has looked bad. The Sydney loss is a write-off given the side they put on the park, but the Adelaide loss was an abomination. The game didn’t look particularly different to the first half of the Hawks game, the Crows just slammed the door shut with their kicking rather than keeping it ajar.

The profile is one of a middling team but given the fluctuation of the 23, that could mean everything or nothing: 15th for contested possession differential, fifth for clearance differential, 13th for inside-50 differential, 10th for scores from stoppages, 14th from scores from turnovers (uh-oh). They’re defending better in their back half but scoring has become a grind.

Of their best players, only Marcus Bontempelli, Bailey Dale and Aaron Naughton have been consistent(ish) across the season – and there’s an asterisk on all of them. Tim English has been great (other than the bath he was given by Lachlan McAndrew) [Mateo: respect McAndrew] or absent, Tom Liberatore has missed and been missed, Ed Richards has been up and down and was clearly playing hurt for a stretch. Adam Treloar is toast. Rhylee West has found some form after a dreadful start but is still a few rungs below his 2025 form. They miss Bailey Williams. Joel Freijah is still good and young and exciting but is finding life tougher with more required of him.

On the positive side, they’ve found a player they needed in Michael Sellwood, and Connor Budarick has been a shrewd recruit. Ryley Sanders has grown into a very capable onballer, Arty Jones has been their second best forward, and in one of the most welcome surprises of the season, Cody Weightman slotted in seamlessly. Cooper Hynes and Jordan Croft have shown enough on the wings to be encouraged, even if both will have you tearing hair out at times in the way young players do.

All in all… I don’t know. The ceiling is lower but the goal – be alive in semi-final week – should be the same. The bye has come at a nice time for them. The injury list is short, with Williams the only player certain to return to the line-up when fit. And they should be fresh for a real test against the Swans which will either answer questions or create new ones.

I just wish, once, this team would have a normal season. Alas.

Adrian’s grade: C+

My thoughts

No event has so changed the trajectory of one club’s 2026 season as violently as when Sam Darcy’s knee crumpled on that brisk April night in Geelong. When Darcy went down, so did the Dogs’ flag hopes. For a club with such a top-heavy talent distribution, every road to the flag ran through the guns firing every bullet they had in the chamber.

Darcy’s season-ending ACL injury was an especially bitter pill to story both because of the inherent tragedy of a young player being struck down and because, until then, the Dogs had been finding new ways to win. Last season, Luke Beveridge’s side was bad both at defending fast transition and slow plays. The problem was both structure and personnel. It’s not just that the blanket was too small – it’s as though there was no blanket at all. Beveridge’s big innovation this season was to drop the high press and semi-willingly concede opposition entries into a crowded 50. The bet was essentially that superior defensive numbers, and the ground ball prowess of the Dogs’ midfield corps, could create opportunities in attacking transition (which would also have the effect of giving Darcy more one-on-one contests).

The first month of the season offered good evidence for the theory. The Dogs emerged from the Lions’ den with four points despite a -13 inside-50 differential, and beat GWS and Adelaide in more conventional style (overwhelming midfield superiority and suffocating forward pressure). 4-0 looked like a perfect platform. Then came a limp Gather Round loss to Hawthorn – in a game that felt like a rerun of the last four encounters between the sides – and that dirty night down the Princes.

As Adrian says, everything changed when Darcy went down. It wasn’t just him, either. Tom Liberatore, Rory Lobb, and James O’Donnell suffered injuries in the same game. Ed Richards, who’d already been carrying a hamstring tendon injury, badly rolled his ankle in the dying stages of the defeat to Hawthorn. Truth be told, this version of the Dogs, despite improved contributions from role players like Michael Sellwood and Connor Budarick, isn’t as good as 9-6 suggests. They are flattered by a remarkable 6-0 record in games decided by a goal or less. That slightly inflated position, coupled with a relatively benign run home, may introduce some challenges in matching a bid for talented NGA prospect Khaled El Souki (and possibly the trade for Zak Butters). But that feels like small beer next to the excitement of winning close ones and the value of the finals experience for what’s still a young group.

There’s been growth through adversity. The question rattling around in my head is whether it’s reasonable for such a talent-studded side to be no better than league average with just one (admittedly, very good, very important) absence? Shouldn’t a team which still boasts the likes of Bontempelli, Richards, Naughton, and Freijah be… better? Perhaps it’s moot. This side will be different next season in a way that makes comparisons with the side they’ve been since April difficult. Darcy will be back. Butters is very likely to join. The club has signalled its pursuit of a key defender. There’ll still be important questions about talent distribution and game plan that haven’t been fully answered. But talent talks. The Dogs’ main objective for the rest of 2026 should be fortifying younger players with the experience they will need for the trials ahead.

My grade: B-

In addition to restarting paid subscriptions, I’ve also created a “Buy Me a Coffee” page. Here’s the link if you feel like supporting my work financially.

Plus: we share our memories of Tony Modra (don’t worry, he’s still recovering, you haven’t missed a terrible update!), Jonathan’s sore throat adds an extra baritone to the pod (he also says a slightly naughty word), Mateo remembers another ‘90s Adelaide icon, and we officially extend an invitation to Jack Ginnivan to join the pod.

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Links:

• Read Cody’s work here

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• Adelaide That Was: Dazzleland at the Myer Centre 1990s

We are now into the fourth week of the mid-season byes. The bye provides players with a chance to rest weary bodies and coaches with virtually their only real opportunity to make substantial changes to their game plan. As the byes unfold, I want to consider how each club is travelling – not just relative to pre-season expectations, but also what’s the likely range of outcomes for the rest of the season. Thankfully, I won’t be doing it alone. I’ve asked supporters of each club – all friends of the newsletter – to share their thoughts about how their sides are going and how it’s changed their belief about what’s possible in 2026. I’ll then respond with my own thoughts.

This installment, with apologies to Essendon and West Coast supporters, resembles the Three-Headed Dragon meme (except there’s an extra dragon). There are two beasts and then two derpy ones. But just because the Bombers and Eagles won’t figure in the season’s denouement doesn’t mean the storylines surrounding them are any less intriguing. They are playing for pride in 2026, and real table stakes in the upcoming years. One appears to be on the verge of climbing out of the basement. The other might just be beginning its stay. Then there’s Brisbane, the wounded champs, and Sydney, the side with so much Grand Final-related trauma. It is an intriguing set of teams that sat out Round 15. Let’s get into it.

Brisbane

Win-loss: 8-6

Ladder position: 8th

Next four games: Sydney (H), Geelong (A), Essendon (H), West Coast (A)

Perri, friend of the newsletter

The Lions’s season has been very up and down. Big wins against St Kilda, Collingwood, Adelaide and Gold Coast have been offset by close losses to Melbourne and the Western Bulldogs, and less close defeats to Fremantle, Sydney, Geelong, and GWS.

The fluctuation in competitiveness has been driven mostly by one of the longest injury lists in the AFL. At one point, the Lions just had six available players for selection outside the best 23.

As a result, there has been significant doubt from footy fans, members, and the media that Brisbane can achieve its second-ever threepeat.

The first half of the season has been worse than expected. But injuries have created opportunities for depth players. Despite the additions of Oscar Allen and Sam Draper pushing him further down the depth chart, Brisbane supporters have seen first-hand this season how good Ty Gallop can be as a backman. Much like Captain Harris Andrews who began life as a forward before becoming a defender, Gallop has shown how young players can quickly change positions while still benefiting the team in the long term.

Speaking of Draper, given his injury history at Essendon, it was fair to question what sort of contribution he’d be able to make. Instead, he’s quickly become Brisbane’s #1 ruck. Draper has been a big beneficiary of both the new ruck rules and tapping the ball down to a more capable midfield unit – his rate of hit outs to advantage has increased from 21.4% in 2025 to 34.6% in 2026, helping give his midfielders first use (the Lions are 1st in the AFL – by a lot – for first possessions at stoppages).

Given the side’s underwhelming start, it’s only natural that not every player has performed at their best. While he is often touted as a future Captain at the Lions, Fletcher has had a mediocre start to the season. Playing out of position as a defender doesn’t help him, but the Lions will need him at his best if they are to achieve the fabled threepeat. The biggest culprits, however, have been the players who make up the midfield unit. It’s partly understandable: several of them had interrupted pre-seasons and are playing through niggles. But the fact remains that they have majorly struggled, especially against the midfields of the other flag contenders. The Lions’ 25-point loss against Fremantle in Round 12 was a jarring example of how the midfield has struggled against the best in the league this season. According to Champion Data, Josh Dunkley, Hugh McCluggage, and Will Ashcroft’s output has declined significantly in the first half of the season compared to 2025. Dunkley has gone from being the 46th-rated player to the 188th, McCluggage has dropped from 12th to 180th, and Ashcroft has declined from the 38th highest-rated to the 235th. Going from an All-Australian squad member last year to being in and out of the side because of a persistent calf injury, Dunkley’s decrease in form has been the most stark of any Lions midfield player. If Brisbane are to feature in finals, the entire midfield group must lift, and the injury list must shorten.

Although missing finals from here is unlikely, this side currently looks a long way from contention. The Lions will have to dance on ice again if they’re to return to the final Saturday in September.

Perri’s grade: C

My thoughts

I’ll start with the good news: Brisbane are generating the second-highest expected score of any side, and over nine points more than last season. The attack is functioning well. Logan Morris has continued his development into one of the game’s deadliest marking forwards. Kai Lohmann has bounced back after a disappointing 2025 and Charlie Cameron has wound back the clock, silencing his critics in the process. Now to the bad news: defending is half of the game, and Brisbane’s defensive numbers have clearly deteriorated.

The Lions are currently conceding 87.7 expected points per game; 13th in the AFL. Compare that to 2025 (76.5 expected points – 8th) or 2024 (71.5 – 2nd) and the picture of a side that has lost its ability to prevent damage becomes clear. So what’s changed? Perri has identified the decline in output from the side’s champion midfield, the anchor of its era of success. But although there are semi-extenuating individual explanations (niggling injuries, an ebbing of desire after back-to-back Premierships, etc.), I always prefer finding a structural explanation. Many of the fundamentals of Brisbane’s game have remained intact: they still lead the league for marks differential and clearance differential. Few sides are as good at winning the ball and keeping it. The problem is that opposition sides have become more efficient at creating situations where the ball is in dispute, and vastly more damaging when forcing turnovers.

The Lions were 1st for time in possession in 2024 and 2nd in the same stat in 2025. This season, that’s dropped to 5th. It’s modest but meaningful. Brisbane’s distinctive kick-mark game is its first layer of defence. As the Lions’ time in possession has decreased, the opposition’s ability to punish in transition has increased. Brisbane are currently the second-worst side in the AFL, better than only Essendon, at denying its opposition from taking the ball from D50 to F50. In fact, the Lions are in the bottom three for all the major transition denial stats and – unsurprisingly – 17th for opposition scores from the back half. Rather than a single smoking gun culprit, it’s an accumulation of several different factors: the decline in time in possession, a modest decline in the Lions’ ability to win contests around the ground, and injuries. There’s also the basic fact that the Lions are the hunted. Opposition coaches have been thinking about how to unpick their game plan for two years. The evidence thus far is that they are making progress.

None of this should frighten Brisbane supporters too much. Their side copped the occasional anomalous Home & Away result even during its Premiership years. The Lions have, from time to time, given the impression they’re playing beneath their true level from March to August. This side has won a flag from outside the top four before. Hell, they’ve won a flag from 44 points down midway through the third quarter of a Semi Final before. No one will believe this side is done until it’s actually done. But it does feel slightly different this time – as though Brisbane’s players are more sated (and more injured), and their opponents more determined.

My grade: C+

Essendon

Win-loss: 1-13

Ladder position: 18th

Next four games: North Melbourne (A), St Kilda (H), Brisbane (A), GWS (H)

Anth Proc, author of the Bombers Blog

What a 12 months it has been to be part of the red and black army. Only once since Round 11 last year have Essendon supporters seen the Bombers fly up, up. The reality of the rebuild that had been discussed, and for some, not announced loudly enough, quickly became impossible to ignore.

Having watched much of Essendon’s summer training, I wasn’t alone in thinking another evolution in ball movement was coming in 2026. Across Brad Scott’s first two seasons, Essendon largely relied on a kick-mark game style, recording a handball percentage of 41.6% across 2023 and 2024 (the Bombers were 15th for kick percentage in 2024, and 18th last season). By Round 11 last year, before injuries truly began to take hold, that figure had climbed to 44.5% as the Bombers increasingly looked to support the contest with extra numbers and then link up by hand to generate possession chains.

At that stage of last season, no side in the competition was averaging anywhere near Essendon’s 145 handball receives. For context, Sydney currently leads the AFL in this metric in 2026 – with 145. The problem was that this style often invited pressure at the source, produced very little territory, and made opposition turnover scoring far too easy.

Watching summer training created optimism that another adjustment was coming. There appeared to be a greater emphasis on territory, quicker ball movement and backing in teammates ahead of the ball, resembling much of what Fremantle has shown this season: kick long to a contest, trust the forwards to either win it in the air or bring it to ground, and be predictable for teammates arriving to support at ground level.

Unfortunately, that is not what unfolded once the season began. Three games in, Essendon was once again overusing handball, with 47.6% of its disposals coming by hand.

The long kick to contest that appeared to be such a focus over summer vanished almost immediately, leaving the forwards looking up the ground in bewilderment while Essendon gained the fewest metres via kicking in the AFL, and by a significant margin.

Then there were the defensive issues. After three rounds, Essendon was allowing 146 uncontested marks per game, including 123 in transition through the back two-thirds of the ground, numbers that would have been setting off alarm bells. In Round 4, the Bulldogs had opened a nine-goal lead by half-time, setting up a significant challenge at the main break.

After the restart, Essendon abandoned the handball-heavy approach and returned to a more controlled style. The Bombers took 48 uncontested marks, working methodically up the ground and, in doing so, defending far more effectively behind the ball.

With confidence regained after returning to a previous version of themselves, Essendon headed to Gather Round, where the control method continued. Against Melbourne, the Bombers finished +57 in uncontested marks and +99 in uncontested possessions, snapping an equal club-record 17-game losing streak with a 45-point victory. It was Essendon’s biggest win since Round 11, 2023.

Yet for all the positives, it is not a style I believe will deliver reliable long-term success.

In my view, Essendon’s two best performances of the season came against Gold Coast and GWS. Those two prefer to move the ball through handball and run, creating more chaos. Significantly, they remain the only two games this season where Essendon’s opponents were forced to win more ground balls than marks [Mateo: the ratio of ground ball gets to marks is a useful rule of thumb for “control” vs. “chaos”].

Compare that to Brisbane, Collingwood, Hawthorn and Port Adelaide – the AFL’s top four uncontested marking sides – and it is no coincidence those matches produced Essendon’s four heaviest defeats of the season.

The challenge for Essendon in 2026 has been finding a game model that is both competitive now and capable of developing the next generation at the same time. Unfortunately, the second-youngest and second-least experienced side in the competition has been unable to find consistency in most facets of the modern game.

While there have been occasional signs of improvement, the fundamentals haven’t improved enough for long enough. Eventually, after a disappointing second consecutive loss to Richmond, the club reached a conclusion many had seen coming. Brad Scott’s tenure came to an end.

From my perspective, the decision itself was justified. Many of the defensive metrics I track had trended in the wrong direction over his final 46 games, including opposition transition from defensive 50 to inside 50, opposition scores per inside 50, intercepts per opposition possession and points conceded from turnovers (the list goes on).

While most associated with the club appeared aligned on what would be required to compete with the best sides in the competition long term, turning that vision into high-level performance proved a different challenge altogether. It was fair for stakeholders to question whether Scott was the coach capable of delivering it, and not unreasonable that they decided he wasn’t.

What remains more debatable is the timing. With only three games remaining before the mid-season bye, the decision inevitably left those remaining to pick up the pieces scrambling to manage both coaching changes and on-field priorities simultaneously. The same decision could have been made with much less disruption three weeks later.

The coaching search itself will dominate discussion throughout the second half of the year. I could write thousands of words on potential candidates, club politics, media speculation and Essendon’s history of football department appointments, but that discussion misses the bigger point: whoever gets the role needs to be the best available coach. More importantly, they need to be surrounded by the best people possible.

For all the disappointment of 2026, the brightest moments have almost exclusively come from the younger brigade. Sullivan Robey has helped transform Essendon’s stoppage profile. After four rounds, the Bombers sat at a cumulative clearance differential of -53. Since his introduction, that number has improved to +33. His contested work pre-clearance has also been a significant factor, with Essendon going from -40 to +32 in that area over the same period.

Dyson Sharp immediately translated his under-18 traits to AFL level when given greater midfield responsibility against GWS in Round 9. Before injury cut his afternoon short, Sharp had 17 possessions, 10 contested, seven at pre-clearance, and converted four of his five first possessions into effective clearances in only 40 minutes of football.

Behind the ball, Jacob Farrow and Archie Roberts have shown enough to suggest both can become important pieces of the future. A system that better rewards their vision and kicking skills should allow them to play with greater confidence and aggression.

Further forward, there are also genuine reasons for optimism.

Nate Caddy ranks 15th in the AFL for marks inside 50 and ninth for shots at goal despite Essendon sitting 17th for inside 50s. Archer May is already inside the top 10 forwards for front-half contested marks, while Isaac Kako finished the first half of the season in the AFL’s top 15 for post-clearance inside-50 groundball.

There is talent. The challenge now is creating an environment where it can flourish. While wins would provide a welcome reward after an extremely difficult season, development must remain the primary focus.

Anth’s grade: D-

My thoughts

Part of what Anth’s review correctly identifies is that Essendon’s current ladder position makes the win-loss record a poor measure of success. Realistically, the Bombers are unlikely to win more than one game for the remainder of the season. If it doesn’t happen in the next four fixtures, it probably won’t happen. There will probably be more heavy defeats. Supporters should acquaint themselves with this year’s draft cohort.

Results can’t be the measuring stick. Instead, as Anth suggested, Essendon supporters – those brave enough, or masochistic enough, to keep watching – should focus on improvement in defensive metrics and the development of what suddenly looks like an exciting crop of youngsters. Essendon’s defensive numbers across the last five games have modestly improved. In that time, the Bombers are 14th for opposition chain to score, 15th for opposition D50 to F50, and 6th for opposition expected score. The softness of the fixture across that time (Essendon has played Carlton, Richmond, and West Coast in the last five) makes me sceptical that it’s anything other than a biased sample.

The reality is that, although one can quibble the exact timing, sacking Brad Scott was the right call. His Essendon side was shockingly poor defensively, to an extent I don’t believe can be wholly attributed to injuries. The Bombers played in small spaces while allowing their opponents to play in large spaces. Sure, it may have looked comical – the desperate act of a desperate club. But footy clubs can’t allow themselves to become hostages of the past or of public opinion.

The challenge will be whether Essendon is a mature enough club, with a sufficiently robust decision-making framework, to make better decisions from here. The early evidence is not encouraging. Dean Solomon was a curious choice of interim coach given his culpability for the side’s defensive woes (he was appointed as the assistant in charge of the backline and team defence, after serving on the club’s Board of Directors in 2025). The apparent chase for James Hird… well, there’s little point in me re-prosecuting arguments that have already been made hundreds of times in both directions. It’s possible Hird is a good coach who has kept up with the vanguard of modern tactics. I think the more likely explanation is that he believes he still has unfinished business at the club where he remains enormously popular with fans and influential with coteries. Regardless of the identity of Essendon’s next coach, the long-term mission remains the same: develop the young players, retain enough mature bodies that the floor doesn’t fall even lower, hit the draft heavily, and gradually rebuild the prestige of this fallen old club. There are no shortcuts, only a long road. It will involve a fair amount more pain.

My grade: D

Sydney

Win-loss: 12-2

Ladder position: 2nd

Next four games: Brisbane (A), Western Bulldogs (H), Fremantle (A), Adelaide (H)

Joe Cordy, This Week in Football contributor

Losing consecutive Grand Final appearances, particularly four, can really warp your relationship to success. I don’t know if the dynamic switched after the second, third or fourth loss, but at some point the potential of going to another big dance became more ominous than exciting. “Could we do it?” gave way to “I can’t do this again.”

I’m aware of how this looks to opposition fans and I appreciate the offers for ever-smaller violins providing ever-sadder soundtracks, but like I said, it warps your relationship to success.

Unfortunately that’s about where Swans are 14 games in: 12-2, entrenched in the top two, and aside from a couple of long-term injuries, everything going about as well as you could reasonably expect. To my eye, there are three key factors that have gotten us here and make me quietly confident (and uneasy) about playing in the last game of September.

The first is the integration of the new blood, both from within and without the club. I’ve told anyone who will listen that I’m not sure how I’m meant to explain to my currently eight-month-old son that I was once something called a “Charlie Curnow defender”. His goal contributions, both direct and indirect through the space he’s created for players like Amartey, have been awesome but expected; what I will admit I was reserving judgement for was his off- and ground-ball work, both of which have been impeccable. Jai Serong and Will Edwards have brought the depth of big-bodied defenders we’ve been crying out for since the loss of Paddy McCartin and end of the Will Gould experiment, and Malcolm Rosas Jnr. has been a genuine revelation.

The second is how much more mature we are off-the-ball and defensively, particularly when the run of play is going against us. The 2022 and 2024 teams were like bad window washers – streaky. They looked like Showtime Lakers going one direction but the worries about their porous defence, need for clean ball movement and tendency to fall behind at the start of games were fully realised in both Grand Finals. The current iteration have sacrificed some of that liquid ball movement and high-volume scoring but are overall so much stronger in defence because of it. Part of it is just having more talented players on the field. But a lot of it is how much the rest defence has been helped by the pivot from precision kicking to forward handballs and overlapping runs to break through the middle of the field. When it doesn’t come off, we’re already right in the opponent’s face to win it back.

The third is the pending return of Errol Gulden for the run-in. He’s the key to everything. Heeney’s athletic ability and nous make him our clear best player but Errol is arguably our most important. The way he coordinates the rest of the side particularly around stoppages is only paralleled by Callum Mills, and his vision for how the game is about to unfold is peerless within the side. This isn’t to say that his eye-catching highlight reel stuff isn’t more impactful, direct actions always are, but where that can be recreated in the aggregate by the rest of the team, his indirect work is irreplaceable. When he went down, the hope was just to be in touch with the top four so that we could mount a charge for a double chance upon his return, so to be in a position where we can cruise (relatively) comfortably to top two just from breaking even in the remaining fixtures is an immeasurable boon. It takes the mental pressure off of each result and provides room to experiment with lineups and tactics ahead of the finals.

The ceiling on this team’s potential performances week to week is as high as it’s ever been, and the floor hasn’t been so high in a decade. Cox has a plan, it works, and it can survive losing key players. There’s every reason to believe we can go deep into finals, again.

I cannot overstate how stressed I am.

Joe’s grade: A+

My thoughts

Across pre-season, Errol Gulden spoke about how the Swans wanted to put more speed on the ball in 2026. In my season preview, I hypothesised that that greater speed would most likely manifest as less time spent at half-back and more decisive corridor release but probably wouldn’t see the Swans become more frantic with the ball. Well, I was correct enough on the first two, but very wrong on the third! The Swans have executed the boldest in-possession changes of any side in the AFL. Consider this: last season, the Swans were 8th for marks and 5th for kicks as a share of disposals. This season, they are 18th for marks and 18th for kicks as a share of disposals. They are also 1st for handballs and handball receives and, as has been widely remarked upon, they top the league for handball metres gained. The increase is extraordinary. Last season, Sydney gained an average of 177.7 metres by hand per game. This season – 695.2. They have gone from being conventional to being an outlier.

Thus far, it’s been a smart gamble. Sport is replete with examples of sides that have leveraged short-term tactical advantages to their benefit. I suspect embracing such an extreme change in game style has been responsible for a large amount of Sydney’s return to the top reaches of the ladder (I pity the poor opposition analysts who had to report on Sydney’s game plan in the first month of this season). As Joe alluded to, it’s plausible that the pivot will make Sydney more robust when the whips are cracking in September. The 2024 Swans were too reliant on clean ball to function. That side was 14th for forward-50 ground ball gets. This side is top for the same statistic. Defensively, too, prior Sydney sides, even those that made Grand Finals, tended to be clever but brittle, and relied too heavily on dominating possession to prevent opposition scores. This one – admittedly, only halfway into the season – looks more robust. The Swans are currently 3rd for opposition shots per inside-50 entry (they were 14th in 2024).

This side has also not been cruelled by injury to the same extent. Gulden, captain Callum Mills, and Logan McDonald all missed significant time in 2025. This season, McDonald no longer needs to shoulder the burden of being the main forward, and the side was able to string together good results and performances despite Gulden’s absence. He is almost certain to return this week against Brisbane.

These Swans are good. They play an unusual and unusually explosive brand of football. I suspect pundits are probably overindexing on the fragility of past Sydney sides that have failed on the biggest stage. But it’s true that this version hasn’t truly been stress-tested yet. The next four weeks, which includes games against Brisbane, Fremantle, and Adelaide, will teach us much more about them. I’m not yet convinced that they’re better than the rest of what currently looks like a very even top four. But I’m equally unconvinced they’re any worse. The Swans have the talent. They have the game. What remains to be seen is whether they have the mettle.

My grade: A

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West Coast

Win-loss: 4-10

Ladder position: 16th

Next four games: Carlton (A), Adelaide (H), Western Bulldogs (A), Brisbane (H)

Man Seeking Merry Hell, This Week In Football contributor and newly-minted footy substacker

2025 always felt like something of a ‘Year Zero’ for Andrew McQualter. He arrived at a club undergoing one of the deepest clean outs in recent history, promising a game plan seemingly designed to be the polar opposite to his predecessor.

What was already one of the youngest teams in football became further unrecognisable by the time West Coast’s bye rolled around, thanks to the in-season retirements of Jeremy McGovern and Dom Sheed, and trade speculation looming over captain Oscar Allen. Things quickly became an exercise in getting minutes into the legs of a few key pillars, then holding on for dear life.

Flash forward to bye week 2026, and the Eagles have taken some big strides, moving from ‘historically bad’ to ‘still not great but having an honest dip’. Crucially, the gameplan we were promised upon McQualter’s arrival is showing genuine signs of life, built around taking field position and building pressure through repeat inside 50s.

While definitely more interested in process than results, I had five wins as an indicative pass mark for the season. With four under the belt, West Coast is well on its way. The year thus far can be divided into three. The opening three rounds, where a 2-1 record led by a raft of highly drafted kids and the unearthing of Milan Murdock had fans rubbing their eyes in disbelief.

Then came a 21-goal home defeat to Sydney. There were still moments to savour, such as Willem Duursma and Jobe Shanahan joining a growing list of reasons to be excited about the future, but the loss of defensive anchors Jack Graham and Dev Robertson left the Eagles far too brittle against the league’s best (…and St Kilda) [Mateo: aggrieved Saints fans, take it up with MSMH].

From the day the fixture was announced, the period on which to judge McQualter and his Eagles was Round 8 until the bye. It started as poorly as imaginable, throwing away a home game in grim fashion to a previously winless Richmond – the clear low point of 2026 despite the two 100+ point defeats.

However, from Round 9 onwards, West Coast has suddenly looked like a real team, consistently playing the game on their terms for the first time in years. Over the last five weeks, the Eagles rank #1 in the league for time in forward half, with a defence rated #1 in D50 transition, and #2 in metres gained.

While the majority of list improvement is still predicated on patience, it’s been a breath of fresh air to see healthy veterans own their roles. In addition to the biggest find of the season, the aforementioned Murdock, Eagles fans have enjoyed Bailey Williams taking full advantage of the new ruck rules, and the renaissance of Tim Kelly. We’ve also seen our fair share of interesting magnet moves (see: Brady Hough reinforcing the midfield in a tagging role, and lifelong defender Tom Cole’s redeployment as a goal-kicking pressure small forward).

There’s still no team in footy more reliant on one player than West Coast and Harley Reid [Mateo: Port and Zak Butters??], whose strong pre-season and growing in-game maturity (yes, I’m serious) has taken his output to a new level while revealing him as a surprise mentor among the club’s youngest players.

It can’t be ignored that most of the improved performances have come against teams ranging from wildcard hopefuls to outright bottom-two fodder. But equally, recent losses by 10, 6, and 1 mean that, with a bit of luck, the Eagles could be wildly over-performing on the ladder.

There’s still plenty to be solved; we’ve seen no reliable method of scoring from D50, and Reuben Ginbey’s season ending quad injury compounds Harry Edwards’ highly uncertain future. The club is likely to search for a key defender during the trade and draft period.

A poor run home will see tensions return but, for now, it seems as though West Coast has set itself up for a period of natural growth. Steal one or two wins before the offseason and it cements what we’re starting to suspect; the Eagles are finally stirring from their long slumber.

MSMH’s grade: B-

My thoughts

The Eagles have lost two games this season by more than 100 points. They have lost to Richmond – at home. And yet, I think things are looking up and that, furthermore, that’s a fairly widely held view among West Coast’s supporters. I wrote in my 2026 season preview that Andrew McQualter would be looking for progress in key indicators of his game model: scores from forward half, turnovers forced, and post-clearance contested possessions. Improve them, and a jump up the ladder (well, perhaps a step up) was within reach.

At first glance, those indicators have recorded modest progress, but not necessarily the sort you’d associate with West Coast’s clear improvement. The Eagles are 13th for post-clearance contested possessions after being 16th in that stat in 2025, 13th for intercept possessions (same as last season), and 16th for forward half scores. But, as Man Seeking Merry Hell suggests, the improvement has really happened over the last five games. Here’s a sample of how the Eagles are faring in some metrics over that timespan:

• 8th for scores from turnover

• 3rd for scores from forward half

• 16th for opposition contested possession share

• 2nd for opposition for disposal retention

• 2nd for opposition marks

• 3rd for opposition scores from turnover

• 2nd for opposition D50 to F50 success rate

What unites these statistics is how closely correlated they all are to McQualter’s high-pressure surge and turnover style (that he learnt as an assistant to Damien Hardwick at Richmond). The Eagles are getting better at forcing turnovers in dangerous areas of the ground, converting those turnovers into scores, denying their opposition easy uncontested possessions or marks, and successfully applying frontal pressure to stymie opposition ball movement. That’s the blueprint: apply tremendous pressure at ground level, patrol the skies, and surge forward following contest wins. And there’s real evidence it’s working. It’s not at all unthinkable that the Eagles could have won four or perhaps even all of their last five games. It should be said that, as bad as West Coast was last season, it was never really “one-win season” bad. The Eagles were unlucky, going 0-4 in games decided by 10 points or fewer.

It’s always worth asking how much of a rebuilding side’s improvement is being driven by older players enjoying a late-career resurgence and how much of the work is being done by younger players. Tim Kelly, Elliott Yeo and Liam Baker have been the Eagles’ three highest-rated players across the last 20 games. None are young. But you’re allowed to have senior players play well. It’s not illegal! And, crucially, any honest accounting of West Coast’s season would conclude that the club’s young players are pulling their weight. Willem Duursma has taken to senior footy like a duck to water. He looks every inch a number one draft pick. Harley Reid has shaken off his second-year blues. Jobe Shanahan has star attributes. Tom McCarthy and Milan Murdock look like excellent low-cost additions. Reuben Ginbey might not be a midfielder, but has become a very good hybrid defender. Early signs for Marcus Herbert and Josh Lindsay are encouraging. Dev Robertson and Brandon Starcevich look like good soldiers. The outline of a very good list, youth supplemented by reliable experience, is beginning to come into view. Chad Warner and Mitch Georgiades could well join as free agents next year.

What needs to happen in the Eagles’ final nine games to make the season an unqualified success? Another win or two will maintain supporter optimism without spoiling what looks like yet another tasty draft pick (the Eagles have games against Richmond and Collingwood to come). Results are good, but performances probably matter more at this stage of the build. McQualter will want to see the strong performance in the statistics I cited earlier continue. Regardless of what happens, Eagles fans should feel confident that things are finally trending the right way. Something is stirring out West.

My grade: B

I’ll be back later this week, or early next, with thoughts on how Geelong, St Kilda, Melbourne, and the Western Bulldogs are travelling.

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