Plus: Mateo reveals Jonathan’s footy allegiance, Cody Remembers Some Guys, and we celebrate the Socceroos’ inspiring start to the World Cup by defying the No Sherrin rule.

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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 the Instagram reel Cody mentioned about how players are increasingly seeking to kick with the outside of their dominant foot rather than kick with their non-preferred.

Links:

• Read Cody’s work here

• Read Jonathan’s work here

We are now into the third week of the mid-season byes. The week off 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.

There’s lots of meat in this third installment: two genuine flag contenders, a Carlton side that has won four consecutive games under caretaker Josh Fraser and is suddenly a chance of making the Wildcard Round, and a Collingwood side that looks well short of the top sides. Subplots and storylines abound. How will Fremantle’s players – and supporters – deal with the pressure of expectations? Can Hawthorn bridge the small but significant gap to the very best? What will the Carlton hierarchy do if Fraser keeps on winning? And how will Collingwood respond to being at the crossroads? Let’s get into it.

Carlton

Win-loss: 5-8

Ladder position: 13th

Next four games: GWS (A), West Coast (H), Richmond (A), Hawthorn (H)

Jono Baruch from The Gardiner Stand Substack

Carlton has packed a full season’s worth of drama and emotions into the first half of 2026. Major upheaval in the off-season was followed by a disastrous 1-8 start, the resignation [Mateo: “resignation”] of coach Michael Voss, the sad Elijah Hollands situation, and now – improbably – four consecutive wins heading into the mid-season bye. Remarkably, the flame on Carlton’s season is still flickering.

The first half of 2026 has felt like two completely different seasons. The opening nine rounds were a continuation of the frustrations that had followed Carlton for much of the previous 18 months. Slow ball movement, an overreliance on contest and clearance, and an inability to stop momentum swings led to games repeatedly slipping away. It was like watching Groundhog Day without the happy ending.

The coaching change has undoubtedly altered the mood and direction of the season. Under Josh Fraser, Carlton looks more composed with the ball, more willing to control tempo and, perhaps most importantly, more confident in its identity.

Fraser’s remarkable start to coaching life has vindicated scepticism of his predecessor and yielded more information about the list. Carlton entered 2026 with the sixth-oldest list in the competition and an increasingly urgent need to determine whether the next generation was ready to become more than supporting acts around the club’s established stars. The answer, encouragingly, appears to be yes.

Harry Dean and Jagga Smith have both earned Rising Star nominations and look capable of becoming long-term pillars. Lachie Cowan has continued his development after some worrying moments of stagnation, while Jack Ison and Billy Wilson have arrived at AFL level looking more comfortable than many would have expected. Talor Byrne has shown glimpses and, before his unfortunate ACL injury, Matt Carroll was producing the best football of his career and looked well on the way to becoming a set-and-forget on the wing.

For a club that has often been criticised for its inability to develop depth beyond its top-end talent, the emergence of that group may prove one of the most significant developments of the season. There remain holes to fill and difficult decisions to make. A significant number of players remain out of contract, and the incoming senior coach – whether it’s Fraser or not – will inherit a list that is still undergoing renovation rather than one ready for immediate contention. But the outlook is healthier than it appeared a month ago.

The reality is Carlton should never have been 1-8. They led at half-time in six of those first nine games. Equally, four wins don’t suddenly erase every concern. The truth likely sits somewhere in the middle.

As the Blues head into the bye at 5-8, finals remain unlikely. Making the Wildcard Round would probably require winning seven of their last 10 games. But for the first time in a long time, the conversation feels less about what Carlton lacks and more about what it might become.

Jono’s grade: C-

My thoughts

Jono nailed it when he wrote that the first half of Carlton’s season has felt like two entirely different seasons. The first was miserable: excruciating proof that refreshing the list while retaining Michael Voss was the wrong call. Losing is never fun. Losing in more-or-less the same way each week, allowing opposition supporters to draw from a bottomless reservoir of schadenfreude, really is the worst. The second quarter of Carlton’s season – or, if you want to be pedantic, the last month – has been revelatory: Josh Fraser has won four straight games while also exposing young players like Jack Ison, Billy Wilson, Talor Byrne, and Matt Carroll to senior footy.

Carlton’s statistical profile under Fraser belies the claim that the side’s major impediment was the list. Over the last five games, the Blues are second for D50 to F50 transition success rate, fourth for chain to score, second for time in possession, and third for inside-50 retention rate. There’s other stats I could quote, but the point is abundantly clear: Fraser has turned a group of players that, under Voss, resembled the Titanic – huge, slow, destined for disaster – and, with a few subtle tweaks, got them playing something resembling modern footy. Across that five-game stretch (which encompasses Voss’s final game), the Blues played Brisbane, the Bulldogs, West Coast, Port Adelaide, and Geelong – perhaps a very slightly easier than average draw but certainly not so soft that it renders the numbers meaningless.

The questions now are what does Carlton’s form in the last month mean for the club’s short, medium, and long term. Specifically, what can the club salvage from this season, how will its resurgence affect its strategy for this year’s draft, and how will it affect the club hierarchy’s beliefs about what’s possible in the next five years?

It’s still unlikely that Carlton will qualify for the Wildcard Round. For what it’s worth, Andrew Whelan of Wheelo Ratings (someone who actually understands probability) thinks there’s only a 27.9% chance the Blues finish in the top 10. But that chance would have been less than 5% a month ago. If Carlton are genuinely a different side, they could make it. Their next month will tell us more. Win four, perhaps even three of those games, and they could make a run at it.

Regarding the draft: if you’re reading this, then you probably know both that a) Carlton has a very promising father-son prospect in this year’s draft; and that b) the AFL has increased the cost of matching bids on club-tied talent. At the time of writing, it’s still regarded as a fait accompli that a club will bid on Cody Walker in the top two of the draft. That’s both good for Carlton (because it will indicate that he is highly rated among recruiters) and bad for Carlton (because the cost to acquire him will be steep). The debate about tanking for draft picks, the importance of establishing a “winning culture” is contested and won’t be resolved by what I write here. The facts are clear enough: with each win, Carlton will need to pay a higher price for a prospect the club has publicly committed to. Doing so will reduce how much else the Blues can achieve in this year’s draft.

As for the long term, I think a prudently-run club would avoid significantly changing its priors based on one month of footy. Carlton has not always been prudently run. But Graeme Wright was appointed CEO for exactly this reason: to create a sound process around important questions such as: what do we do if we keep winning? How does it change our next 2-3 years of list building? How should our form inform our coaching search? Just as important as the answers is the process used to derive them. This will be the most important storyline to follow for the rest of Carlton’s season.

My grade: C

Collingwood

Win-loss: 5-7-1

Ladder position: 11th

Next four games: Port Adelaide (H), Richmond (H), Gold Coast (A), North (H)

Leigh Eustace, author of the Get Serious Substack

Collingwood’s contradictory 2025 season blurred fan expectations entering 2026, and despite sitting 11th at the bye, the reality of where they actually are feels unclear.

Last year, the Pies were two and a half games clear on top before famously stumbling into fourth. Yet they still led the eventual Premiers at half-time of a Preliminary Final. So, what to make of it all?

Many questions remain unanswered halfway through 2026. On one hand, the red flags are well publicised: forward-half issues, questions over talent, and an ageing list. Yet despite all that, other than being torched by Brisbane on Easter Thursday, Collingwood have been competitive throughout. Even against Geelong, only Collingwood’s inaccurate goalkicking prevented them being right in the contest at three-quarter time before the margin blew out late.

In 2023, Collingwood went 8-1 in games decided by less than 10 points. This year, however, they’re 1-1-4. Who knows, with some 2023 pixie dust, this team, for all its flaws and foibles, could easily be sitting on the edge of the top four (and perceived quite differently).

Returning from the bye, the Pies face Richmond and Port Adelaide. Win both and they will be 7-7-1 with eight games to play. With 10th now effectively the new 8th, who knows?

Is there another September chapter to be written? Nick Daicos is probably leading the Brownlow [Mateo: not sure I agree but I’m leaving it in!], Jordan De Goey is having his best home-and-away season in years, and Harry Perryman, Billy Frampton and Lachie Schultz amongst others all enjoying strong seasons too.

Craig McRae’s coaching gives Collingwood a chance every week. Defensively, the system is holding up. Offense though, it persists as the elephant in the room. Some weeks they generate enough entries but are wasteful. Other weeks they struggle to generate entries at all, rendering any discussion about efficiency redundant.

Collingwood have tried multiple forward options (Dan McStay, Jack Buller, Tim Membrey, Charlie West), yet none has yet taken their chance. The pseudo no.1 key forward has instead remained the 177cm Jamie Elliott. After a slow start to the season, Elliott had rediscovered form, kicking 12 in his last six games. His season-ending knee injury, sustained in the last minute of Scott Pendlebury’s milestone 433rd game, was a brutal blow that lowers the ceiling on what the Pies can achieve this season.

If McRae can keep Collingwood competitive while giving extended opportunities to Ed Allan, Angus Anderson, Harvey Harrison, Will Hayes, West and Buller, and hopefully debuts to Liam Puncher, Sam Swadling and Joel Cochran, then a “walk and chew gum” approach may be the most appealing outcome for supporters.

If it leads to a wildcard spot and the Pies play with house money in September, terrific. If not, a clearer picture of life after the veterans and a list positioned for an aggressive offseason with an “impatient” list strategy may be the next best thing. Unrewarding, ultimately, but acceptable.

Leigh’s grade: C

My thoughts

I wrote about Collingwood’s predicament in my post last week. My basic conclusion was that the Pies’ apparent desire to continue supplementing its list with mature-aged talent, trades, and free agents to extend its contention window across Nick Daicos’s prime is probably the correct one. Keeping the floor high isn’t without risk – there is no meaningful zero-risk option available! – but the range of outcomes is narrower than committing to a three-year build through the draft which might theoretically “raise the ceiling” but is just as likely to not yield the high-end talent Collingwood needs.

The reality is, that despite results being poorer than most Pies supporters would have expected, ninth and 10th now being “finals” spots means that the season is still live. Wheelo gives Collingwood a 40% chance of finishing in the top 10. They will start favourites in their next four games. Being without Darcy Moore, Brayden Maynard and Jamie Elliott hurts, but the first two names could yet play a role in the back-end of the season. A factor which works in Collingwood’s favour is that, as Leigh wrote, they’re not far off it. The floor is high and the defensive system is intact. Despite the close game magic having worn off, Collingwood’s craftiness keeps them in games. It’s not hard to see a couple of close losses turn into close wins, a September berth, and an Elimination Final.

Beyond this season, there is also cause for optimism. Should Collingwood’s season peter out, the Pies will finally be able to do something they’ve not done since 2021: have a properly early pick in the draft. The consensus seems to be that the biggest gaps on the list are a running mate for Daicos and a true key forward. Both types are likely to be available around Collingwood’s natural first-round pick. Both types are also likely to be available during Trade Week. Media reports currently suggest Collingwood is leading the pack for Lachie Neale. They are keen on Jed Walter. I have little doubt the club hierarchy has inquired about the availability and willingness of the likes of Ben King, Zak Butters, Max Gruzewski, Charlie Ballard, Darcy Wilson, Bailey Humphrey, and Zac Bailey. The Pies won’t get all of them. Just getting two of them could vault a healthy Collingwood back into contention, or something close to it, in 2027.

That’s the optimistic case. The pessimistic story is the one told by reality: Collingwood are losing ground to the best teams in the comp, and a list management strategy that revolves around topping up with low-ceiling types and competing in a sellers’ trade market will only see that gap widen. It’s not just the distance between them and the best (although they could well have beaten Fremantle in Gather Round), it’s the number of sides that appear clearly better than McRae’s side. Getting important players back from injury and acquiring some key trade targets will undoubtedly make Collingwood better. But it’s now been a year since the Pies looked close to being the best side in footy. And a year means a lot for the oldest team in footy.

I wonder: in a world where tanking didn’t elicit penalties and senior club officials spoke candidly about their intentions, what would Collingwood do for the rest of this season? Would the club acknowledge that a flag is a remote possibility and instead make choices geared toward the long-term, including maximising the value of its hand in the last uncompromised draft before Tasmania enters the league? The club’s recent list management decisions suggest not. But I’d argue 2026 is a different type of opportunity. Success looks further away and the cliff looks closer. Wouldn’t getting a top-eight pick, securing some coveted trade and free agency targets, and reloading for another tilt next season be better? I suspect we’ll never know. Instead, the Pies will probably do what they’ve been doing all year: stick close to good teams, trust their system, and run everything through their talisman #35.

My grade: C-

Fremantle

Win-loss: 12-1

Ladder position: 1st

Next four games: Geelong (H), Gold Coast (H), GWS (A), Sydney (H)

Mim Birch, author of Mim’s Substack

There has been no overhaul by the Fremantle Dockers. This is basically the same team playing basically the same defence-first game plan. Improvement has largely been demographic: young, inexperienced players are one year older, and one year wiser. They win more physical contests, and have less stupid turnovers.

The throughline of Freo’s 2026 is that this side simply does not let its opponents kick a winning score. Coach Justin Longmuir has made it his mission to prevent the stand rule’s intended outcome, a free-flowing game. Freo have conceded the lowest points against by adding the following layers to its already solid defensive game:

1. Freo’s previously zoned defence has become tighter. The Dockers do not want the opposition to have an easy option, even laterally. This is a much needed fix to kick-mark vulnerabilities in 2025.

2. Players have been instructed to sprint over to man the mark, ensuring they’re inside the zone when ‘stand’ is called, preventing opposition play on.

3. Freo is relentless in preventing a run-past handball receive. (The Dockers boast the lowest opposition average for handball receives – by a significant margin.) Any dashing half-backs or zippy outside mids are forced to confront a direct opponent running with, bumping, and scragging them.

This is a lot of hard running baked into the gameplan before any Freo player even touches the ball. Effectiveness hinges on not only this aerobic effort, but also unerring attention to direct opponents, communication for hand-overs. (These high demands help explain some in-game lapses.)

While in possession, Freo denies turnovers in dangerous positions. If the Dockers succeed in generating overlap or a man out, they back the skills and speed of Murphy Reid, Shai Bolton, Michael Frederick, etc. Without a clean option, defenders switch, sometimes multiple times. Nothing forthcoming, Freo take the neutral long-down-the-line to their reliable talls (usually resulting in a stoppage) over a 60-40 kick that could result in a fatal corridor turnover.

This side enjoys a stoppage. The midfield bats deep (attested to by the recent win over Brisbane without Caleb Serong or Hayden Young). Longmuir’s side is second in scores from stoppage differential in 2026 – a significant improvement from 9th in 2025. So far in 2026, the Jackson/Some Big Goober Playing 55% time on ground combo is second for Hitout to Advantage differential, behind only Hawthorn.

Freo’s tall forward line is a proof of concept for the much-maligned concept of organic improvement. Treacy, Amiss, Voss are a year closer to the age that AFL key forwards ought to be. More contested marks stick, more physical contests go Freo’s way. Patrick Voss is first in the AFL for inside-50 tackles among players who’ve played more than five games. He’s more than just a meme.

After an uninterrupted pre-season learning inside midfield running patterns, Shai Bolton has been revelatory. His chaotic brilliance is no longer fighting against structure, but utilising space created by teammates. There’s also been big improvement in Fremantle’s bottom six players. Karl Worner is getting the ball five times more per game this season compared to last. Matthew Johnson and Neil Erasmus are now mature bodies with cool heads. Isaiah Dudley’s improved fitness has transformed him into a genuine pressure forward.

My primary concern for Freo is the close wins against quality opposition. A gameplan predicated on reducing in-game variance can, paradoxically, increase it. Smaller margins increase exposure to luck: umpire decisions, skill errors, moments of individual brilliance from the opposition, in-game injuries.

The bad scenario is that Freo’s perilous habit of letting good opponents back in proves costly. The side picks up injuries to players that they cannot afford to lose, misses the top two, then youth and finals inexperience hobbles them away. The good scenario? Well… I’m daring to dream.

Mim’s grade: A

My thoughts

The only reason I’ve not awarded Freo an A+ for its first half of the season is because of that fade-out loss to Geelong in Round 1. There’s a world very similar to this one where the Dockers are 13-0. How have they done it? Simply put: Justin Longmuir, the architect of the process, has trusted the process. He and list manager David Wells have built the foundations. It took years. It stirred discontent among fans who wanted the Dockers to rise up the ladder sooner, or Longmuir to be more charismatic in front of the media. But they persisted. And now, helped by the subtle tweaks Mim outlined in her superb review, they’re building the cathedral.

Longmuir’s most distinctive trait as head coach is his stubbornness. That can often manifest in ways which tick supporters off: conservative selection, deadpan press conferences, and a refusal to adopt a semi-mythical “Plan B”. But the reality is that most coaches believe the best way to win is to optimise Plan A, not invest time in Plan B and end up with half-baked versions of both. That’s what Longmuir has done. As most of the rest of the league has rushed to embrace the forward handball, his Dockers have remained circumspect; they are gaining precisely 53 more metres via handball this season compared to last. This Fremantle side prefers gaining territory by foot. The main change in possession (Mim has described the main out-of-possession changes) has been that the Dockers are taking riskier kicks. They were midtable for expected threat per kick last season – a product of playing on too rarely and being forced to kick down the line. Many coaches in today’s AFL talk about earning permission to take risks. Fremantle in 2026 is a great example of that philosophy: it’s because of the trust the coaches and players have in the side’s defensive robustness, and the confidence they have in their ability to win post-clearance contests, that enables them to bite off kicks they weren’t attempting in past seasons. That risk is the product of trust and continuity. Learn your footy. Learn your role. Learn your responsibilities. Earn the right. It’s not flashy. But it’s working.

The Dockers are genuine contenders. They concede the fewest points (more than 10 fewer than the second-best side) and the fewest shots. And although I’d have them as a good rather than great attacking side (they’re fifth for expected score), they’re ranked first for chain to score leaguewide. So what, besides the anxious palpitations of a success-starved fan base, can bring them undone? The first reason is banal. Although they’re very good, I’m not yet convinced they’re clearly better than the other three occupants of the top four ladder positions. The second is structural: the sort of variance-reducing conservatism that Longmuir practices can become a liability in key moments. The Dockers are fourth in scores from turnover in 2026. But the three sides above them are the sides they’re most likely to be competing with for the flag in late September. They’re also only 13th for D50 to F50 transition success rate (while still being second for back-half scores). Adelaide had a very similar profile last season – a low success rate and a high scoring rate that was the result of kicking to contests rather than manufacturing elaborate uncontested chains. That’s fine when you’re winning contests. But winning contests in September, when all your best guys are sore (Freo have used just 30 players this season, the fewest of any side), can be fickle. The Crows came undone. The Dockers bat deeper, especially in the midfield. It’s unlikely one of their best players will get himself suspended in such an ignominious way. If there’s a flaw, that’s where it is. But it’s hidden behind what looks like an increasingly impermeable suit of armour.

My grade: A

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Hawthorn

Win-loss: 8-4-1

Ladder position: 3rd

Next four games: Gold Coast (A), GWS (H), Melbourne (H), Carlton (A)

Nat Martin, contributor to the Hawks Insiders Substack

If you’d told me before the season started that, at the bye, Hawthorn would sit third with a record of 8-4-1, I would’ve been quite content. The Hawks have played 10 of the current top 12, and haven’t played West Coast, Richmond, North Melbourne or Carlton yet. On paper, this seems like a good launching pad from which to attack the rest of the season. However, there is a tinge of frustration.

Since this unusually constructed side began its rise in 2024, I have been looking for a sign from this group to truly believe we were good enough to win the flag. The 2024 season was so joyful and felt like simply we were playing with house money – whatever we achieved was a bonus. Despite making a preliminary final last year, I still felt as though we were a rung below the very best.

The thing that has frustrated me about Hawthorn this year is that there have been times this year, both visually and in the data, where I have actually believed our best is good enough. The last quarter dismantling of Gold Coast in Tassie to go 6-1, finally being on the right side of Easter Monday, leading the red-hot Freo at Optus by 3 goals with 7 mins left, and putting 29 scoring shots on the Swans – admittedly a Swans side missing Heeney and Gulden – all suggests Hawthorn, at its best, has what it takes to compete in 2026.

That’s what makes the draw with Collingwood, getting run over by the Dockers and the unfathomable loss to the Bulldogs (where we kicked 9.17) all the more irritating. The Bulldogs loss was especially jarring – leading a side we’ve had the better of in recent meetings by 27 points at half-time. A win would have given Hawthorn a game-and-a-half advantage over third. The club’s GM of Football, Rob McCartney, said at our Hawks Insiders pre-season live event words to the effect of “there will be times this year where you think we can win the flag, and times where you think we are still a way off”. He wasn’t wrong.

What has made me believe more this year is a clear change in our ball movement, and our stoppage clearance game. Hawthorn’s default mode in 2024 and 2025 was to make the ground as big as possible by using long, diagonal kicks out of D50 and using our half-forwards to overload key areas. Opposition teams cottoned onto this, and understood that defending our outside shoulder as a starting position and forcing us back into the corridor took us out of our comfort zone. As a result, the Hawks were only the 11th best offensive side in 2025 – not the profile of a Premiership-winning side.

In 2026, Sam Mitchell has been much more willing to use the corridor and move the ball faster by either forward-handballing or kicking shorter to keep the ball in constant motion. As a result, Hawthorn is first in the competition for defensive half to inside 50 transition success rate and second for points from turnover. We are more dangerous. Our stoppage game has also improved – currently second in the competition for stoppage clearances, after being 10th in 2025, allowing us the chance to control more territory.

This has seen Jack Gunston once again defy father time to kick 35 goals from nine games, using the ‘disconnected forward’ role to full advantage. Nick Watson is the 10th rated player in the entire comp; frankly ridiculous for a 21-year-old small forward. Jarman Impey would be top 3 in our B&F, getting the balance between brave, bold defending and attacking drive right, and Jai Newcombe has once again been a colossus.

This all sounds good. However, the same frailties that have plagued us for a few years still remain. Despite being second in the comp for stoppage clearance wins, Hawthorn is a lowly 13th for points from stoppage. Our centre bounce game (vital in 2026 football) has been poor, ranking 15th for points from this source, 16th for opposition points against and 11th for centre clearance differential. It doesn’t need to be the best in the comp for us to give the flag a shake, but it needs to improve.

In addition, our reliance on Gunston has been a worrying trend, with teams (Collingwood, Melbourne and the Bulldogs) successfully being able to get numbers behind the ball to clog up leading lanes and space to force us into poor entries. Losing Tom Barrass for the last four games made us uncomfortably vulnerable in the air. This is less than ideal given one of those players is 34 and the other is nearly 31. The form of Dylan Moore has been a concern. He hasn’t been able to get near his 2024 All-Australian level. Lloyd Meek has suffered significantly with the advent of the new ruck rules and Karl Amon has been slightly down on a top-three B&F placing in 2025.

Can we win it? Yes, but a lot has to go right. I believe we will still finish in the top four. Our best is good enough. But the question is can we produce it for long enough when it’s needed? I need some more convincing.

Nat’s grade: B

My thoughts

One of the throughlines of my Hawthorn season preview was a recognition of the quality of the system that Sam Mitchell has built alongside a nagging doubt that there was quite enough star quality to break through against the very best. The Hawks’ rise up the ladder was swift; they only had four top 10 draft picks between 2020 and 2023, and one of them – Denver Grainger-Barras washed out of the AFL system in four years. Although they drafted very well outside of the first round and did a superb job acquiring best-23 talent for bargain prices (Impey, Amon, Ginnivan, D’Ambrosio), I wasn’t totally convinced that the growth curve of the club’s most promising younger players lined up well enough with the timeline of important older players like James Sicily, Jack Gunston, and Tom Barrass. It’s safe to say that Nick Watson’s ludicrous breakout season has allayed many of those concerns. Contrary to the claims made by people who cited his inaccurate early goalkicking as proof that he had a tough start to AFL life, Watson has been good from day one. But he’s made a gigantic leap this season. He’s probably Hawthorn’s best player and almost certainly a top-20 player in the league. The choice now looks like being the game’s best small forward – and perhaps the best ever – for the next 10 years, or be an elite midfielder, or some optimal combination of the two. He is cocky, and annoying, and outrageously brilliant.

Hawthorn has a strong claim to be the best “post-clearance” side in the league. As Nat explained, Mitchell has sharpened his side’s ball movement scheme while remaining defensively solid (the Hawks are fourth for chain to score and second for opposition chain to score – a winning combination). The vulnerabilities arise in three distinct phases of the game. The first is stoppages; specifically, Hawthorn’s inability to punish and contain. The Hawks are 14th for scores from stoppage differential, and 17th across the last five games. Perhaps more concerningly – although it is still very early in his latest return from injury – two of those five games have featured Will Day.

Hawthorn’s second potential weakness is the one Nat identified: despite Watson’s brilliance, the Hawks can be easy to blunt without Jack Gunston in the side. Gunston’s gravity stretches opposition defences vertically and distorts their spacing inside D50. if he doesn’t get you (and this season, he almost always has), then the space his presence creates will generate opportunities for other forwards. It looks a lot less dangerous when he’s not there or if Hawthorn’s opposition can disrupt their forward entries. Hawthorn are second in the AFL for marks on the lead (a proxy for clean entries) but only just above league-average for marks inside 50. Finals footy is much more contested, and clean leading lanes much scarcer, than in the Home & Away season. Do the Hawks know how to win dirty?

The third vulnerability is at ground level inside Hawthorn’s defensive 50. Tom Barrass is an excellent defender and a true double threat – he can intercept or lock down. He also looks like an old man when attempting to bend down to gather a ground ball. One of Sam Mitchell’s tactical innovations since being appointed coach is his preference for hybrid-sized defenders who can impact aerially or on the ground (think Weddle, Battle, Scrimshaw, Hardwick, even Impey). That sounds great – and it has largely worked – but it can create an uneasy balance between being slightly too small to intercept mark and slightly too large to compete effectively at ground level. When Barrass is there, it usually looks fine. His weakness is offset in the aggregate and his strengths can shine. When he isn’t, as he hasn’t been for the last four and a half games, it can look fragile.

None of these are necessarily fatal weaknesses. Hawthorn has the system and I’m more confident they have the elite talent than before the season began. But I think I ultimately share Nat’s concerns: there are questions that don’t have answers just yet. The good news is that, once Barrass and Gunston come back into the fold, the Hawks will be healthy. A dividend of a very tough fixture to start the season means they have a soft run from here until September. They should do something they’ve not yet done under Mitchell: finish in the top four. From there, they have a chance. And, in The Wizard, they have a player who can make all those question marks disappear.

My grade: B+

I’ll be back later this week, or early next, with thoughts on how Brisbane, Sydney, Essendon, and West Coast

are going so far.

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Social preview photo courtesy of the (marvellous) The Honest Broker.

According to legend, guitarist Robert Johnson acquired his supernatural ability by selling his soul to the devil at a Mississippi crossroads. When he died – at 27, the inaugural member of that infamous club – he left behind the founding canon of the Delta Blues. Johnson probably didn’t literally sell his soul to the devil. But the legend captures something real about making choices from which there’s no going back.

St Kilda and Collingwood are standing at the same crossroads, facing opposite directions. The Saints are facing east. Their sun is rising. The Magpies, meanwhile, are staring west, raging against the dying of the light. To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure who out of Craig McRae, Nick Daicos, Ross Lyon or Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera is the Robert Johnson, and who’s the devil in this analogy. A diligent editor would ask me to tighten up the analogy or, better yet, discard it. But I don’t have one of those.

Both clubs have won five of their first 13 games this season. Neither is in crisis, exactly – but it’s also fair to say that neither is where they hoped they would be. They have arrived at the crossroads from very different origin points: Collingwood have made at least a prelim final in three of McRae’s seasons at the helm. In the same year the Pies won the flag, 2023, the Saints made the finals for just the second time since 2011. They haven’t featured in September since. Yet despite those differences, both clubs are united by the same tension: the presence of a player whose influence is so profound that he fundamentally changes the trajectory of the club’s decision-making.

Only 12 times in VFL/AFL history has a player averaged 30 disposals and a goal across a season. Gary Ablett Jr., inducted into footy’s Hall of Fame this season, accounts for five of those instances. Nick Daicos is currently on track to equal that dazzling statline. He is, by most reasonable measures, one of the five best players in the game. His commercial and spiritual value to Collingwood is as great as what he does with the footy. Collingwood’s problem is not Nick Daicos. Except it sort of is. Because his brilliance, and the immense fear created by the prospect of him leaving, or his prime years going to waste, has driven a list management approach that most clubs in Collingwood’s demographic position would avoid. The Pies have the oldest list in the AFL. Beyond Daicos, a concerning amount of heavy lifting is done by players in their mid-30s. With respect to promising but still speculative prospects like Charlie West and Ed Allan, most clubs would rate their youth over Collingwood’s. That’s hardly a surprise: this is a club that has recently won a flag while publicly signalling its preference for permanent contention over the uncertainty of a trip down to the lower rungs of the ladder. If anything, it’s the way things are supposed to go.

Collingwood opting to win now while they have Daicos, Scott Pendlebury, Steele Sidebottom, Darcy Moore, and Jordan De Goey is defensible. But that competitiveness has created a deficiency of the young talent that’s typically considered essential for a sustained tilt at Premierships. And the senior core, partly because of injury, and partly because of the depredations of age, isn’t pulling as much weight as it used to.

It’s by no means a perfect measure, but the Pies currently have just one top 20-rated player in the competition – Daicos, who else? – and only three in the top 100. Topping up with mature-aged players and free agents has yielded some success. Harry Perryman has been a good addition. Angus Anderson, Roan Steele and Oscar Steene all look as though they’ll generate more value than what should be expected from the speculative picks used to draft them. Other moves – Dan Houston’s mediocre first 18 months in black and white come to mind – haven’t helped as much as the Magpie Army would have hoped.

Winning flags requires elite talent. It also requires elite depth. One of the things which makes sustained contention so hard is that playing longer seasons and having weaker draft hands year after year means you’re usually replenishing solid role players with paler imitations. It’s extraordinarily hard to keep up with the Joneses when, most of the time, you’re shopping from the clearance aisle. The evidence, halfway into the 2026 season, is that diminishing returns are beginning to bite.

Collingwood’s approach is governed by big-club hubris and shaped by Daicos. The club’s football department thinks the club has a better shot at winning the belt by throwing their best punch every year – even if it’s a weak one – than by throwing in the towel and getting back in the gym. There are some important details that make me lean their way. The first is that Collingwood’s glamour, the prospect of playing in front of huge crowds in marquee games, and the prospect of playing with Daicos, will make them an attractive destination for free agents. If the Pies land Ben King and Lachie Neale this summer without using a draft pick, they could well bounce back into the top four in 2027. The second is that rebuilding through the draft is hard and getting harder. Tasmania will enjoy significant draft concessions as it enters the league. The AFL is determined for the 19th side to become competitive quicker than the 17th and 18th. The late 2020s will be a rough time to rely on the draft. More attention will shift to trades, picks later in the draft, and alternative talent development pathways. Collingwood has reasonable form in this area.

St Kilda’s dilemma is different but recognisable. The fan base is not becalmed by a recent flag. The club is not a Mecca for free agents. But it does orbit around a superstar. Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera is one of the most electrifying players in the game. His ascension to superstar status and eventual decision to re-sign with the club in late 2025 was the most cathartic storyline of the season. But the softly-spoken South Australian’s choice to only extend through to the end of 2027 sent a loud message: you have two years to show me what you’ve got. That contract situation hangs over everything the Saints do. It makes every setback in Max King’s attempt to escape from injury hell even more painful. The aggressive trade period last year felt like a move made by a club which believes it must show progress on a timeline set not by the football department, or the natural growth of a young core, but by a contract offer.

There are several other factors which complicate the easy narrative that Nasiah is calling the shots at Moorabbin. The first is that, much like Collingwood’s public declaration of its desire to maximise its contention window (McRae spoke this week about being “impatient” to bring in talent – not the words of a coach eagerly contemplating a rebuild), St Kilda has openly expressed a belief that rebuilding through the draft is no longer a viable means of improvement. Club president Andrew Bassat said so when he criticised the Northern Academies and bemoaned Josh Battle’s choice to depart to Hawthorn in free agency. The slow start to AFL life for St Kilda’s two top 10 picks in that 2024 “super draft” – Tobie Travaglia and Alix Tauru – shows that good picks aren’t a cure-all. Liam Ryan and Jack Silvagni have been the best of the new recruits. Tom De Koning has helped them become better, although his individual output hasn’t moved the needle as much as a player on his purported salary probably should. Sam Flanders lasted less than half the season in the midfield before being moved to half-back. His Achilles tendon injury has robbed him of the chance to prove he was worth what the Saints paid to get him. In a flash of irony, Flanders was pushed out of the midfield rotations by two players who herald a bright future and have been key to St Kilda’s real statistical improvement this season – Hugo Garcia and Max Hall. Combined, the two players cost virtually nothing: Pick 50 in the 2023 draft and Pick 4 in the 2024 mid-season draft. Both have added skill and speed to the Saints’ midfield, which is currently ranked 2nd in the AFL for clearance differential.

That improvement, along with the rise of Darcy Wilson – this season’s unwelcome contract saga – has ameliorated but not fully solved the Saints’ dilemma: the moves they’ve made to drive short-term improvement are in tension with the goal of long-term competitiveness. The list genuinely looks better than this time last season. Improvement hasn’t shown up in the place it matters most – the win-loss ledger – but it has shown up virtually everywhere else.

The Saints are currently 7th for quarters won, and have won the most first quarters of any side. They’re 7th for expected score after being 12th in 2025. But they’re still 12th on, you know, the ladder. I’m sure Wanganeen-Milera has noticed the improvement. He seems to enjoy life at the club. But have the Saints improved by enough to convince him that’s where his long-term future lies? Trying to be just one thing at once is hard enough in footy, especially for the league’s most snake-bitten club. Trying to do two things at once – win now and win later – is playing footy on permadeath mode.

When a club possesses a player of the ability of Daicos or Wanganeen-Milera, decisions are filtered through a simple question: does doing X help us be good while he is here? It can seem obvious. Of course you want to maximise the time you spend being competitive with your best player available. But there’s actually competitive [Lionel Hutz smiling face] and technically competitive [Lionel Hutz frowning face]. Footy isn’t like basketball, where one guy is 20 percent of the team. You need stars and you need depth. It’s hard to find enough of either if you finish around the middle. No club has won a flag while paying a guy $2 million a year. I’m not sure a club has won a flag with a list management strategy geared around retrofitting contention around a single superstar. Stars need planets. The trap that both the Pies and the Saints are in danger of falling into is that optimising for the short-term often means you make decisions which appear locally rational but are irrational in the aggregate. Each free agent signing is defensible (hey, they only cost salary!). Each traded pick feels like a price worth paying. Until, that is, you’re left with a list with one superstar and a bunch of guys that bring to mind the more obscure Wu-Tang Clan associates. That’s Collingwood’s dilemma. I think they’re probably making the right choice, given the fact that the alternative is freighted with all sorts of danger beyond the mere danger of the unknown. But it’s by no means guaranteed to work.

St Kilda is trying to build sustainably and build urgently. Losing Wanganeen-Milera, a superstar all their own, would be a hammer blow. It would destroy supporter morale and there’s no way that, in a draft environment compromised by the entry of Tasmania, the club could be fairly compensated for his departure. So again – what looks like recklessness might actually be their best bet. But on the other hand, maybe the task is, instead of compromising the future and hoping it persuades him to say, perhaps the thing to do – difficult as it is – is to craft a list that is worth playing for regardless. Either choice feels like a gamble. Saints supporters should feel a measure of comfort that their side appears to be on the right trajectory. The problem is not knowing where it ultimately leads. When you’re at the crossroads, you usually don’t get to choose your destination. You take the road that’s being offered, and you figure out where it goes.

The Video Room

The volume and diversity of close finishes in Round 13 is the perfect opportunity for the (long overdue!) return of The Video Room. The clips I’m reviewing this week – spanning four of the close games – each tell stories about how many decisions players and coaches need to make in crucial moments.

To begin, I’ll consider two clips from the end of last Thursday’s epic, rain-lashed game at Adelaide Oval between the Crows and the Cats. The first begins with the ball in the hands of debutant Hugo Hall-Kahan, who’d just won a holding the ball free kick.

Before I get properly into it, a quick explanatory note: a source of consternation among many Adelaide supporters is the side’s tendency, in late-game situations, to seek contests instead of retaining possession. The cue for the Crows to enter their particular kill-the-game mode is this sign:

I think it refers to protecting the defensive “T” – the area encompassing the corridor and the half-back zone – while seeking to keep the ball in contested, congested situations (the simpler, still plausible explanation is that the T just means “time”). It’s understandable in the context of Adelaide’s main strength being its contested work and its main weakness being its foot skills. But the way it’s deployed has arguably allowed opposition sides to come back into the game, safe in the knowledge that the Crows are more interesting in containing than scoring.

All of this, together with some good one-on-one checking by Geelong, serves to explain why Hall-Kahan didn’t have any teammates presenting for the short kick. Instead, he sent it long down the line.

Geelong are a chameleonic side under Chris Scott. But one constant is his desire to maintain numerical superiority behind the ball to leverage his defensive unit’s excellent intercept marking. The Cats will go to often-absurd lengths to preserve a defensive +1. They outnumbered the Crows at this aerial contest.

The next thing worth noticing is Taylor Walker’s split-second recognition that, because Geelong didn’t want a stoppage, he was free to instead gain some territory and push the ball into space. The eventual result was another stoppage, just what the Crows were craving. Not many players would have taken the extra beat in that situation.

Let’s fast-forward to the second stoppage at Adelaide’s attacking 50-metre line. Walker and Darcy Fogarty were both up at the stoppage. In a normal game state, at least one would have stayed deeper, a quick kick ahead of the ball. Here, their brief was simple: help contain Geelong. If you pause at the minute mark, you can see that each Adelaide player was content to have his direct opponent control the inside “bubble”, so long as they remained close enough to apply physical pressure. The Cats wanted to get the ball to the outside. The Crows wanted to prevent it. And they might have, had Josh Rachele not lost touch on Oisin Mullin and allowed him to squeeze a kick out of the congestion.

From here, Patrick Dangerfield and Max Holmes were good enough to get to the outside. Adelaide, however, had some insurance in the form of Dan Curtin, whose size and intercepting made him the ideal response to Scott’s choice to push Mark Blicavs forward to mark or bring the ball to ground. It’s great to have a two-metre tall unicorn to neutralise your opponent’s two-metre tall unicorn.

That wasn’t quite the end of things. The second clip resumes with a ball-up on the central wing with just 11 seconds left in the game. Darcy Fogarty was positioned as a spare on the defensive side of the stoppage. His job was to try and stop Dangerfield should the Geelong champion take the ball and run through the contest.

That didn’t happen, however Lachie McAndrew’s handball out of bounds meant they came up with the clearance regardless. Bailey Smith bombed it to half-forward, where Jeremy Cameron was in the box seat to mark in front of Max Michalanney. The ball bounced off Shannon Neale’s big paw and spilled to Tom Stewart, whose progress was impeded by Michalanney just enough to run out of time. Another 10 seconds and the Cats might have done it.

Let’s move to Friday night’s game at the MCG, which saw the Western Bulldogs overcome a profligate Hawthorn side. In this clip, the Hawks were a goal down – but had a forward-50 stoppage.

Every side chasing the game in this situation wants the same thing: to clear space behind the ruck contest, on the goal side of the stoppage. Hawthorn manufactured it with an excellent left-handed, over-the-shoulder tap by Lloyd Meek, Conor Nash creating a lane for Will Day by blocking Aaron Naughton from the contest, and Day giving his direct opponent Joel Freijah the slip. You don’t want to be too critical of young players, but Freijah made a couple of errors here: he gave up the goalside position too easily, lost touch with Day too easily, and was slow to react to the situation. The one advantage was that Day was on his wrong side, and couldn’t generate enough power with his right-foot snap. Rory Lobb, serving as the sweeper, marked in the goal square.

The next event in the game was Rory Lobb’s exit kick and the ensuing contest.

This clip is a small but neat illustration of a central trade-off that sides protecting leads late in games must confront: congesting defensive 50 often leaves the defending side outnumbered at the landing zone of the exiting kick. Hawthorn had numerical superiority at the drop of the ball here. The Bulldogs’ buffer was that even had they conceded a clean intercept mark, Hawthorn would have been too far out from goal to score directly – and the Dogs would have had enough numbers behind the ball to probably neutralise the ensuing contest.

Still with me? Good, there’s still a way to go. The third clip from Friday night’s game shows another stoppage in Hawthorn’s attacking 50. As with the first clip I showed from the Adelaide vs. Geelong game, the Dogs’ objective was straightforward: deny the Hawks’ most dangerous players the ability to get into space. But straightforward isn’t the same thing as easy.

The fact that neither ruck decisively won a hit-out actually created a dangerous situation for the Dogs because it meant that half a dozen players instinctively collapsed towards the ball, creating space on the outside of the contest. Mabior Chol and Connor Macdonald were quick to realise this, and had their positions swapped, the Dogs might have punished for a brief lapse in positional discipline.

The final clip from this game illustrates the split-second decisions that players must make under physical and psychological pressure. There were barely 20 seconds left in the game. The Dogs, once again, were kicking out from D50. Jordan Croft did really well to halve an aerial contest. A second later, he gathered a loose ball.

What do you think he should have done in this situation?

Croft could have held the ball in. He effectively would have been challenging the umpire to penalise him for holding the ball. That was probably a small risk – but a real one. So instead, he chose to gain territory with a kick. The problem was, that because of his body position and the shape of the contest (i.e. Hawthorn’s strength on the boundary side of the secondary contest), his only valid choice was to kick into the corridor – into a nest of waiting Hawks. He didn’t protect the T. All of a sudden, Jack Ginnivan had possession level with the centre circle. What he didn’t have was enough time to launch a deep ball. Time ran out for Hawthorn.

What would you have done in Croft’s position?

Sunday night saw Carlton beat Essendon in a game that felt distinctly like a Round 24 contest between two tired sides that know they won’t be playing finals. It was bad, but also sort of fun. Seeing as other outlets and pundits have already covered the controversial choice to allow Harry McKay the full 30 seconds to kick for goal from 65 metres out, I thought I’d just focus on the final centre square ball-up. According to Channel 7’s clock, the Bombers had just nine seconds to manufacture a goal.

Pause at the five-second mark of this clip, which shows the stoppage set-up. What do you see? I think a few things stand out. The first is that Carlton didn’t put a sweeper on the defensive side, although as the contest contracted, Patrick Cripps (matched up against the impressive Sullivan Robey) became a de facto sweeper. The second thing to notice is that Zach Merrett didn’t physically engage in the contest whatsoever. He wanted to act as a half-back, running from deep on the outside to receive and send it forward. That positioning probably confused George Hewett, who’s used to having a direct opponent in those situations. With Hewett trailing a metre behind, a clean gather from Merrett would have created the inside-50 kick the Bombers needed to stand a chance of snatching this game. Alas.

We’re into the home straight – just one game and three clips to go. Let’s go to the SCG. The first of the clips I’ll show from this instant classic begins at the point Marcus Windhager thought he took a mark inside 50 that was adjudged to have not travelled the required 15 metres. Rushed – and possibly pushed in the back – Windhager turns the ball over with his kick. But it’s what Callum Mills and the Swans did next that’s important.

One of the main reasons the Saints so nearly won this game was how well they denied Sydney corridor access. The first thing any decent opposition analyst will identify about Dean Cox’s side in 2026 is the priority they assign to getting to the middle band of the ground, and how it unlocks their ball movement. In this respect, the Saints coaches nailed it.

But in the final two minutes of the game, the Swans exploited St Kilda shifting its defensive shell back (a natural tactical and psychological response to being up by less than a goal with so little time left) to repeatedly access the corridor. The key moment in this first clip is Brodie Grundy’s recognition of the movement and ability to override his natural instinct to handball to James Jordon on the wing and instead look inboard, where Jake Lloyd had continued his run. The ruckman’s handball was perfect, and created a concertina effect where the next Saints player had to push up, eventually freeing Isaac Heeney, whose kick found Chad Warner. Warner found the lizard – Nick Blakey – in his natural element: alone, on the fat side, on the attacking side of centre. He got past Mason Wood rather easily and, had he made slightly better contact, could well have kicked the go-ahead goal.

The second clip shows the forward-50 stoppage which did result in the winning goal. Again, consider what Sydney wants to achieve here – space outside “the bubble”, either side of goal, but ideally on the goal side. Then consider what resources St Kilda had to counteract that.

Before discussing Heeney’s role in the goal, I want to discuss the role of Ryan Byrnes, St Kilda’s spare on the defensive side of the stoppage. He’s the guy standing between Rowan Marshall and Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera. As the ball gets thrown up, he takes two steps to the boundary side, effectively depriving himself of the ability to disrupt Jai Serong’s kick for goal. But he didn’t take those steps for no reason. He could see that Chad Warner had shaken the attention of Hugo Garcia, and that a decisive forward tap by Grundy could have released Warner on goal.

Byrnes’ choice to attend that spot-fire created a small pocket that Grundy and Heeney exploited to perfection. Grundy’s goldilocks tap – just strong enough to escape congestion, just soft enough to land in between three Saints – allowed Heeney to gather. The Sydney player was well-corralled by Darcy Wilson, but had the presence of mind to shift hands and handball with his left hand, which created a tiny amount of extra space that was enough to prevent Wilson from getting a hand in. Serong, alone 30 metres in front of goal, did the rest. The trade-off between guarding the inside and the outside of the contest is not always easy to solve.

There’s just one more clip – the final centre square ball-up. There were just 14 seconds left in the game, and tables had turned. Suddenly, the Swans snapped into lockdown mode, and the Saints had to win the game. Of course, St Kilda has (relatively) recent experience of winning the game with a Hail Mary centre clearance – just ask Melbourne supporters. That clearance was made possible by a really unusual spatial configuration and quick thinking by Nasiah and friends to create space inside 50. I suspect this last set-up on Sunday was motivated by similar reasoning: Nasiah is the guy we want to get on the move, and we want to manipulate it so he can receive the ball running forward.

Pause the clip at four seconds, just as the umpire is preparing to throw the ball up. There is, uh, something unusual here: each side has a player “missing”. Instead of four separate one-on-ones, only three are actually visible on the screen. James Jordon was briefly visible before the shot tightened, but there was no one particularly close to him. The reasoning for this wide spacing was clear – the Saints wanted variance. Losing the clearance wouldn’t have hurt them, they just needed to win it. Tom De Koning did his job – he won the tap decisively and hit the ball into space. Wanganeen-Milera did his job, too: he was ahead of James Rowbottom.

The role I don’t understand here is the one played by Marcus Windhager, normally St Kilda’s defensive midfielder/tagger. He came into the shot only when Jordon, who had gathered the loose ball from De Koning’s hit-out, was kicking the ball forward to ice the game. I’m not a coach, nor any sort of expert in stoppage set-ups. I presume there was a reason here – Windhager laying a block to clear Wanganeen-Milera’s path to goal, perhaps – rather than just a dropped coverage. If anyone at St Kilda is reading this, please get in touch. Whatever the intention, the result wasn’t the one the Saints were after.

There you have it: 10 clips. Each, hopefully, revealing something about the dozens of choices and actions that players and coaches are forced to make in the dying stages of the game. Often there are no perfect solutions, only different flavours of trade-off. Good thing we’re just watching on TV, eh?

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Straight from the chart

Instead of becoming the juggernaut that I and others expected, Gold Coast have instead had a stuttering first half of the season. To a significant extent, that decline in form has been driven by a drastic deterioration in the Suns’ clearance game. The numbers illustrated in this week’s first chart are rather stark.

Across the entire 2025 season, Gold Coast had a cumulative clearance differential of +77. Through the first 12 games of this season, they’re -82. Scores from clearances tell a similar story: +230 for the whole of 2025, just +21 so far this season.

Rowell, Anderson, and Petracca looks like a formidable midfield trio on paper. But that’s not where the game is played. Damien Hardwick and his coaches are no doubt searching for a better balance.

Readers with long memories will remember my promise to do something slightly more ambitious with the possession chain data I present most weeks. I believe I specifically said I’d look at the correlation between chain volume and ladder position (or win-loss record), but what’s a small difference between friends? Instead, now that we’ve ticked over the halfway point of the season, it’d be worth looking at how many possession chains sides are generating compared to last season.

Some of the differences are marginal. Sydney’s is gargantuan. Others are smaller but still meaningful – Collingwood, St Kilda, Geelong, West Coast. It’s not quite as simple as “more chains = better”. It depends where the increase comes from, and how it correlates to a side’s preferred style. If you want to play quickly, creating more intercepts is good. Winning clearances – which implies stoppages – may not be so good. And taking more kick-ins (the third component of possession chains) is probably bad, because it means you’re conceding more shots on goal.

Still, they work as a rough proxy for team improvement. And, in the case of Sydney, St Kilda, and West Coast, that improvement is real.

Zooming in, we can consider how many possession chains each side created during Round 13. Unsurprisingly, given both the conditions and the fact that these two sides are both in the top three for total chains, there were a heap of them in the Adelaide-Geelong game. Part of why watching Crows games is so stressful as a supporter, beyond the close finishes and the bonehead errors, is how choppy they are. There are lots of intercepts and lots of stoppages. It’s an intense experience.

The smaller volume of chains in the North Melbourne-Fremantle game is quite typical for a blow-out result: North couldn’t generate chains because they couldn’t win the ball, while the Dockers didn’t generate that many because they tended to kick goals on their first attempt (kicking a goal ends a chain). The low number of chains in the Essendon-Carlton game, meanwhile, is also another common feature of games between poor sides: low on pressure, low on stoppages, and relatively low on intercepts.

Turning our attention to how efficiently each side converted clearance and turnover wins into scores and… what is there to say, really? The Dockers scored an average of 2.03 points for each clearance win, and 1.42 points for each interception. I’m sure North supporters didn’t need another way of seeing how badly their side was beaten.

The other noteworthy statistic is how bipolar the Bulldogs’ scoring distribution was: almost completely impotent from intercepts, deadly from stoppages. That says something about their opponents, too: Hawthorn are fourth in the AFL for preventing opposition scores from turnover, but below league average in preventing opposition scores from stoppages.

Footnotes

• Some stats that would encourage Andrew McQualter and West Coast Eagles supporters. Over the last month, the Eagles are: 1st for forward-half differential, 1st for opposition D50 to F50 transition success rate, 2nd for inside-50 differential, 2nd for forward-half intercepts and points from that source, 3rd for pressure, and 4th for points against. That is precisely the sort of growth – in the metrics which underpin McQualter’s style – that suggests things are finally on the right track. (H/T this tweet, which shows an image from Footy Classified)

• Collingwood’s record under Craig McRae in games decided by 10 points or fewer: 9-3 in 2022, 8-1 in the 2023 flag year, 6-2-1 in 2024, 3-4 in 2025, and currently 1-1-4 in 2026. The line between contention and decline can be very thin. (H/T Footy on Nine)

• Teams are 5-0 when scoring exactly 92 points in 2026. They are 4-0 when scoring 99 points. They are 5-0 when scoring 103 points. They are 6-0 when scoring 104 points. But when a side scores 102 points? 0-4. (H/T AFL Live Ladder)

• Round 13, 2026 stands alone as the VFL/AFL round with the lowest-average winning margin despite including a 100+ point margin The average margin over the weekend was 22.88 points. Take away the Bunbury Massacre and the average margin drops to 8.43. You’ll never sing that. (H/T Sirswampthing)

Recommended reading

• New footy Substack alert!!! Man Seeking Merry Hell, West Coast supporter and friend of the newsletter, considers an important question: what if Sliding Doors (the AFL website ragebait column, not the film) made sense?

• The Gardiner Stand and friends consider Carlton’s topsy-turvy first half of the season.

• Sean Ross does something similar, only solo and with fewer wins to celebrate.

• It’s six days old, but This Week In Football’s Round 12 newsletter is a cracking read.

• Ahead of the Under-18 National Championships, which begin this weekend, Tommy Wolfe reveals his top 50 of the upcoming draft crop.

• The Vulture Street Journal reviews Brisbane’s QClash 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.

Plus: Cody uses the word ‘vectorisation’, I use the word ‘succour’ (as well as saying ‘you know’ far too many times – sorry), and Jonathan drops an incredible bit of personal lore.

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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 the Deadspin piece Cody mentioned in our first segment.

Links:

• Read Cody’s work here

• Read Jonathan’s work here

• A Philosopher’s Definitive (And Slightly Maddening) Case Against Replay Review

We are now into the second week of an increasingly-prolonged sequence of byes. The bye is an opportunity for players to rest weary bodies and virtually the only chance for coaches to spend real time pondering how to iron out flaws in the game plan. As that happens, 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.

In this second, smaller tranche, I’ll consider two sides travelling in opposite directions and with very different priorities for the remainder of the season: Richmond and Greater Western Sydney. The Tigers’ main objectives from here are to reduce the size of the injury list, see more of the next generation (the likes of Josh Smillie and Taj Hotton), and win another one or two games without endangering what looks certain to be another juicy draft pick. The Giants, meanwhile, have found form and have welcomed back some key players. They appear primed to make a run for finals. Let’s get into it.

Greater Western Sydney

Win-loss: 6-6

Ladder position: 10th

Next four games: St Kilda (A), Carlton (H), Hawthorn (A), Fremantle (H)

Dane Gade from SuperCoach Co-Captains podcast

The GWS Giants head into their bye round as the AFL’s ultimate mystery. Every week feels like opening a Kinder Surprise: sometimes you get something brilliant, sometimes you get a piece missing and no idea how it fits together. Despite a horror run with injuries, they’ve somehow kept themselves firmly in the finals conversation and continue to look capable of troubling the competition’s best when everything clicks.

The season looked destined for disaster when midfield star Tom Green went down for the year. Add smooth mover Josh Kelly and “the Kid with the Lid”, Darcy Jones to the long-term injury list, along with defensive superstar Sam Taylor, who sustained a nasty hamstring injury playing for Western Australia, and you can understand how the Giants got into this awkward position. Taylor only returned in Round 12, prompting supporters to check whether they’d accidentally skipped half the season. His return couldn’t have come soon enough for a defence that had been held together by duct tape, crossed fingers, and Adam Kingsley’s ability to keep a straight face during press conferences.

The injury curse hasn’t stopped there. Jesse Hogan has managed just seven games for the season, meaning the Giants have spent much of the year trying to replace one of the competition’s most dangerous key forwards. Fortunately for GWS, Max “Gru” Gruzewski has grabbed his opportunity with both hands. What began as a depth player filling a role has quickly become a genuine breakout season, with Gruzewski showing he belongs at AFL level. He’s provided a strong marking target, kicked important goals and given Giants fans plenty to get excited about for the future. At this point, the club should be locking him away on a new deal before rival recruiters can pounce. Missing Hogan for much of the season could have crippled the Giants, but Gruzewski’s emergence has softened the blow and possibly unearthed a key piece of the club’s future.

Remarkably, despite missing Green, Kelly, Jones, Taylor and large chunks of Hogan, the Giants have hung in there. To the Giants’ credit, they’ve somehow found reinforcements from the football equivalent of the clearance rack. Clayton Oliver arrived from Melbourne for a pack of durries and a half-full fuel card. Oliver has been outstanding, collecting possessions at a rate that would make a Dyson vacuum cleaner jealous [Mateo: he’s #1 in the AFL for contested possessions among all players with more than five games]. Jayden Laverde was picked up for next to nothing and has slotted seamlessly into the backline during the injury crisis. Somewhere at Essendon, fans are wondering why he suddenly looks like an AFL-calibre defender.

Meanwhile, Finn Callaghan has gone from emerging star to public enemy number one for opposition taggers. Rival coaches have realised letting him roam free was a terrible strategy, so Callaghan has had to learn the weekly challenge of dealing with a hard tag, something every elite midfielder eventually faces. The numbers haven’t always been as eye-catching, but the growth has been obvious. At the same time, Lachie Ash’s move into the midfield has been a mostly successful experiment. Initially appearing to get in Callaghan’s way, Ash has provided speed, run and dare through the middle, proving necessity really is the mother of invention. He will likely return to the half back flank, but the Giants now know they have an option to roll through the middle if needed.

Another huge positive has been the return of Brent Daniels. While most fans know him as one of the competition’s best small forwards, “Midfielder Daniels” has become one of Kingsley’s most important game-breaking weapons. The Giants are careful not to leave him in there for too long, generally only unleashing him around centre bounces in the second half of games. When they do, chaos follows. Daniels turns orderly stoppages into absolute carnage, bringing speed, pressure and unpredictability that few players in the league can match. In a midfield missing Green and Kelly, those bursts have often changed the momentum of games and given GWS a genuine point of difference. Can Daniels’ body hold up? Who knows! I’m just enjoying “Midfielder Daniels” while I can.

Up forward, one of the biggest positives has been the emergence of Phoenix Gothard. He looks more comfortable at AFL level by the week and it’s becoming increasingly obvious he’ll be a major part of the future. He brings energy, pressure and excitement whenever he’s near the ball, and Giants fans are already imagining what the forward line could look like in a few years with him playing a prominent role. In a season where injuries have forced younger players to step up, Gothard has grabbed his opportunity with both hands. In a forward line that can stack goals on or kick a record number of behinds to frustrate you, Gothard always provides an option, finding space and setting up others for that scoring opportunity.

But, nothing sums up the 2026 Giants better than a two-week stretch that should probably be studied by sports psychologists. One round, GWS managed to lose to lowly West Coast, leaving supporters questioning their life choices and wondering whether the club had accidentally boarded the wrong flight. Seven days later, they responded by producing one of the most ridiculous quarters of football in VFL/AFL history, kicking 14 goals in the third quarter and completely humiliating the reigning back-to-back premiers Brisbane. It was the football equivalent of failing your driving test on Monday and winning a Grand Prix on Sunday.

The performance against Brisbane was peak Orange Tsunami. Everything clicked. Yet the week before, the Giants had somehow found a way to lose (deservedly) to a wooden spoon contender. If GWS supporters ever need a definition of emotional whiplash, they can simply replay those two games back-to-back. Shout out to the baby-faced assassin Harvey Thomas as well, this man took on a new role along the wing and has been absolutely amazing and one of the quiet achievers for the Giants. What happens if/when Josh Kelly returns? I don’t know. But right now, he is doing everything right.

The one area that still has Giants supporters nervously reaching for the antacids is the ruck division. While the midfield has somewhat adapted and the defence has survived an injury apocalypse, the ruck stocks remain a genuine concern. Every week feels like an adventure, and not the fun kind. Against the competition’s stronger ruck combinations, GWS can still be exposed around stoppages, and if there’s one thing capable of derailing a September campaign, it’s getting monstered in the middle. Leek Aleer needs to keep getting a chance to roll through there when he is healthy. Watching him leap a foot over Max Gawn, to then see him only know how to tap in one direction and have the ball sharked by the opposition is frustrating, but if he can develop ruck craft, he could become a real wildcard.

Losing Tom Green, Josh Kelly, Darcy Jones, Sam Taylor, Jesse Hogan and Brent Daniels for big chunks of the season would have buried most clubs. But not these Giants. Their best football is arguably better than almost anyone’s. Their worst football can leave supporters staring blankly into the distance wondering what they’ve just witnessed. They could make a deep finals run, or they could finish 8-10th and lose a wildcard final by four points. Because at the end of the day, nothing is more predictable than the Giants being completely unpredictable.

Dane’s grade: C

My thoughts

Of the many adjectives one can use to describe Adam Kingsley’s side, doggedness isn’t usually one of them. This has been a side renowned for flashy footy: absorbing deep inside-50 entries before unfurling exhilarating counterattacks. That fundamental identity has remained. The wild oscillation between brilliance and banality has remained. But it has been supplemented by some steel. As Dane alluded to, the Giants have been whacked hard with the injury stick this season. Green, Taylor, Hogan, Daniels, Kelly and Jones are all arguably top 10 players for the Giants. All have missed most of the first half of the season. Given that, and a front-half fixture which has included games against Hawthorn, Sydney, the Bulldogs (before Sam Darcy did his knee), and Brisbane, and the Giants are doing OK to be 6-6 at the bye.

Smarter observers can tell me if I’m wrong – this applies generally to all my writing – but I have noticed a subtle shift to how the Giants are trying to play this season. As I wrote above, the fundamental identity is stable. They are currently second in the AFL for D50 to F50 success rate (they were seventh in this metric last season), fourth for defensive half scores (same as in 2025),13th for clearance differential (same), and 15th for forward half possession share (13th in 2025).

The Giants are comfortable playing a back-half game. What hasn’t been stable is player availability. But Adam Kingsley has largely succeeded in using that to his side’s advantage. Deprived of dominant aerial players like Taylor and Hogan, the Giants have switched to a ball movement scheme that prioritises moving the ball at ground level. Kingsley’s men took more than 10 contested marks per game last season. They had aerial security at both ends. This season, they’re taking 2.5 fewer. That’s been offset by a massively improved ability to win the ball after the initial contest. Last season, the Giants were ninth for post-clearance ground ball gets differential – the measure of how well they win the ground-level contest after the clearance. This season, they’re first by a mile, almost twice as much as the second-ranked side (Gold Coast). The adaptation has been possible because of the (surprising?) renaissance of Clayton Oliver, and the breakout form of Harvey Thomas (enjoying a change of role to a wing). Oliver has been a revelation. It will be interesting to see how Kingsley makes it work once Tom Green returns to the side (almost certainly in 2027).

The short-term question is what this Giants side looks like as those stars reintegrate into the side. The evidence of the last two games – Taylor returned for their most recent game, against Melbourne in Alice Springs – has been very positive. As enigmatic as the Giants are, and as anomalous as that game was, you can’t dismiss beating the back-to-back Premiers by 13 goals. The ceiling isn’t easy to find. But it remains scarily high. Over the next five games, the Giants play St Kilda, Carlton, Hawthorn, Fremantle, and Geelong. Literally no sequence of results over this stretch would surprise me. But they’ve given themselves a shot. It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve come home with a wet sail under Adam Kingsley.

My grade: B-

Richmond

Win-loss: 2-10

Ladder position: 17th

Next four games: Brisbane (H), North Melbourne (H), Collingwood (A), Carlton (H)

Toby, author of the (excellent) Jousting Sticks substack

For Richmond, it’s been a season of ‘yeah, but’. Everything that’s happened has been simultaneously despairing and understandable, with scarce moments of joy. It’s the dichotomy that defines the journey the club is on, where team and fans alike have accepted short-term pain, long-term gain. Yeah, it sucks to be 17th at 60.4%, but it makes sense and is certainly justifiable when you consider the wider context.

It’s frustrating, but you can’t talk about the Tigers season without mentioning injuries. They’ve been perilously close to needing top-up players. The significant aspect of the injury disaster has been its compounding impact on both veterans and youth. Richmond had a solid contingent of experience, capable of providing the team with a floor of stability that ‘protects’ the kids. Concurrently, Richmond has a brigade of highly touted youngsters. Both groups have been ravaged by injury. From the seven selections made pre-pick 30 in 2024, only Luke Trainor is healthy, whilst Toby Nankervis hasn’t played since Round 2, and injuries have hit Tom Lynch, Tim Taranto, Dion Prestia, and others. The floor has fallen out beneath them, while the kids haven’t had a chance to start building the ceiling yet. The injuries have been the ultimate ‘yeah, but’ of 2026. Yeah, they’re losing, but they’re putting a VFL side out there each week because Punt Road was apparently built on a cursed gravesite.

Adem Yze is coaching with both hands tied behind his back. If we briefly ignore the availability crisis, and the mega-washed status of some veterans, there are some interesting tactical evolutions happening. The prevailing criticism has been the lack of risk; long down-the-line, sideways kicks around defensive 50, all the usual hallmarks of ‘boring’ football is apparent at Richmond, acting as a safeguard. However, they’ve occasionally ventured into what we can consider the first iterations of Yzeball. It’s a similar style to most teams, utilising the forward handball to break stoppages and create overlap run. In moments of confidence, they switch the ball frequently to create width, before attempting to attack the seams through the middle with speed that their improved running capacity has created. It mostly falls apart because it’s a team full of kids, but if you squint, you really can see the bones of a cohesive style. It’s a modern game plan fitted for modern players. Yeah, it’s not yielding wins right now, but you can see it come to fruition if the players who the system is built for ever become available.

I’ve ‘joked’ about Richmond’s season beginning after the bye. We should be seeing the return of Taj Hotton and Sam Lalor in the coming weeks, and the club remains hopeful 196cm(!!) midfielder Josh Smillie will debut too. Add in the returning Nankervis and Lynch, the floor begins to take shape, the construction on the ceiling occurring simultaneously. The off-season looms with the Zak Butters shade over it, but regardless of how that turns out, Richmond will have another top 3 pick and the hope created by uninterrupted pre-seasons and houses being trained down. I’d prefer to limit the smashings and maybe scare a team hoping to play finals in the run-in, but really, I can’t imagine winning more than 1-2 more games. It’s really hard to talk about Richmond with detailed nuance because so much is up in the air, but what’s the point in being a fan if I can’t be optimistic about it?

Toby’s grade: D-

My thoughts

How do you begin to assess a season so cruelled by injuries? That’s the challenge Toby confronted and the one I now face. The best place to begin is with an acknowledgement that, subjectively, it’s felt like a lousy season for Tigers fans. I covered some of that ground in my recent piece about the progress of the rebuild. Lousy results are leavened by seeing kids weave a brighter future. They’re harder to stomach when some of the most exciting of those kids are stuck on the sidelines and you’re instead watching Oliver Hayes-Brown try and replicate Toby Nankervis.

The green shoots are there – if you squint hard. Seth Campbell has consolidated his rise. At the time of writing, he’s the 121st highest-rated player in the AFL this season and the fourth highest-rated Tiger over the last 20 games. He’s impish and skilful, and I’ve enjoyed Yze giving him some midfield reps. Sam Cumming has made a bright start to his AFL career (if only the poor boy didn’t always look so worried). Patrick Retschko, traded in for a token pick from Geelong, has looked at ease on a wing. Sam Lalor, meanwhile, showed enough in his seven games to vindicate Richmond’s choice to take him with the first pick in the 2024 draft. The problem is that, in a microcosm of Richmond’s frustrating year, he suffered a partial Achilles tear that will rule him out for most of the rest of the season. Lalor, Gibcus, Smillie, Hotton, Armstrong – these players will define the next decade at Punt Road. But you can’t get better if you don’t play.

On the field, it’s mostly been awful. It was never going to be any other way, even with a full complement of troops. But there have also been a couple of gritty wins against fellow cellar-dwellers, driven in large part by younger players. When the Tigers beat Essendon in the Dreamtime at the ‘G game, Campbell and Retschko were their two highest-rated players. When they beat the Eagles in Perth, Campbell, Jonty Faull, Tom Burton, Kane McAuliffe and Tom Brown all played well. These are the things you need to hold onto. And they’re data points about the future. With respect, the likes of Burton, McAuliffe and Burton are unlikely to become stars. But if they can take the opportunity that’s been extended to them by injury to become long-term contributors, that’s a win for everyone.

Beyond that, there have been flashes against decent sides. Richmond led Adelaide at half-time. They should probably have beaten Carlton in Round 1 (OK, Carlton was not “decent” at the time). The Tigers hung in for most of the day against Melbourne and St Kilda before young legs tired. Their next four games are not especially kind – but there are no easy games at this stage of the rebuild. Brisbane will be a damage limitation exercise. Instead, progress will be measured by the performances against North Melbourne – the first meeting between those sides was the on-field nadir of Richmond’s season – Collingwood and Carlton. If Richmond could jag a win, or run a couple of those sides close, their supporters should be pleased. Some of the kids will come back and get a glimpse of senior footy in the run home. And, come November, Punt Road will become the new home of a couple of the country’s most-talented 18 year-old footy players. It won’t be dawn for a while. But there’ll be some stars in the night sky.

My grade: D+

I’ll be back later this week with thoughts on how Collingwood, Carlton, Hawthorn and Fremantle are going so far.

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The byes are here. Over the next month, every club will have a week off. As they do, I want to consider how they’re travelling relative to pre-season expectations. Thankfully, I won’t be doing it myself. I’ve asked some friends to share their own thoughts about their teams, and how the first half of the season has updated their beliefs about what’s possible in 2026. I’ll then respond with my own thoughts. The first batch of clubs perfectly illustrate that there are good byes and there are bad byes. Adelaide and Gold Coast are both probably relieved to get some time off, address specific tactical problems, and give key players time to rest and recuperate. North Melbourne’s players and supporters, meanwhile, would probably prefer the opportunity to capitalise on the momentum created by the side’s stirring comeback victory against Gold Coast last Saturday. Let’s get into it.

Adelaide

Win-loss: 6-5

Ladder position: 7th

Next four games: Geelong (H), Western Bulldogs (A), Melbourne (H), Port (A)

Michael from the Adelaide FC subreddit Discord server (shout-out)

Losing Mark Keane, Mitch Hinge, and Dan Curtin for most of the first half of the season has brutalised us this season. However, while it is an excuse, I’ve seen enough to put it plainly: we aren’t nearly good enough to contend with the best sides.

Regression from last year’s surprisingly dizzying highs were expected, but when you watch us and then watch the benchmarks of the competition (Sydney, Freo, Brisbane) you can’t help but notice the chasm between game styles. Theirs are built for winning premierships; ours is built to limit as much damage as possible – unless the opponent has big flaws, in which case Adelaide adopts a more aggressive game plan. However, it’s not all bad. The Crows have shown that there’s talent on multiple lines, and Jordan Dawson is the perfect leader to nurture and lead that talent. Add a Zac Bailey in the middle, Darcy Wilson and/or Kade Chandler and/or Tom Swallow in and around the forward/mid rotation [Mateo: surely that’s not too much to ask?] and optimism will return to West Lakes.

Perhaps the biggest concern, beyond player availability, is the reluctance to use overlap handball or move the ball with urgency – especially compared to 2023 and (parts of 2025), when Adelaide was one of the most exciting teams in the competition. The Crows’ continued reliance on aerial and ground-level contest wins means they’ve been left by the wayside. The coaching staff has recognised this over the last couple of games, but it might be too late to salvage the season. The Crows are 18th in the AFL for average metres gained per handball at 0.7m; Sydney, who are the best team in the competition at the time of writing, are running at 4m gained per handball. There’s nothing wrong with going with your own style, and you can understand Matthew Nicks’ reluctance to depart from a game plan which was successful for most of 2025, but it clearly isn’t working anywhere near as well in 2026.

Brayden Cook has been the silver lining. How he’s gone from the last-chance saloon to a near AA-calibre wing option is the story of the season. Credit to the club for sticking with him when everyone was just starting to ask, ‘if only’. Shoutout to Sam Berry too. I’m [Tom] a big, big critic (and I still think he’s too fumbly at times) but his centre square clearance work has gone from merely okay to very good. If he can get his kicking and ground ball game sorted, the Crows have a viable long-term prospect in the engine room.

The worst-case outcome for the rest of the season would be for Adelaide to continue on its current trajectory and finish 9th-10th – not good enough to be a “true” finalist, yet not bad enough to get one of the best players in the draft. To be avoided. The normal outcome would be finishing near the bottom of the top six. Given the current issues, an Elimination Final berth (and win) would be a good season, all things considered. There are two types of good outcomes. The first would be if Adelaide had the sort of resurgence it did after the bye last season [remember: the Crows lost their game immediately before the bye to Hawthorn at Launceston before winning out for the rest of the Home & Away season]. The other is to completely fall off a cliff, draft one of the best midfielders in the draft pool, and appoint a new coach. It might be the recession the club needs to have.

Michael’s grade: C-

Tom from the Adelaide FC subreddit Discord server

As a Crows fan who leans on the more pessimistic side, I tend to feel Adelaide is at the level I expected heading into the season; a bottom eight to wildcard side – but I do feel we are quite lucky to be around that mark on the ladder. To be frank, we don’t pass the eye test. A team that realistically overachieved last season, off the back of some luck, easy fixtures and the cohesive rhythm of healthy star players carrying the side (Rankine, Dawson, Thilthorpe, Worrell, Keane). Yet, despite trying to maintain a sense of pragmatism, I still feel as disillusioned as I did after the horrendous 2025 finals.

Once the excitement of watching a young side grow – from new faces debuting and inexperienced players showing glimpses of star power – deteriorates and the expectations rise, you lose a sense of enjoyment for the game. Your enjoyment becomes results-driven. In those early rebuild years, you could excuse the inability to control games, lack of proactive decision making and sometimes leaders not standing up in big moments. But your patience as a fan becomes thin and, as time goes on, entitlement grows. Adelaide might be having a down year, but I feel I’ve seen this movie before under Matthew Nick’s tenure and I hope post-bye the club can start banking some results and look like a more competent side.

As you articulated in your season preview [Mateo: I promise I did not add this in], Adelaide’s game plan in 2025 had a scheme of piercing and slicing kicks, creating space for your one-on-one contests. But being first on the ladder means you become the hunted. Teams have gone to work and the failure to adapt to the stand rule is part of why Adelaide has become a very predictable side in possession. While other teams embraced the changes in their offseason, Adelaide has been caught on the hop.

It’s not necessarily doom and gloom as a fan. Players like Brayden Cook, Wayne Milera and Sam Berry have exploded onto the scene and as a strong past critic of all three, I’ve been thoroughly rapt to see them performing to a high standard. Cook’s development has honestly kept me engaged with this season. As for the most disappointing player, I know most fans would say Thilthorpe, but I am going to say Jake Soligo. Pre-season health scare aside, he’s been pushed out of a vanilla midfield. It’s left me contemplating where he goes from here.

Tom’s grade: C-

My thoughts

Adelaide has regressed in more or less exactly the ways I warned of in my season preview. In 2025, the Crows leveraged real physical advantages to become the league’s best post-clearance contest team. They took big grabs, brushed off opposition tackles while making their own stick, and regularly won contests in high-value parts of the ground. But relying on winning contests is dangerous, both because it’s so sensitive to the form and fitness of the players who make it work and because it can defer the creation of a more unsustainable style based on the manipulation of space. As that advantage has been whittled away, the Crows have regressed. They are currently a middling side.

Tom and Michael both lamented the rigidity of the Crows’ game plan under coach Matthew Nicks. I have a small measure of sympathy for Nicks here. I think it’s reasonable to believe that a style which helped deliver a club-record 18-win season is viable. Losing Dan Curtin and Mark Keane to freak injuries in pre-season was a bigger blow than most non-supporters realise. But the most devastating riposte is that Nicks and his assistants successfully overhauled how the Crows played out-of-possession after a month of last season – so why have they been largely unable to improve the side’s rudimentary ball movement scheme thus far this season? The charitable answer is that it’s tougher to change how you attack than how you defend mid-season, and that without Mark Keane, Adelaide doesn’t have enough good kicks in its backline. The other answer is the one that an increasing number of Crows fans have reached on their own: if your style relies on Izak Rankine, or Jordan Dawson, or Riley Thilthorpe winning their direct contest more than it does on structured possession chains – that’s probably not a viable style in 2026. It’s true there have been some changes. For the last month, Adelaide has been handballing more often and moving the ball slightly better. The defence remains a strength. But it still looks like a low-tech brand in a high-tech world.

The club’s injury burden (not catastrophic, but a big change from a relatively serene run in 2025) is largely out of its control. Keane’s return could make a big difference. The most perplexing question, and probably the one in most need of an answer, is what the hell’s happened to Thilthorpe. The ideal outcome is the extended break afforded by the bye and his one-week suspension for a gut punch on Lloyd Meek gives him the chance to physically and mentally refresh. If he rediscovers his 2025 form, the Crows become a significantly better side. If he can’t, the wildcard round (or worse) looms. That’s probably the most likely outcome for the remainder of this season. The worst-case scenario – the bottom falling out of the season – has a silver lining: a good draft pick and a new coach.

My grade: C

Gold Coast

Win-loss: 7-4

Ladder position: 5th

Next four games: Brisbane (H), Geelong (A), Hawthorn (H), Fremantle (A)

Keegan from the Turnover the Tape podcast

The first half of the season for the Suns has been one of underperformance while still putting wins on the board. The club has been saying it has taken one step back to take two steps forward, and so far this season feels like that. We have shed some experienced depth (Ainsworth, Fiorini, Budarick) to fit in more academy players and big name recruits which has left us with a bottom five or six players that are currently not producing at AFL level each week.

At the start of the season I had us down for a top six finish, and I still believe we are capable of that at our best, but some down performances are a cause for concern with a hard run of games incoming. The forward line mix has been a headache for the club and continues to be so, with Damien Hardwick rotating in search of a forward line that can do the things he wants. The Jed Walter story continues to bubble in the background. I’m unsure about where he will play next year. The lack of a quality small forward has hurt, especially when our tall forward can’t take a mark as well.

Ned Moyle has now ascended to the #1 ruck role and looks like he will keep a hold of it going forward, helping with clearances while also being a threat forward. This has relegated Witts to the backup spot after he has struggled with the new ruck rules. Christian Petracca has exceeded all expectations since coming to the club. I haven’t been this excited to see the ball in a player’s hand since prime Gaz – his ability to hit the scoreboard is not something we have seen in our midfield in some time. Uwland is looking to improve on his second-place Best & Fairest finish from 2024 and has been so solid down back, adding rebound to his game and no doubt piquing the interests of some All-Australian selectors. He’s been a key part of our defensive unit which has been our strongest line this year. Sam Collins is in career best form, Mac Andrew is playing well, while Oscar Adams has improved out of sight holding Charlie Ballard out of the team. The Rioli and Noble combo off HB continue to be so important to our ball movement.

Conversely, despite the names on the sheet, the Suns’ midfield has been subpar with Rowell and Anderson being impacted by injury and sickness for parts of the year. We have been conceding clearance deficits most games and the inability to defensively pressure has meant opposing midfielders have been able to slice through and hit up forward targets at will, not giving our defenders a chance.

The worst-case plausible outcome from here would be failing to make the top eight and travelling away for the first wildcard game ever played. A normal outcome would be finishing in the top six and hosting our first-ever home final. A good outcome would mean beating the teams around us in the second half of the year – starting in the next four games – and pushing for the double chance.

Keegan’s grade: C+

My thoughts

Following the first month of the season, I was halfway convinced the Suns were already the best team in the league, and, given their absurd wealth of academy talent, concerned about what portended for the rest of the decade. I arrived at the MCG on April 5th fully expecting them to dispatch the Demons and frank those credentials. Instead – and admittedly, they were without Petracca that day – they lost by 20 points and showed the first signs of the frailties that have plagued them since.

I don’t think I was alone in expecting a core midfield trio of Petracca, Rowell, and Anderson to be one of the league’s most formidable. In some respects, it has. Gold Coast is ranked seventh for scores from stoppages, and Petracca is, implausibly, enjoying a career-best season. But the deterioration in the Suns’ ability to win first possession or defend clearance losses is alarming. They are currently 14th for first possession, 15th for clearances won, and seventh for scores from clearance differential. What should be a great strength looks instead like a liability. Hardwick has moved some magnets in search of a more defensively secure on-ball rotation, giving the likes of Alex Davies, Touk Miller, and Bailey Humphrey more CSB attendances in over the past month. Part of the problem, as identified by Keegan in their write-up, is that neither Rowell nor Anderson have been able to be quite at their best so far. But part of the problem is structural: Petracca’s ability forward of the ball will mean he takes up aggressive positions both at stoppages and in transition. That looks great when it works, but it often requires a player assuming a more sacrificial role to patch up defensive holes. At Melbourne, that role was often performed by Alex Neal-Bullen. I’m not sure Hardwick has quite found the answer yet.

I also share Keegan’s concerns about the composition and efficacy of the forward line. I’m not sure I see what many others claim to see in Jed Walter. Ben King is an elite finisher, but his non-contributions both in build-up and out of possession is part of the reason why the Suns are mediocre in preventing opposition transition. The lack of a true small forward is obvious – Ben Long, Bailey Humphrey, and Leo Lombard do an admirable role, but it means that Gold Coast aren’t as dangerous at ground level inside-50 as most true contenders are. It’s up to Hardwick to see if the solution to these issues exists on the current list.

The collapse against North Melbourne was the product of the fatigue accumulated by a fortnight in Darwin. But it was still inexcusable, and followed a concerning string of performances. Since that defeat to Melbourne (a side we now know is much better than most expected them to be), the Suns have been comfortably beaten by Sydney and Hawthorn, and registered unconvincing victories over Essendon and Port Adelaide. It’s not the formline of a top-four side. They’ve banked enough wins to still be in touch with the leading pack. But they need to improve.

My grade: B-

North Melbourne

Win-loss: 5-6

Ladder position: 13th

Next four games: Fremantle (H – but in Bunbury), West Coast (H – but in Perth), Richmond (A), Essendon (H)

Ricky Mangidis of The Shinboner

Through six rounds, it was obvious to anyone with a functioning set of eyes that North Melbourne had improved. It was the level of improvement which remained a mystery due to the level of opposition. Five of those six games against Port Adelaide (home), West Coast (away), Essendon, Carlton, and Richmond didn’t exactly scream murderer’s row.

Five rounds later, after GWS (away), Geelong (GMHBA), Sydney (home), Adelaide (away), and Gold Coast (home), the improvement is now large enough to be notable. While those five rounds only yielded one win, there were just three poor quarters – the fourth vs. Geelong, a historically bad second vs. Adelaide, and the second vs. Gold Coast. Elsewhere the underlying process remained relatively sound, with a couple of key focus areas.

Scoring from forward half turnovers: It may shock readers to learn that in the last four years, North ranked 18th (2025), 16th (2024), 15th (2023), and 18th (2022) in points scored from forward half turnovers. After 11 games this year, North ranks seventh in the same stat. It is slightly inflated because of their blinding efficiency at scoring from those turnovers – second in points per turnover forced – but that efficiency had also been non-existent in previous years.

Possession as control: While it’s a thin line between using possession to defend, possession to progress, and then knowing when to shift between each, North have been much better in achieving both so far this year. The side is ranked first for uncontested possession differential and sixth for time in possession differential. Combine it with a simplified system behind the ball and it’s allowed the defence to be protected more often after turnover while dedicating a larger focus on forward half play. There’s still a long way to go in the area, of course, but the steps forward are obvious.

Individually, with the exception of bedding Colby McKercher down into his best position as – opinion alert – a high half-back coming up to contests and playing with the field in front of him – the first choice on-ball unit has consolidated into the look we’ll see for the medium to long term, health pending. Finn O’Sullivan has been the revelation to some outside the North bubble, graduating into a position as the midfield glue to unlock his teammates. Whether it’s Luke Davies-Uniacke as the explosive ball winner, Harry Sheezel as more of a first receiver, or George Wardlaw as the manic wrecking ball, it’s O’Sullivan’s presence, positioning, and work without the ball making most of it possible without having to sacrifice too much elsewhere.

Looking forward, while the last month of Hawthorn, Bulldogs, Geelong, and Sydney is brutal, the eight weeks beforehand present real opportunities. Put Fremantle to one side and the other seven opponents read, in order: West Coast, Richmond, Essendon, Port Adelaide, Collingwood, Melbourne, and St Kilda. None of those outfits should present North with any nightmares. It’s not to say they should or will go anywhere close to running the table, but it presents the perfect opportunity for football with actual (relatively low) stakes as they aim for a wildcard position. It’s a position they haven’t been in for a decade.

Ricky’s grade: B

My thoughts

As I made clear in my 2026 season preview, I was a committed North Melbourne sceptic. I wasn’t enamoured with their list build and really didn’t like their style of play under coach Alastair Clarkson. North were almost totally dependent on clearance wins to generate scores and well below AFL standard at defending turnovers, which is increasingly where games are won and lost. So it’s been a surprise, albeit a pleasant one, to see their real improvement through 11 games of 2026.

From my perspective – and I will defer to Ricky here, whose week-by-week reviews are the highest standard of writing about North Melbourne anywhere on the internet – the improvement has been driven by organic improvement and by a simplified structure out-of-possession (in short: moving away from a zonal structure to something closer to back-shoulder one-on-one defending). North look significantly more resilient when they don’t have the ball. While it’s true that they remain poor at preventing the opposition from moving the ball, they are (very) slightly better than league average when it comes to preventing opposition scores from turnover.

Ricky has identified the main statistical sources of improvement. I think the statistic which should provide North supporters, who should finally believe there is an escape from the hell of the last five years, with the most confidence is that four of the club’s 10 highest-rated players (across the last 20 games) are 21 or younger. While it’s true that the likes of Tristan Xerri, Luke Parker, and Jack Darling are carrying a big load, Finn O’Sullivan, George Wardlaw, Cooper Trembath (despite a quiet month), and Harry Sheezel are showing that the kids are alright. It’s not like Luke Davie-Uniacke is nearing the end, either.

North is by no means fully out of the woods. Flashes of the old, bad North are much rarer but still present. They’re probably a win behind where they ought to be given the softness of their opening run of fixtures. But these are entirely different problems to the 2021-2025 Omnicrisis era, where the footy team and footy club were very bad at everything. If North can produce the type of footy they’ve already shown this season, including against sides like Sydney, over the next month, then a wildcard berth is by no means out of the equation.

My grade: B

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Port Adelaide

Win-loss: 3-8

Ladder position: 15th

Next four games: West Coast (A), Sydney (H), Collingwood (A), Adelaide (H)

Patrick McCabe, barrister and good friend of the newsletter

Port Adelaide has always loved to anoint its favourite sons as coach. The only exception over the near century separating Sampson Hosking and Mark Williams was Mark’s legendary dad Fos. Fos, now regarded as perhaps the most Port Adelaide person of them all, infamously moved from West Adelaide in 1950 to become Port’s player-coach.

Port’s next outsider experiment was, of course, Ken Hinkley in 2013. When that experiment began to falter, it was no wonder the faithful began to salivate over the prospect of Josh Carr replacing him. There was something nostalgic and familiar about it – another favourite returned son, another premiership player. Not only that but a player whose hard and physical approach encapsulated what fans delight in calling the “Port Adelaide way”, and someone so thoroughly Port Adelaide he (allegedly) actually initiated the iconic Ramsgate fight with Mark Ricciuto. How could it go wrong?

Well, unfortunately, so far it has. After truly terrible performances in the first month of the season against North and West Coast, and a feeble win against even-more-atrocious Essendon, the wind was out of Port’s sails before the anchor had even been raised. The breeze seemed briefly to stiffen with a tantalisingly gallant loss against Hawthorn, an invigorating, romping win over Geelong, and a just-forgivable loss to the Crows over consecutive rounds. But as Port head into the mid-season bye, it is hard to hold on to hope following consecutive and convincing defeats to the Bulldogs, Gold Coast, and worst of all, Carlton.

Causes for optimism are thinning as rapidly as Ken Hinkley’s hair over the latter years of his tenure. There have been significant injuries – to captain Connor Rozee, Sam Powell-Pepper and Miles Bergman (who, even when he was playing, did not seem to be doing so on a full tank). But, as significant as these absences are, they seem like excuses papering over what is increasingly hard to deny – Port’s list is not what it once was. Mitch Georgiades has been a dependable if inaccurate presence up forward, but it is hard to resist the conclusion his impressive goalkicking figures (currently sixth on the Coleman Medal count) are mostly a function of the dearth of talent surrounding him. Aliir Aliir has found some of the form that made him a fan favourite a few years back, but he similarly has had few reliable assistants.

Meanwhile, Zak Butters dominates almost every game. But this is cold comfort given he’s almost certainly departing Alberton at season’s end. Jason Horne-Francis continues to be inconsistent, Ollie Wines has slowed up, and after that the pickings quickly start to become meagre. Burgoyne, Drew and Farrell have been solid enough. There have been some enjoyable performances from new youngsters like Ewan Mackinlay, Jack Whitlock, and Josh Lai. But are they going to replace Travis Boak, Dan Houston, Charlie Dixon, and the rest? I hope so. But I don’t see it quite yet.

This brings us back to that fundamental, and fundamentally unanswerable, question of football punditry – how much of a difference does a coach make? It would be harsh to judge Carr’s performance when he can only work with what he has got, and has only had 10 games to do so. But so far, our favourite son has not achieved the Williamsesque feats so many fans indulgently allowed themselves to think he might. The attention of many Port fans has already turned to the enticing prospect of Dougie Cochrane and the exciting 2027 crop of father-son and NGA prospects. If, that is, the AFL hasn’t completely ruined that for us too.

Patrick’s grade: C

My thoughts

I’m going to disagree with Patrick here! Port’s start to the season was very bad. And the recent sequence of close losses – especially the heartbreak of the Showdown (not that I think there’s any shame in being beaten by Brayden Cook, the best player in the AFL) – would no doubt sting. But overall, I think the season is well on track to deliver the outcomes most realistic Port fans would have wanted: evidence of Josh Carr’s coaching acumen, growth from young players, and maintaining a good draft hand.

Carr has transformed Port’s defensive profile virtually overnight. Here are some relevant numbers:

There are probably some beneficial fixture and sample size effects here – it’s only 11 games, after all – but the improvement from Ken Hinkley’s final year in charge has been stark. (Perhaps it’s evidence in favour of the argument that Ken really was in charge in 2025.) Without having closely reviewed the tape, my impressions are that Carr has significantly improved his side’s ability to slow the opposition in transition, funnel them wide, and maintain disciplined defensive spacing. If Port was at all a relevant side this season, it would be one of the bigger stories in footy. It’s been genuinely impressive, and, in my opinion, enough to give Port supporters confidence that Carr knows what he’s doing.

Crucially, that improvement hasn’t translated into too many inconvenient wins. Sometimes we need to acknowledge realities that the AFL would prefer didn’t exist. Outside of an implausible jump up the ladder that persuaded Butters that his long-term future lay at Alberton, it’s not really in Port Adelaide’s interests to win many games this season. They’re headed to the draft. If (realistically, when) Butters leaves, Port will have several picks in addition to its natural first-rounder. Dougie Cochrane looks like such an enticing prospect that he will be a top-two draft pick without playing many, if any, games in his draft year. The AFL’s recent changes to the bidding rules will make him more expensive. Had Port won the four games they’d lost by less than a goal this season, matching a bid on Cochrane would have looked much more complicated.

The players that Port has selected with its few meaningful recent draft picks are showing good flashes. Joe Berry looks much more at home at AFL level in his second year. His late goal almost won the Showdown. Jack Whitlock is the real revelation, however: the spring-heeled tall forward looks like a set-and-forget forward for the next decade. That’s a great outcome from Pick 33. Now that he’s regained match fitness, Jason Horne-Francis looks like he’s about to go to the next level.

I understand that, on some fundamental level, it sounds silly to say given the point of footy is to win, but I truly believe that, in almost every respect except the win-loss record, it’s been an encouraging season for Port Adelaide. The problem is that the guy who’s done the most to make that happen on the field almost certainly won’t be there next year. The clock will reset.

My grade: B

I’ll be back this time next week with thoughts on how GWS and Richmond are going so far.

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West Coast’s 2026 Sir Doug Nicholls Round guernsey (the club was renamed Waalitj Marawar for the duration of the round), designed by Ngadju Mirning artist Andrew Beck, tells the story of Mandooboornup, a place central to the Waalitj Dreaming story. In the story, a mother eagle carried two boys who’d been stealing eggs from the Mandooboornup peak and dropped them into the ocean, where they turned into islands. The front of the guernsey features a large circle representing the club, surrounded by figures that honour the first three Indigenous players to represent the club: Wally Matera, Phil Narkle, and Chris Lewis. Flowing from that central circle are dots, shields and boomerangs, symbolising the warlike nature of Australian rules football.

At the centre of the design sits a golden eagle – the Waalitj – an important and respected symbol across many Aboriginal nations, including Noongar Country. “The eagle is really significant within Aboriginal culture,” Beck told the West Coast club website. “We talk to our young people about what the eagle does when it’s being annoyed or frustrated. Instead of reacting, it rises above. It goes to an altitude where nothing can bother it anymore, so it’s really important symbolism as well.”

Adelaide’s (Kuwarna’s) guernsey tells a story of a different kind. Designed by Wayne Milera, the guernsey is about the Crows half-back, his footy journey, and his ancestry. On the top-right of the guernsey is a small circle, interlaced with dots and figures, representing his mother’s Gunditjmara and Wotjobaluk heritage. The circle on the bottom-left represents the Nharangga of the Yorke Peninsula – his father’s side. Small white dots around the large central circle represent Milera’s ancestors, including his nan, who are no longer with him in body but still are in spirit. The U-shaped figures in the bottom-right of the guernsey represent the Ingle Farm Football Club (shout-out to the northeastern suburbs of Adelaide; God’s country), where Milera played until he was 16, and Central Districts, where he completed his footy apprenticeship.

On the top of the guernsey, sandwiched slightly awkwardly between the large AFL and Toyota logos, are two sets of animal tracks – an emu chasing a crow. This is a nod to a Wotjobaluk Dreaming story, which tells of a fierce, giant emu spirit named Tchingal chasing Waa the Crow across the land. Their violent struggle physically shaped the geography. It’s fitting. After all, Milera is a Crow who is often chased. The four sets of handprints right in the centre of the guernsey represent Milera’s family: his wife Nina, their two boys Carter and Stanley, and him.

Melbourne’s (Narrm’s) guernsey celebrates the club’s connection to Nyirripi, a small town 440 kilometres northwest of Alice Springs. Sitting on the land of the Warlpiri People, it’s a community whose heart beats red and blue. The local club is the Nyirripi Demons. This year’s guernsey was designed by Vanetta Nampijinpa Hudson, a Nyirripi artist whose works tell the stories passed down by her father and his father before him for millennia. She paints stories of Warlukurlangu Jukurrpa (Fire Dreaming), which relate directly to her land, its features, and the life that dances and teems on its surface. The video on Melbourne’s website, which features Kysaiah and Latrelle Pickett, Shane McAdam, and Ricky Mentha Jr., depicts children laughing, kicking the footy, and admiring the heroes who’ve come from the big smoke. But the spiritual richness cannot hide the material poverty.

The 18 guernseys reveal the astonishing breadth of Australian Indigenous culture – its age, its span, its reach. They encode not one story, but thousands. The AFL Players’ Association Indigenous Map, which traces the origins of every Indigenous AFL and AFLW player, evokes a similar feeling. Every corner of this vast red, brown, and green land is represented. Ngarrandjerri. Whadjuk. Kamilaroi. Larrakia. The map reveals an important truth. There is not one Indigenous culture. Instead, there are dozens – hundreds – which have independently found an avenue of creative and physical expression in this game we all share.

Indigenous Australians were playing various forms of kicking games on this continent before white settlement. Whether those games, often banded together under the collective name Marn Grook, was a direct influence on the sport today known as Australian rules, is not the subject of this essay. What is not in dispute is that the AFL has been hugely ennobled by the contributions of Indigenous players, coaches, fans, and administrators. Sir Doug Nicholls Round acknowledges those contributions and celebrates a deep connection to the game.

The AFL and its clubs have gotten very good at honouring Indigenous culture. The guernseys, the smoking ceremonies, the Welcome to Country, the matches played on sacred ground – the way the league observes Sir Doug Nicholls Round has grown richer and more considered with each passing year. The unfortunate irony is that, over the same time span, the league has become less good at ensuring there are actually Indigenous players on the field.

According to the AFL, there are 62 Indigenous players on clubs’ lists in 2026. (I actually couldn’t reach that total myself, I could only get to 59 or 60 – but I’ll trust the league to get such an important number right.) Regardless of the exact number, the trend is clear. There were 87 Indigenous players in 2020. Since then, the number of Indigenous players in the AFL has declined year-on-year.

Just a single Indigenous player featured in Dreamtime at the ‘G, the showpiece game of Sir Doug Nicholls Round. Yes, that was an unfortunate coincidence created by Richmond’s extensive injury list. It still felt symbolic. Observance and representation are different things, and the gap between them has been widening for half a decade. The ceremony has expanded at the same time as the numbers have contracted.

Many people believe this is a problem. The AFL believes it is – at least in the prosaic sense that it’s a bad look for an already crisis-stricken administration. But this is by no means a unanimous view. Opposition to the claim that declining Indigenous representation is a problem comes in two main forms. The first is that Indigenous culture and contributions to footy aren’t worth celebrating. That view exists and is probably more widespread than many people believe. But it’s one I fundamentally disagree with. The second form of scepticism is more consistent with the principles of footy libertarianism I articulated in a piece from a couple of months ago – namely, that clubs and coaches should be allowed to build their lists and approach the game however they like, and that attempts to do that ought to be resisted. A footy libertarian might respond to the fact of declining Indigenous player numbers with questions such as: what’s the “right” number? Will the AFL impose a quota clubs must comply with? Where does it end? There’s a difference between the concern the AFL has expressed about Indigenous player numbers (which one doesn’t tend to hear much about outside of Sir Doug Nicholls Round) and full interventionist tyranny, but if the league believes there’s a problem, and seeks to address it, then most proposed remedies will impact clubs.

The AFL is doing something – or is at least talking a reasonably good game about doing something. In a media conference launching this year’s Sir Doug Nicholls Round, CEO Andrew Dillon announced that the league would launch a First Nations Impact Fund, an initiative which “aims to grow First Nations representation across the industry, creating culturally safe environments and calling out racism ‘wherever it exists’.” That sounds encouraging, although given that the fund is believed to be worth about $300,000 – less than the median player’s salary – we should temper our optimism about what it can achieve. The AFL has also convened a sub-committee of AFL and club figures, which met for the first time on the eve of Sir Doug Nicholls Round to discuss ways to boost the number of Indigenous players. No sooner had the committee been publicised, it was criticised by several Indigenous AFL greats, including Shaun Burgoyne, Michael Walters, and Michael O’Loughlin, for not being sufficiently consultative or representative. The omission of national AFL talent diversity manager Paul Vandenbergh, the most senior Indigenous staffer at AFL head office, from the panel, came in for particular criticism. There’s a real dispute here: the AFL and Indigenous advocates like Hill might well define “success” differently. The current AFL administration is, first and foremost, looking to arrest the decline of Indigenous player numbers. Indigenous players might see it differently: they could be just as interested in important questions of cultural safety, career longevity, and how the league will support Indigenous players after they leave the system.

The AFL is also reportedly considering giving clubs an extra list spot specifically for First Nations players. It’s worth exploring the potential implications of this. When I asked “Alex”, an AFL list boss, what list management rules he’d remove, he quickly identified the rookie list. “A lot of clubs use it as a list management tool,” Alex told me. “It’s within the rules, but I just think you can extend your primary list, make it a full list, and remove the admin, remove the stress of players getting delisted and re-listed.” Clubs have converged on a use of the rookie list that’s quite different from its original purpose of player development. It’s a small example that illustrates a broader point: clubs are increasingly clever at maximising utility. Given this, what are the likely outcomes of a bespoke Indigenous rookie list spot?

The first is the one the AFL would most like: clubs use it as a chance to recruit a player they know is talented but would otherwise have required more patience than is typically afforded. Isaiah Dudley comes to mind here as a potential proof of concept: a player with all the technical tools who has thrived in an AFL environment. That’s a quick and effective way to go from 62 Indigenous AFL-listed players to 80. The second outcome, which one suspects the AFL would tolerate but probably not love, is that clubs treat the spot as a box-ticking exercise by adding an Indigenous rookie player that’s unlikely to ever make it, and investing minimally in their development. That would probably count as vaguely malicious compliance: recognising that the value of getting the league off their backs is greater than the cost of the list spot. Certainly not an ideal way to increase Indigenous representation in the AFL, but one way for the line to go up.

The worst-case scenario is that the Indigenous rookie spot isn’t actually additive at all, and instead results in fewer Indigenous players being taken in the National Draft. I suspect that’s more likely than the AFL would like to admit: creating a list spot that can only be used for Indigenous players will effectively increase the opportunity cost of adding Indigenous players to a senior list. If the choice was previously between using a third-round pick on an Indigenous player and a non-Indigenous player, more clubs, knowing the buffer exists, will pick the non-Indigenous player. In this view, an extra list spot without accompanying obligations – minimum development hours, cultural safety reporting, etc. – becomes window dressing at best, and cynical compliance at worst. Clubs are rational and self-interested, and smart people employed by them spend lots of time thinking about how to engineer marginal gains.

The proposal to add an Indigenous rookie list spot might be misguided, but it gestures at something real: fewer Indigenous players are being drafted, and more are being delisted. In a sense, this is trivially true. Indigenous player numbers are declining, so clearly more are exiting the system than entering it. But the collapse in the number of Indigenous draftees is still alarming. The sole Indigenous player taken in the 2024 National Draft, Cody Anderson, was selected with Pick 64.

There are several hypotheses for why fewer Indigenous players are being drafted. The first is that nothing has actually changed and the decline is just attributable to bad luck. That’s possible; we’re ultimately dealing with small sample sizes. But I’m not sure it squares with the reality, and the AFL’s response. Most other explanations posit that something structural has happened. Perhaps clubs believe that Indigenous prospects aren’t well-suited to the evolving physical and tactical demands of modern footy (players are getting taller and are expected to run harder for longer). Or perhaps they believe that Indigenous prospects, especially those which haven’t come through elite developmental pathways, are riskier prospects than “good kids” who won scholarships to fancy private schools. Either way, if you believe there’s a structural reason for declining Indigenous player numbers, then you’re implicitly agreeing there is a crack somewhere in the developmental pipeline – we’re just quibbling about where it is.

Saying that the AFL is bad at considering second-order consequences is a little like saying that water is wet. But the problem isn’t really that the AFL’s proposed interventions are inadequate. It’s that the league is hopelessly stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, the AFL is one of the few mainstream institutions in Australian public life where young Indigenous men are actively celebrated instead of being passively tolerated (or treated with something between suspicion and hostility). On the footy field, Aboriginality is admirable. Seeing Kysaiah Pickett, or Shai Bolton, or Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera strut their stuff matters a hell of a lot for Indigenous kids in Broome or Nyirripi. It is also, frankly, one of the main ways Australians learn about Indigenous customs. The AFL is a prominent stage for positive depictions of Indigenous culture. It knows this. It understands the immense commercial and political value of this reputation – and the costs of relinquishing it.

But I also suspect that sharper minds at AFL House know that, ultimately, they have few levers at their disposal to meaningfully increase the number of Indigenous players coming into the system at the level required. The most obvious problem is that clubs have adopted a more fine-grained approach to drafting, which often manifests as a greater aversion to downside risk, and therefore – indirectly – in fewer Indigenous players entering the system. I’m going to quote from the piece I wrote about the Indigenous player decline two years ago, because the problems I identified then are still just as apparent today.

Once you start looking for this [risk aversion], you can see its influence everywhere. Funnelling more money to elite underage programs, such as the AFL Academy, at the apparent expense of Indigenous development. Increasingly stringent testing requirements on prospective draftees. The increasing predominance of a small group of prestigious private schools, who burnish their own credentials by offering promising players lucrative scholarships. Clubs, terrified of whiffing on high draft picks, have instead participated in a joint effort to turn drafting and talent identification into a hard science.

But, for several reasons, that effort has worked to the disadvantage of many Indigenous players. According to [Professor John] Evans, his experience in elite sports has revealed a clear pattern: recruiting Indigenous players “is often perceived as more challenging than selecting their non-Indigenous peers.” That reluctance is partly attributable to lingering stereotypes. For example, kids who were raised in tough circumstances are labelled “difficult” when logistical hurdles mean they miss the occasional training session. Nonchalant body language is perceived as not caring. Shyness? Arrogance. The bias, Evans writes, also extends to the metrics clubs use to evaluate prospective players today. Those tests, he argues, prioritise physical traits instead of football skills, and thus often fail to capture the true potential of young Indigenous footballers. If you’ve spent your adolescence kicking the footy on red earth, then it’s easy to see how beep tests might seem a little alien.

That bias doesn’t stay in the recruiting department. It shapes how Indigenous players are discussed and perceived well after they’re drafted. Too often, commentators reach for words like “mercurial” and “X-factor” – words that are meant as praise but presuppose supernatural talent and implicitly discount hard work and football intelligence – in ways we rarely do for white players. It’s a form of exoticisation that, however well-intentioned, keeps Indigenous players at arm’s length from the game’s mainstream. We’ll know something has genuinely shifted when those adjectives are retired in favour of “smart” and “selfless”.

Clubs covet data. And Indigenous players that come through non-standard development pathways – that don’t play Talent League, that don’t play in the Under-18 National Championships, that don’t submit themselves to a battery of physical and psychological testing – generate less data. Players who aren’t on the radar at 16 are often regarded as permanently lost to the system. From the perspective of clubs that pursue their own interests, it’s rational to avoid risk, and sensible to treat the broader problem as not theirs to solve. That’s part of why Melbourne drafting Latrelle Pickett in the first round of last year’s draft, felt so bold. He spent a decent chunk of his draft year in the SANFL Reserves.

Ghosts of present and past loom over all this. Australia is doing a poor job of Closing the Gap. If anything, the gap is widening. The costs of poor physical and economic outcomes are felt far beyond footy. But if the median 16 year-old Indigenous kid is, because of nutritional deficits beyond their control, smaller than their White Australian counterpart (at a time when height and running power are more important at the top level than ever), it’s yet another way the deck is stacked against them. The longer we go without meaningfully closing the gap, the bigger the gap between the environments where many Indigenous kids hone their footy skills and the gilded private schools where so many white kids are drafted from becomes – and the bigger the risks of drafting the former become for AFL clubs. Even the most competent footy admin in history can’t close the gap. It’s just that the AFL, by virtue of its prominence, is one of the places where the gaps have widened.

As the AFL and AFLW Indigenous Player map shows, Indigenous footy talent comes from every corner of Australia. It’s incredibly hard – not to mention expensive – to build a system capable of finding it everywhere. A player being drafted is the culmination of a years-long process. Talent identification is just the beginning. But even that first step filters out so many potential Indigenous AFL players, because so many of them are trying to get by in places like Nyirripi. The Indigenous talent development model often involves identifying future elite prospects when they’re around 15 or 16 and then pulling them into the system, which, for those who’ve grown up in rural and remote areas, means a move to the big smoke and one of those prestigious private schools. That’s a highly resource-intensive process, not to mention one which carries a whiff of an episode of Australian history that’s best forgotten (and which has contributed to lingering intergenerational trauma among Indigenous communities).

There’s another contributor to the decline in Indigenous player numbers I’ve not mentioned: deep cuts to clubs’ “soft caps” because of Covid that have still yet to be restored. I haven’t seen that connection made very often. But a quick glance at the trend in Indigenous player numbers suggests it should be. When budgets tightened, clubs cut what they couldn’t easily justify on football ROI terms. Indigenous Player Liaison Officers – the staff members best placed to make newly-drafted Indigenous players feel culturally safe – were precisely the kind of role that didn’t necessarily generate the short-term value that contributed to wins.

Following the Hawthorn racism saga, where Indigenous players described being pressured to cut ties with family members, the AFL mandated that every club must have an Indigenous Player Liaison Officer present for at least three days a week. According to comments made by Caroline Wilson on the most recent episode of the Real Footy podcast, Richmond’s Indigenous player liaison officer currently attends the club just one day a week. Whether that’s an outlier or representative of a broader pattern of non-compliance, I’m not sure. But perhaps that at least offers a genuine starting point. Increasing Indigenous player numbers in the AFL is partly about recruiting more Indigenous players – but it’s also about retaining the Indigenous players already in the system.

Perhaps the First Nations Impact Fund includes an increase to the funding available to clubs for Indigenous Player Liaison Officers. I hope it does, but I don’t know. I’m not sure the AFL knows. But one thing is certain: the problem won’t be solved by talking or by forcing clubs to act against their interests. If the AFL is serious about increasing Indigenous player numbers, and serious about doing it the right way – by improving the breadth of talent identification, the depth of talent development, and making the AFL a more culturally safe environment – it’ll need to pony up. You can’t do something like this on the cheap. More Indigenous player liaison officers and a dedicated rookie list spot are a start. But the AFL should reconsider how it handles Indigenous talent development.

The Northern Academies provide a clue. They work because they provide those clubs with strong incentives to invest in footy in their own backyard. They get to direct junior development and then draft them at a discount. It’s a hell of a deal. And it’s a demonstration that when the AFL gets the incentives right, clubs respond. The question is whether similar logic can be applied at scale to Indigenous talent development. Here is one tentative answer, offered in the spirit of creative blue-sky thinking rather than a model that’s guaranteed to work. The West Australian clubs have been petitioning the AFL for expanded academies, based on the northern states’ model, to make better use of the abundant talent in the state. The AFL should accede to the request – with caveats. Make them Next Generation Academies, specifically dedicated to the incubation of Indigenous and Culturally and Linguistically Diverse talent. Ensure that the Academies are tied to demonstrable community investment obligations, minimum development hours, and mandatory cultural safety reporting. Find a compromise between the products of those new academies being in the open pool (which would deter the WA clubs from investing) and giving them exclusive access (which would be unfair to other clubs). The WA clubs will bear the brunt of the cost of running the academies, but every club has an interest in seeing them succeed.

Beyond WA, the harder problem is the Northern Territory, where the distances are just as great and the communities even more remote. I suspect something more radical is needed here: a permanent AFL-funded institution. Base it in Darwin and give it a satellite presence in Alice Springs. Appoint coaches and welfare staff who are based in the community year-round, a pathway from community football to a Territory academy that doesn’t require a 15 year-old to leave home, and cultural support that travels with players when they do eventually relocate. The pastoral care piece – the part the soft cap cuts gutted – gets built into the institution’s DNA. Fund it so it operates entirely independently of clubs. The AFL takes responsibility for everything before draft night. Clubs still draft the kids and mould them into AFL players. But at least they’re picking kids that aren’t beginning 20 metres behind the start line. Framed correctly, this isn’t the AFL taking power away from clubs. It’s the AFL finally taking responsibility for the parts of the system no one else has. Something like this will cost real money and an appetite for leadership and ambition I’m not sure the incumbent administration has shown. There’s no guarantee it’ll work. The complex, multilayered challenges of geography, history, and trauma that have shaped Indigenous Australians’ relationships with institutions like the AFL won’t melt away because they can suddenly attend a whizz-bang academy in Darwin. In truth, there’s scant evidence that, outside of the ritual admission that “there is work to do” you hear around Sir Doug Nicholls Round, that the AFL considers declining Indigenous representation to be a big enough problem to intervene in the talent development model. And it’s not at all clear what success would look like. Is it a particular number, or share, of Indigenous players in the AFL? Is it about improving cultural safety and retention of Indigenous players in the league? Improved articulation of development pathways? I’m not qualified to answer these questions, but they’d probably be good ones for the sub-committee of AFL and club figures convened by the league to consider.

But the alternatives that the AFL has so far presented – a $300,000 fund, a sub-committee, and a list spot that smart clubs will find ways to game – don’t adequately honour the contributions that Indigenous Australians make to the game. So much about how Indigenous people in the system are treated – the way players are spoken about, the way Indigenous club staff are often the first to be cut – suggests that they are still regarded as an ornament. They are not. They are a central part of the game’s past, present, and future. On the back of the Waalitj Marawar Indigenous guernsey is a small circle. Inside it are human footprints and stylised versions of the tracks made by the eagle, the kangaroo, and the emu. These three animals are incapable of walking backwards. According to Andrew Beck, the artist who designed the guernsey, the symbolism is deliberate. “The club shouldn’t walk backwards. The nation shouldn’t walk backwards.” Those words are worth heeding.

Straight from the chart

To begin, one final chart which illustrates the dwindling presence of Indigenous players in the game. The total number of AFL-listed players across this sample size ranged from 806 in 2019 to 777 in 2023. NB: these are manual counts, they might be slightly off in places. But the story it tells is fundamentally true.

Despite being very similar on the scoreboard, the opening two games of Round 11 couldn’t really have been more different structurally. The Hawthorn-Kuwarna game was typical of contests between good sides (well, at least in Hawthorn’s case) in Tasmania – high-pressure and high-turnover. The two sides combined for 151 intercept possessions. The Dreamtime at the ‘G game was rather different: just 118 intercept possessions were recorded.

The other especially noteworthy thing was how few possession chains were recorded in the North Melbourne-Gold Coast game. Both sides were accurate, so there were only 18 kick-ins. Remarkably, there were only three more intercept possessions (88 in total) recorded than clearance wins (85). Neither team could stop the other when they had the ball.

Turning our attention now to how successfully sides converted possession chains into scores, Kuwarna and Richmond both feasted on clearance wins (the former simply didn’t win enough of them), Waalitj Marawar capitalised on the turnovers they did force against Collingwood (but only recorded 52 intercept possessions), and Carlton utterly dominated Yartapuulti in close.

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Footnotes

• Some good stats from the ESPN Footy Podcast: across the two games Josh Fraser has coached Carlton, the Blues have been:

  • 1st for uncontested marks (13th this season under Michael Voss)

  • 18th for share of kicks taken long (9th under Voss)

  • 3rd for 45-degree kicks (15th under Voss)

  • 2nd for D50 to F50 transition success rate (13th under Voss)

  • 2nd for inside-50 kick retention percentage (6th under Voss)

• Courtesy of Ben Cameron: North Melbourne’s stirring after-the-siren victory against Gold Coast at Marvel on Saturday was the club’s biggest half-time comeback since Round 18, 2005. That day, they were 40 points down at half-time against Port Adelaide. On Saturday it was a measly 38 points.

• Speaking of that game, it was the ninth this year where both sides have scored 100+ points – the most in a season since 2016. There are still 119 games left to play. (H/T Sirswampthing)

• Unsurprisingly (given it was the highest-scoring third quarter in V/AFL history), GWS’s third term against Brisbane was also the highest-scoring quarter ever recorded against a reigning Premier. The previous best was the 80 points Richmond put up in the last quarter of its Round 2 game against Melbourne. Don’t remember that game? I’m not surprised – it was played in 1942. (H/T Sirswampthing)

• Some utterly bonkers stats about the third quarter of the GWS-Brisbane game, courtesy of friend of the newsletter, Emlyn Breese: The Giants were +53 for post-clearance disposals, +41 for uncontested possessions, +14 for tackles, and +9 for forward-50 tackles.

Courtesy of Fox Footy’s Max Laughton: this is the first time Essendon has been outright bottom of the V/AFL ladder at the conclusion of a round since Rounds 18-22 of 2016. Before then, it was bottom from Rounds 7-16 of 2006. Before that? Round 4, 1992. Before that??? You have to go back to 1933.

Recommended reading

• Cody Atkinson and Sean Lawson on that third quarter by the Giants on Sunday, and what it might mean for them and the Lions.

• Jonathan Horn on James Hird, the ghost at the Essendon banquet.

• Tommy Wolfe on the responsibility of commentators and creators to ensure the footy media ecosystem is safe and inclusive to all.

• In case you missed it: Cody and Jonathan and I have started a podcast. It’s called 110 Percenters. Find it wherever you get your podcasts, or here’s a direct link to our second episode.

• Nick Rynne wraps up another big week in WA footy over at Jumper Punches.

In addition to restarting paid subscriptions, I’ve also created a “Buy Me a Coffee” page so you can give me even more money. Here’s the link.

On the second episode of 110 Percenters, Cody, Jonathan, and I reflect on Neale Daniher’s life and legacy, discuss that third quarter at Engie Stadium on Sunday and what it might mean for the Giants and the Lions, and talk about Essendon’s decision to sack Brad Scott.

In case that isn’t enough, Cody revealed some lore about his footy allegiances, and Jonathan – perhaps unwittingly – dropped an iconic Gen Z meme.

New episodes of 110 Percenters will be published here. I can also officially say that you can find us wherever you get your podcasts, including:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocket Casts

• YouTube Podcasts

Our thanks to everyone who tuned in for our first episode.

Listener feedback will be key to making us better, so if you took the time to listen, please also consider taking the time to share your thoughts about what we did well and what we could do better.

Leave a comment on this post, write to us on Twitter (My handle is “onepercentas”, Cody’s is “CapitalCityCody”, and Jonathan’s is “JonathanHorn23”), email us – there’s plenty of ways to get in touch.

Links to Cody and Jonathan’s writing is after the jump. They are two of the best footy writers in the industry and I endorse their work in the strongest terms.

Now that we’re bona fide podcasters, I guess the only way to wrap this up is to say… please like, share, and subscribe!

Links:

• Read Cody’s work here.

• Read Jonathan’s work here.

I’ve heeded the call. And I’m very glad to say I’ve brought a couple of friends along for the write: the ABC’s Cody Atkinson and The Guardian’s Jonathan Horn. Cody and Jonathan rank very highly on the list of the best footy writers. No one can analyse the game like Cody (or his ABC co-writer, Sean Lawson). And no one can humanise it as elegantly as Jonathan.

We’ve started this for the same reason we write: to add a nuanced, independent voice to a media landscape that, too often, rewards hot takes and manufactured drama.

On the inaugural episode of the 110 Percenters podcast, Cody, Jonathan, and I discuss Scott Pendlebury breaking the V/AFL games record, the other members of the 400-game club, and how Steven King has turned Melbourne’s fortunes around in just 10 games.

Our aim is to record and publish once a week.

New episodes will be published here. You can also find us on:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocket Casts

• YouTube Podcasts

It’s safe to say we have a lot to learn about this podcasting business. Which is why listener feedback will be so important. If you take the time to listen, please also take the time to share your thoughts about what we did well and what we could do better.

Leave a comment on this post, write to us on Twitter (I’m [at]onepercentas, Cody is [at]CapitalCityCody, and Jonathan is [at]JonathanHorn23), email us – there’s plenty of ways to get in touch.

Links to Cody and Jonathan’s writing is after the jump.

I guess there’s nothing left to say except… please like and subscribe!

Links:

• The book about the best-ever Collingwood players Jonathan mentioned.

• Read Cody’s work here.

• Read Jonathan’s work here.

Social preview photo credit: The Hollywood Reporter.

Most footy fans can name their side’s coach and captain. Attentive fans can name the CEO and President. Only the most committed can tell you about their list manager. On one hand, this makes perfect sense. List managers don’t kick the footy or mould the game plan. But on the other hand, it’s a curious blind spot in our shared understanding of how labour and glory are divided inside AFL clubs. Because list managers make it all possible. They work with recruiters to evaluate draft prospects. They work with coaches to identify trade targets. They lead contract negotiations. And they hold the whip hand when it comes time to decide which players to delist. Every side, successful or not, is the product of choices made by people most (well-adjusted) footy fans wouldn’t recognise if they walked past them on the street. To help me better understand the role and its salience in modern footy, I spoke to “Alex”, a list manager at an AFL club.

The player had red flags. Alex could see them in the data. He’d been part of a team that had built a system – data, supplemented by interviews and the good old-fashioned eye test – specifically designed to identify those red flags. They shouldn’t have been ignored. And yet, because the player’s athletic upside was so tempting, they were. Alex is wistful when I ask him the question that yielded that answer: what’s one decision in your career you wish you could have again? It’s clear this one plays on his mind. It was a decision, a reasonably big one, that didn’t work out.

That experience reinforced an important lesson: drafting for immediate need is dangerous. “The way I look at it now,” Alex says, “is that you’re always drafting for need. It’s just that in the first round, the need is talent. Once the talent dries up, positional need becomes more prevalent.” Alex and his club’s recruiters develop clear tiers based on their evaluation of the talent in each year’s draft. Clubs today have more tools at their disposal to evaluate talent. Some are technical – but the most important are epistemological. “In recruiting and evaluation,” says Alex, “there are some significant biases that can creep in through subjectivity, which is really important to identify first and try to counter as best you can. That’s probably our main goal through assessment.”

Recognise your own propensity for bias and error. And then create a system which allows for apples-to-apples comparisons. That’s how you create a process which yields better outcomes. “The way I describe it is,” says Alex, “is we try to make all our subjective measures objective. So if we’re watching tape, we’re identifying and recording a lot of that information through metrics we like to follow in terms of how a kid plays and some of these fundamental skill sets, and how they wash out at the end of the year. It’s a lot of work, but at the end of the day, we can objectify a lot of our information and generate a final grade and rating off the back of that.” Alex isn’t kidding when he says it’s a lot of work. AFL list managers and analysts do a lot of the technical work in-house because the market for player scouting tools is smaller and more opaque in footy than it is for global sports like soccer. Footy doesn’t have comprehensive public-facing tools like FBRef or Wyscout. Instead, it’s not uncommon for clubs and especially dedicated amateurs to develop their own player evaluation models. “Bailey”, a club analyst I interviewed for a piece in 2024, built one while working at a state league club. Alex’s answer seems to suggest that his club employs a bespoke model to evaluate prospective and incumbent players. Getting the right answers begins with asking the right questions.

Something else in Alex’s answer to my question about player evaluation jumped out to me: “immediate need”. List needs change because needs are determined by two things that themselves change: a list’s existing traits and the footballing traits that are most strongly predictive of on-field success. Many, probably most, of those footballing traits are predictable and stable over time. All else being equal, you’d prefer guys who can find the footy, win one-on-one contests, and possess a psychotic desire to win. But other traits like, say, size, the balance between contested ball-winning ability and outside spread, how far you can handball it, are more sensitive to rule changes. Just as the Reserve Bank of Australia’s determination of the cash rate directly influences the relative desirability of certain assets, the AFL’s decisions about rules and the interpretation of rules drive the behaviour of clubs. Changes to draft rules like NGA eligibility and bid matching impact how clubs plan for upcoming drafts. Changes to in-game rules, by changing the value of different footballing traits, impact the viability of different game plans (as I wrote about here), and significantly impact the practice of list management.

Alex’s solution to this vexing problem is to reason from first principles. “We break it right back to the core,” he tells me. “How we want to play and what types of players will be best suited in that system. Then you’re trying to overlay what we think the league’s going to look like in five years – potential rule changes, interchange changes, those sorts of things, and who they’ll impact most.” There probably are clubs and list managers who regard it as a reactive discipline that is mostly about filling holes. But I suspect the best list managers are those who don’t simply evaluate the player in front of them, but do so in the context of what they believe footy will look like in the near future.

“We talk often about the types of players that may not exist in three or four years, and the types of players you want multiple of in three or four years, and where the game is shifting,” Alex explains. “There’s been a real influx of clubs wanting to get small forwards and speed through their front half – both on the ground and maintaining an aerial threat. That’s been a pretty significant shift in the last five years, and you see a lot of smaller forwards going earlier in the draft than they might have historically. Off the back of that, you’re thinking about what types of players can play on those types. So you’re searching for trends that have become more prevalent over the last few years, trying to stay ahead of that – but you’ve also got to acknowledge where the game is now and where you think it might get to.” Watching Nick Watson strut his stuff this year has made me consider that perhaps the best advice one can offer a talented but undersized 16 year-old midfielder hoping for an AFL career is to retrain as a lockdown small defender.

Best practice in list management is driven by making decisions that anticipate the evolution of the game. But that process of evolution is itself highly contingent and dynamic. It isn’t just driven by rule changes; it’s also driven by the sides that have bent the rest of the competition to their will. Tactically, we still live in the shade of trees planted by Damien Hardwick’s Richmond. Although most sides have added their own tweaks, Hardwick’s innovations – embracing post-clearance contests, surging from turnovers, and the forward handball – remain the basic blueprint for how footy is played in 2026. Alex acknowledges the influence of that side, and indeed of all great sides, on how he does his job. “They [Hardwick’s Richmond] were probably the first ones to embrace the contest and embrace a neutral ball,” he tells me. “That was a step change from Hawthorn, who wanted to control the game. Time in possession was a big thing for them. I remember whenever we scouted Hawthorn it was about trying to keep the ball off them as much as we could, because if they control it, you’re defending for 70% of the game, and they’ll kill you.” This matters for list management because the ability to execute certain tactics is largely constrained by a side’s physical and technical attributes. Alex is very clear on this point: “If you don’t have the personnel that match up with that system, I think you get in trouble. If you want to play fast but you don’t have speed in your team, it’s probably not going to work. It sounds simplistic, but your personnel needs to match up with the way in which you want to play.”

Any discussion of the way a side wants to play raises an obvious question: who gets to decide that? The responsibility for designing the game plan still sits principally with the senior coach (although at some clubs – St Kilda is an example – that responsibility is partly delegated to senior assistants). But, as the game has become more tactically dense and the industry has professionalised, the job of implementing that game plan has been distributed across a larger number of personnel. On one side, there is a growing network of specialist assistants – line coaches, ball movement coaches, heads of game plan, analysts – who each own a small chunk of what used to be the domain of the senior coach. And on the other, list managers like Alex have responsibility for what is ultimately the biggest constraint on what the game plan can achieve.

Most elite European soccer clubs now employ a Director of Football. That role emerged in response to a specific problem: managers get sacked a lot, and that turnover is detrimental to long-term club strategy (it’s also usually very expensive). By shifting responsibility for recruitment and squad planning to a separate executive who sat above or alongside the manager, clubs gained continuity regardless of who was in the technical area. The emergence of the Director of Football role has brought its unique dynamics. Some have gained public prominence and many have accrued a parallel power base that can sit in tension with a manager whose job security is highly sensitive to short-term results. Alex, I should add, is extremely effusive about his senior coach.

There’s a few reasons footy has resisted the Director of Football model. I suspect the main one is that there’s so much less coaching turnover. AFL Coaches are given an amount of grace that’s unusual in elite sport. They start with more political capital and their political capital diminishes more slowly. Partly that’s because appointing a new coach is usually an admission by a club that the list needs to be overhauled. That task, whether it’s a full tear-down rebuild or a more modest refresh, is a painstaking process that requires the senior coach and list manager (and other key staff, including the head of recruitment) to work closely together. Overhauls take time, and although Alex stresses to me that list builds are never “complete”, clubs generally understand that parting ways with a list manager creates disruption. That’s why Carlton dismissing Nick Austin on the same day Michael Voss departed was so significant: it was institutional recognition of collective failure. The importance of the list, and the fact they’re harder to improve than in sports where you can buy your way out of trouble, gives list managers power. By the time a game plan has been reshaped in a coach’s image, it’s often married to a list that’s been crafted by people like Alex.

The best list managers recruit players who are aligned to their club’s game model and are well-suited to how clubs believe the game will evolve. One of the biggest challenges is to not overreact. The Richmond example is useful here. The clubs that saw what Hardwick was doing and immediately tried to replicate it without adequately considering that it was a unique marriage of system and talent usually failed. My mind turns, wistfully, to Adelaide drafting Ned McHenry with its first-round pick in 2018, partly because of a belief that it needed more scrappy, defensive midfield/half-forward types on its list. The correct lesson to draw from the way Richmond’s dominance shaped the competitive meta was to acknowledge its influence and plan for the next version of that style (see: GWS under Adam Kingsley) instead of brute-forcing an ersatz version of the original.

List managers try to make decisions that seem optimal based on the information they have to hand at the time. The problem is that the information they have is almost always incomplete. Perhaps the key bit of information that is both highly conducive to success in an AFL environment and hard to measure is a player’s psychological profile. Clubs are very interested in understanding a player’s competitive drive, their emotional regulation, their “coachability”, and their capacity to perform under pressure. “There’s no doubt it’s of high importance,” Alex tells me. “Resilience, competitiveness, self-belief – those values are hard to measure outside of talking to the kid and getting information from people who know them really well. We do have psych profiles, but interpreting that information is a challenge, for the most part, for 18-year-old kids who can potentially change their psychological makeup.”

Every AFL club spends time thinking about how to improve the accuracy of its psychological profiling. These days, clubs talk to a player’s friends, family members, junior coaches, and teachers in an attempt to form a comprehensive picture of the kid they might draft. The biggest brushstroke, however, is still made by the face-to-face interview. They’re very useful. But they’re gameable. A teenager who presents well in a room, answers questions fluently, and projects the right kind of confidence is not necessarily the adult who will respond well to being dropped, or to losing, or to being asked to learn a new role five years into their career.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that prospects – especially those who tend to attract the most attention from clubs – are getting better at preparing for exactly this kind of scrutiny. In US sports, a cottage industry has developed around pre-draft interview coaching: agents and former players who run mock interviews, school prospects on how to discuss their weaknesses, and teach them to present a particular kind of psychological profile to evaluators. Although the AFL isn’t as far down that road, the principle might still apply. By the time a highly-rated prospect sits across from the list manager at the national combine, they’ve almost certainly been coached on what to say. That reduces to a classic problem in organisational psychology: interviews measure interview performance, and that’s an imperfect proxy for actual job performance. Interviews still have their place. But the clubs which operate at the leading edge have begun to lean harder on other sources of information, such as chatting to close personal contacts and observing the player in situations – training sessions, social settings, pressure moments within games – that can’t be faked.

Alex acknowledges that difficulty, but is careful to draw a distinction between what happens here and what happens in America. “We’re open-minded about whether a player can actually change their psychological makeup,” he says. “They’re still adolescent boys at the end of the day. They’re not 21 or 22-year-old college kids who sort of are who they are. As 18-year-olds, a lot of these kids may not have dealt with many hardships in their life. That’s not the kid’s fault. But understanding how they may react to a hardship is really, really hard to predict if they haven’t actually been through it.” You can measure athletic ability. You can observe footy ability. But psychology is what determines how effectively a player can bring that ability to bear in crunch moments. And that’s bloody hard to measure ahead of time.

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Conflict is the great driver of human affairs. The peasant boy becomes the hero at the end of the story because they overcome adversity. But many elite draft prospects haven’t needed to overcome much adversity – at least on the field – before joining the AFL system. Their talent tends to make big problems easy to solve. And their talent can often lead to them being indulged. They were never the peasant boy; they were the prince. That can create bad habits or, more prosaically, situations where resilience hasn’t been fully tested. Alex understands that problem, but isn’t sure there’s a solution. “Often, that top-end kid has been the best his whole life,” he says. “And then he gets into an AFL program, and I don’t care who you are: if you’re a first-year player, for the most part, it’s a grind. You’re down the bottom of the list. There are 20 players ahead of you when you start, but that hasn’t been the case throughout their journey. How do they respond to that? Do they work harder? Because they’re going to have to. Or does it become too hard? Because the AFL is hard.”

Despite the entire discipline of list management existing to prevent its occurrence, shit still regularly happens. I want to return to the anecdote I opened this piece with – the one about the player with the red flags. Part of the reason for the regret I detect in Alex’s voice, beyond the bare fact of an investment that didn’t work out, is that his answer is a microcosm of the central emotional dilemma of his role: an AFL list manager is ultimately an asset manager. But he or she is a list manager with a twist – because the assets they manage are people. You don’t feel bad when you rebalance your financial portfolio. If anything, you feel good, because you believe that doing so will improve your returns. Delisting or trading out players, both of which Alex has done many times, is governed by the same expected value calculations. But just because it’s rational, doesn’t mean it’s easy. There is a human element. People form bonds when they work together for years in high-pressure industries, and severing them is tough.

The AFL club Alex works for isn’t based in Melbourne. But, like most list managers, he is. As he admits, that comes with challenges as well as benefits. “I’m not around the place 24/7 like I would be at a Melbourne club,” he tells me. “But there’s no doubt the relationship you forge with players is a challenge when it comes to having meaningful discussions about them as assets, and that’s the same from a coaching point of view.” Alex, who is wearing a Major League Baseball team cap throughout our interview, acknowledges the AFL is a long way from the US sports model where players are traded without their knowledge. Nor does he think we’re close to introducing such a model. The AFL Players’ Association is strong, as is, one suspects, the cultural taboo. However, things have changed since Alex took on his current role. “Player movement has shifted a fair bit over the last five or six years in terms of contracted players getting traded,” he says. “Two years ago, we looked at it and 50% of players who moved in the trade period were in contract. That’s a massive shift, in terms of what free agency was intended for.”

Alex keeps using a specific word to explain the principle which guides club behaviour around player movement: flexibility. Clubs want options, because options create more room to pursue opportunities to improve their lists. Consider the case of Charlie Curnow. Clubs were made aware partway through last season that the two-time Coleman Medallist would be open to leaving Carlton. In the end, the deal was possible because Sydney persuaded Will Hayward that his future lay elsewhere and – just as importantly – because the Swans included their 2026 and 2027 first-round picks as part of the package. More options, more possibilities, more player movement. Just the way Alex – and the AFL – likes it. Of course, forcing out a player that had spent nine seasons at the club came with an emotional cost. It just happened to be one that the Swans were willing to pay in the pursuit of a player they believed could hold the key to winning a flag.

I used the passive voice in the preceding paragraph to describe how clubs were alerted to Charlie Curnow’s availability. In truth, it was his manager, Robbie D’Orazio, who did the alerting. Player managers are a much-maligned part of the footy landscape. Acting in their client’s interests often means acting against the interests of the client’s club, and the average footy fan’s loyalty ultimately belongs to the club. But the conventional critique misses something important. AFL football is an illiquid labour market. Players are bound by contracts, constrained by salary caps, and subject to taboos against requesting trades that don’t exist to anywhere near the same degree in other industries (no one really cares if Geoff from Accounts moves to another company; they just have a farewell morning tea). Without player managers, clubs would hold almost all the cards over the people they employ.

The best player managers understand that their job isn’t simply to maximise their client’s salary. It’s to maximise their welfare. That includes some combination of winning, belonging, and what a career in football does for a player’s life after football. The apparent trend of players in successful sides “taking unders” (and partly confounding the goals of equalisation) is a reflection that, sometimes, the satisfaction of winning in September is worth more than the marginal utility of an extra $250,000. A player manager who only chases money is probably, by that standard, a bad manager. “For the most part, they’re really good,” says Alex. “They understand the landscape, they understand their clients and what opportunity might look like. They’re really important in terms of having an open dialogue around potential player movement.”

The largest management firms have accumulated a form of structural power that clubs have to accommodate. They’re an unusual centre of power in the footy landscape, existing, as they do, outside of clubs or the AFL administration. “You have to have good relationships with player managers,” Alex tells me. “The big management stables have a lot of significant players under their banner.” If a single stable represents your captain, your key forward, and three of the top five in your Best & Fairest, the relationship between that stable and your club is not purely adversarial – it’s closer to the wary relationship between sovereign states, with all the leverage, shared interests, and bargaining that implies. There’s no alternative but to come to the table.

While we’re on the subject of employers, I ask Alex to entertain a hypothetical (and indulge me in a hobby horse). If he was to become the AFL CEO – the big boss – what list management rules would he change? Regular readers will know this is a preoccupation of mine. In a previous article, I tried to articulate the principles of a “footy libertarianism” that would relax the restrictions on what teams could do on the field and what clubs could do off it. In my view, we should be encouraging innovation across all phases of the game. Alex pauses, a small smile creeping across his face, before responding. “Two things come to mind,” he begins. “First, a maximum contract length or a maximum financial contract amount. I just worry about the overspill – players getting certain amounts of money and the domino effect that has for other players in the club. Players on big money want their teammates to have a piece of that as well, and you’ve got to try and educate them on money versus team success. In my view, if you’re paying someone $2 million or more, it’s very hard to put a premiership team around that player under our current salary cap restrictions.”

Alex doesn’t mention any names. But it is hard to hear his answer and not think of St Kilda’s decision to offer the two biggest contracts in footy to Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera and Tom De Koning. I understand why the Saints did what they did. I even wrote an article defending their approach. But arithmetic won’t be denied: they have less money to pay other players on their list. Alex’s response also reinforced the point that the interests of clubs and players sometimes diverge. Of course a list manager would like a cap on contract lengths! A spokesperson from the AFL Players’ Association would likely say the exact opposite. Each is advocating for their group’s interests.

“The other thing that I’d do,” Alex continues. “I’d probably remove the rookie list. I think it’s antiquated. A lot of clubs use it as a list management tool. It’s within the rules, but I just think you can extend your primary list, make it a full list, and remove the admin, remove the stress of players getting delisted and re-listed.” It’s clear that the rookie list has assumed a different function than the one it was originally designed for. Every club uses it as an overflow of the senior list. If I was feeling charitable, I’d say that the AFL simply doesn’t consider it a sufficiently big problem to bother addressing. The fact that clubs have converged on a utility-maximising alternative use of the rookie list makes me even more confident that there’s an appetite for innovation in list management that isn’t currently being met. I put it to Alex: why have restrictions on list sizes at all? Why can’t struggling clubs be given the chance to roll the dice on more speculative prospects who could one day mature into good AFL players? Alex is sympathetic, even if I can sense he doesn’t quite share my enthusiasm (it’d mean more work for him, after all). “Philosophically, rookies need more than 12 months,” he agrees. “There’s an irony in it: first-round picks get all the licence because they’ve got the talent. But rookies can sometimes get swallowed up and spat out pretty quickly, and they’re the ones who actually need the time to develop and adjust to a full-time program.”

My time is almost up. I can picture Alex’s media manager fretting that I’m keeping him away from his job. To close, I try to pose a question which best represents the average footy fan’s beliefs about list management: do list managers operate as though “Premiership windows” exist, or is that just something those of us in the peanut gallery have agreed is true without actually checking? “You’re always looking at windows,” he responds. “It might not be Premiership windows, but you’re looking at short, medium, and long term, and making sure the list is in good shape across a lot of different areas. We have list management discussions once a month and we tick a lot of those things off, keeping an eye on what the list looks like over the next three years, five years.” The grind never stops, in other words. Perennial competitiveness, you sense, is the dream of most clubs – and the reality of only a few. “But as I said at the top, there’s a type of person that we’re trying to bring into the footy club, and then athletically and fundamentally they need to be at the level we’re looking for.”

Alex considered that final question the same way he considered all my questions throughout our 45 minutes – carefully. I’d seen him in the media a few times before our conversation, but I sense he’s much happier doing his job behind the scenes. We end somewhere close to where we began: talking about a player who didn’t quite work out, and a decision that still plays on his mind. In a job defined by the management of uncertainty, that regret is unavoidable. You build the best system you can. You counter your biases as best you can. You gather data. And then you make the call, with imperfect information, on a kid, a rival club’s gun, or a senior player who swears they can recapture their best form if only they had another year on the list. Whatever their age, whatever their status, you are shaping their life in some way. Most of the time, list managers do this without anyone noticing. When it goes wrong, the blame usually lands elsewhere – on the senior coach, the player, the development coaches. When it goes right, the players get the medals and the coaches are hailed as geniuses. That’s the job. Alex knew what it was when he took it.

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In the end, Michael Voss took it upon himself to sever the final fraying cords that kept the sword suspended above his head. On Tuesday morning, as most of us were drinking our first coffee of the day, news broke that the 50 year-old had resigned as Carlton’s senior coach. One suspects it was that or face the ignominy of being sacked. The writing had been on the wall – quite literally – for a long time. Voss’s Carlton hasn’t beaten a finalist in over a year. Second half fade-outs had gone from a curiosity and subject of mirth for many to a weekly occurrence (and subject of mirth for many). Other writers have told the story of Voss’s tenure from the emotional perspective available only to Carlton fans. Smarter analysts than me, similarly sceptical of claims that the fade-outs were driven by fatigue or fear, have attempted to identify their substantive causes. Instead, I want to use this essay to pose and probe some questions which might shed light on why coach and club have decided to part ways now, the peculiar demands of AFL coaching in 2026, and where Carlton go from here.

It’s obvious why Voss is no longer Carlton coach. As President Rob Priestley and CEO Graham Wright reminded us multiple times during their press conference following Voss’s departures, the Blues are 1-8 this season. They have won just five of their past 20 games. The flashes of competence had become duller, the mood darker, and the on-field problems more vexing. Footy’s brutal meritocracy had rendered its verdict: Voss could not meet the requirements of leading an AFL side to success in the 2020s. He fell on his sword before the sword fell on him. A more interesting question than why is why now? Reports from journalists I assume have sources within the club have tended to stress that the club hierarchy wanted to give Voss every chance to succeed. That’s laudable on its face. Carlton’s hierarchy was desperate to instill stability and shed the reputation for moving coaches on too quickly. But Voss, who remained in situ well past the point it was obvious he had run out of answers, was a poor application of that principle. One of a club’s most important ongoing tasks is to constantly update its beliefs about its senior coach. Voss was possibly the correct choice of coach after Carlton made a prelim in 2023. He was undoubtedly the wrong choice after Round 9, 2026. I don’t think that necessarily constitutes definitive proof that he was a great coach in 2023 or a bad one by 2026. But somewhere in between those two points – separated by 966 days – was an inflection point the club failed to heed.

We should be sceptical of claims that continuity and stability are desirable in all circumstances. They’re desirable if you’re sure you’ve got the right guy. But Carlton is an object lesson of the costs of overcommitting to the wrong guy. The breakdown of Voss’s relationship with Charlie Curnow prompted the spearhead’s trade request after the 2025 season. The Blues made list management choices in accordance with Voss’s desire to pursue an increasingly archaic style of play. Those are real costs which are likely to take years to repay. After teasing its supporters with the prospect of a contention window, the club is now staring down the barrel of yet another rebuild. Its stars are fading. Curnow’s departure has provided them with more picks to begin pivoting the list, but the AFL’s decision to tighten big matching rules means more of those resources will be absorbed by matching a likely bid for star father-son prospect Cody Walker. There’s a strong case that Voss should have been let go sooner than he was, even though that might have deepened the perception that Carlton pulls the trigger too readily. I’d rather be saddled with a reputation for acting too quickly than making the wrong decisions. There’s also a case – albeit a weaker one – that, with the damage already done, Voss may as well have been allowed to see out the remainder of his contract, in a bid to soak up as much of the toxicity as possible (and, one could say, to guarantee Carlton the highest possible draft pick).

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the difficulty of evaluating whether a coach is “good” when the problems he or she is required to solve change, data is expensive, and counterfactuals are scarce. Voss tested that proposition because he lasted at least a year longer in the job than results merited. He was definitively the wrong coach well before his resignation. Does that mean he was the wrong appointment in the first place? Here, too, one can find arguments for both sides. His tenure as Brisbane’s senior coach was unsuccessful and looks worse given the dynasty quite literally began after him. Voss, unusually, was handed a senior coaching job before serving any sort of apprenticeship as an assistant. The apprenticeship came later – a seven-year stint as Port Adelaide’s midfield coach. On the other hand, Voss looked like a good fit for Carlton’s list circa 2022. “Looked like” is doing additional work here, too. Voss looked like a senior coach out of central casting – fit, vigorous, still young enough to remind onlookers of his playing days.

The mistake Carlton made wasn’t necessarily appointing Voss. It was committing to a decision-making process that made him the inevitable choice. Recall that Carlton’s coach search began with public overtures to Alastair Clarkson and Ross Lyon (who declined when asked to participate in an interview). Both had been senior coaches before. It was only after the field winnowed that Voss and Adam Kingsley emerged as firm favourites, with Voss’s “first-hand experience” believed to have helped him win the role. Four and a half years on, the club statement announcing Voss’s appointment makes for fascinating reading. Then-president Luke Sayers (himself a fascinating presence throughout this era of Carlton’s modern history) is quoted as saying that Voss’s “credentials and vast experience in football made him the right person for the job.” This strongly suggests the Carlton hierarchy had taken a decision that the successful candidate needed prior senior coaching experience. But if they actually consulted evidence to reinforce that claim, they didn’t share that with the public. A more obvious explanation is that Carlton learnt the wrong lesson from David Teague’s short-lived stint as senior coach. (A cynic might add that Sayers sought the prestige of snagging a big fish.) But the George Costanza principle – do the opposite of what you did yesterday – isn’t a good heuristic for a professional organisation. A better one is to actually commit to an evidence-driven decision-making process.

Michael Voss would probably have been a great coach in the same era he was a great player. He was king of the beasts in an era when beasts bestrode the plains. It doesn’t require a great leap of imagination to picture his reputation, his success, his intensity – his aura – translating into coaching. The fact it ultimately didn’t is perhaps more evidence for the argument that the best players (across all sports) rarely make good coaches. Perhaps they never had to learn how to hold space because they could rely on their talent. Or perhaps they’re not able to compute Ollie Hollands fumbling a ground ball or Harry McKay missing from straight in front of goal. Beyond that, there’s the narrower and more relevant point that Voss’s inchoate football intelligence – his command of his body and his temperament – didn’t translate into the specific kind of football intelligence demanded by modern AFL coaching. The Greek poet Archilochus wrote that “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Voss the player and Voss the coach both knew one big thing – overwhelming their opponents with physical force. But footy today requires knowing many things. That’s true in terms of the game’s growing tactical complexity but also in terms of the sprawling demands of the job itself. The modern AFL senior coach is less a football philosopher-king and more a chief executive of a distributed system: adjudicating between competing game-style models, managing non-playing staff, implementing the findings of increasingly sophisticated analytics, and making real-time decisions that require synthesising information from many different sources. I’m sure Voss was good at some of those responsibilities. But very few can handle them all at once, especially in an environment where power has often been concentrated. The modern coaches best equipped to navigate that complexity were often players who had to think their way through their careers rather than talent their way through them. Coaches of yore might have been absolute monarchs, but they ruled over modest kingdoms.

The first is structural. The rule changes I wrote about in “Has the AFL broken footy?” didn’t affect all clubs equally. In fact, there’s a strong case to be made that they adversely affected Carlton most of all. The 6-6-6 rule, introduced in 2019, neutralised the capacity of dominant contested midfielders to physically control stoppages. The tightening of the stand and holding the ball rules reduced the reward for winning the ball at the bottom of a pack. The last disposal rule opened the game up in ways that further disadvantaged sides built around stoppage dominance. All these rules converged on the AFL’s overarching goal: to reduce stoppages and increase scoring. Carlton’s best players during Voss’s tenure – Cripps, Curnow, Weitering, McKay – formed a strong core, but one which was optimised for a style of footy that the AFL was legislating away. Some of those changes predate Voss; we were already three years into the 6-6-6 era when he took the job. But the point is that it blunted the power of the players he relied on most. A smarter football department might have identified the trajectory earlier and begun building a different kind of list. That didn’t happen.

The second problem is the one that came to define the public narrative: the fade-outs. They were predictable. They were embarrassing. And they kept on happening. As games progressed, Carlton’s ability to compete at the source deteriorated. This graph tells the story.

Carlton, especially in the first half of Voss’s tenure, was a powerful side that could run up the score against lesser opponents. But, like a classical tragedy, the fatal flaw was there from the very beginning. Not once throughout Voss’s 104-game tenure did Carlton have a positive rolling differential in third quarters. It seems fitting that his trajectory as Carlton coach was a macrocosm of his side’s perennial fade-outs. He won 31 of his first 52 games, just 19 of the next 52.

Voss wasn’t the only senior figure at Carlton to depart on Tuesday. That afternoon, the club announced that list manager Nick Austin was also leaving (reports suggest it was neither voluntary nor amicable). Austin was the person most responsible for the construction of the list Voss coached. While it’s true that the Cripps, Curnow, McKay, and Weitering were all at the club prior to Austin’s arrival, there was still ample, largely unmet opportunity to surround them with reliable role players. I won’t relitigate all the drafting and trade failures here. Suffice to say there were many. Austin and Voss leaving on the same morning was Carlton’s acknowledgement that the failure was both shared and total. Blame belongs to Voss, Austin, and a systematically miscalibrated decision-making culture that optimised for bruising contested footy at a time when the rest of the competition was accelerating away from it. Michael Voss spoke often – to the point it irritated increasingly impatient Carlton fans – of “pounding the rock”; working away at getting better at his side’s strengths. Austin didn’t speak much to the media. But one can characterise his approach to building this list in a similar way. The next list manager will probably need to take a stick of dynamite to the rock.

There’s one more contributor to this failure worth naming – one that sits outside the club’s walls but shaped the context in which decisions were made: the mainstream footy media’s role in sustaining Voss’s political capital long past the point the evidence warranted it. Footy media is not a monolith, but a fair chunk of it spent the better part of four years functioning as an informal support network for a coach whose results were waning. The reasons are more banal than conspiratorial. Some pundits and hosts were friends with Voss. Some had idolised him as a player and found the neural pathway to critical assessment blocked by the memory of what he once was. Some simply wanted to be his friend, and access and accountability have always made strange bedfellows. The net effect, whatever its cause, was that the media often felt overly generous to Voss and hostile to less chummy coaches. Carlton fans who expressed frustration were often characterised as impatient. It’s pretty remarkable that Voss’s character and playing aura could still function as a kind of reputational force field. It’s also evidence of how much of the mainstream football media’s evaluation of coaches is still informed by instinct, relationships, and residual reverence rather than rigour.

Graham Wright deserves some credit for being sufficiently clear-eyed to see that the failure of the Voss era had many fathers, and for (eventually) making a decisive call to swing the blade. But it leaves the club in an unusual position. At the time of writing, Carlton has no senior coach, no national recruiting manager (Michael Agresta left the role in February), and no list manager. That leaves Wright with virtually untrammelled power inside the club. Perhaps that’s good. But power without constraint has not always yielded good results at Princes Park.

Any path that leads to a coach leaving a club mid-season is inevitably strewn with errors. The most important thing Carlton – Wright – can do now is commit to a process which minimises the occurrence of future errors. The first, and, given it’s one they’ve made before, most easily avoidable error to avoid is overindexing on a short-term positive regression of results under Josh Fraser. Carlton’s players could feel liberated. Fraser could find a real tactical exploit. The ball could begin bouncing Carlton’s way (definitionally, the end of an unsuccessful coach’s tenure tends to be particularly unlucky). Fraser may be an excellent coach. That is genuinely unknowable at this point, which is exactly why the question of process matters more than the question of Fraser’s individual qualities.

That doesn’t mean that Fraser’s performance for the rest of the season should be discounted. There’s still enough time for him to implement meaningful changes to Carlton’s style. The quality of the process should be assigned greater importance than the final results. (Incidentally, this was something Voss lamented that Carlton didn’t do enough in his exit interview with Damian Barrett.) Appointing Fraser as the permanent senior coach could be the correct decision. But Carlton shouldn’t mistake a dead-cat bounce for evidence of a turnaround, avoid the hard work of a genuine succession process, and end up with a caretaker made permanent by institutional inertia. Dysfunctional footy clubs are distinguished not by their ability to identify problems but by their tendency to “solve” them by embarking on the path of least resistance.

This is an opportunity. As Jake Niall put it in his excellent column reflecting on Voss’s departure, Carlton now holds Pick 1 in the coaching draft. There are talented candidates out there (Nathan Schmook canvassed the most likely options in a piece for the AFL website.) The point is not that Carlton should appoint any particular one – looking enviously at Melbourne’s early success under Steven King is understandable but needn’t necessarily be a guide – but that the club should undertake a genuine search, conducted without a predetermined answer. Carlton needs a senior coach. It also needs a list manager with analytical rigour and the capacity to think five years ahead, and a head recruiter who can replenish the list for sustained competitiveness. Those are three important appointments.

Success is following a rigorous process that acknowledges bias and uncertainty. Failure is following a process which looks thorough but isn’t. Hiring Fraser permanently because Carlton won a couple of games because of expected score overperformance. Appointing Longmire because he strikes the coteries as the image of a winning coach, even when the evidence shows that footy is increasingly the domain of new men with new ideas. Getting in a list manager who’s close to the right player agent. Carlton has made the wrong decision for the wrong reasons here several times before. The argument for optimism is that Wright doesn’t have any of the baggage that has prevented the Blues from fully adapting to footy modernity. He has years of experience at successful footy clubs, and was instrumental in the decisions to appoint Sam Mitchell and Craig McRae at Hawthorn and Collingwood respectively. Being an outsider is good. I wouldn’t be surprised if the choice to appoint him as Carlton CEO was driven partly by the knowledge that one day, not too soon after starting in the job, he would be in precisely this position. Is it a good job? I think so, because the AFL is a highly desirable industry and there are only 19 senior coaching jobs in the country. But it will be a hard one. The next Carlton coach will need to oversee what is a rebuild in all but name, in the shadow of footy’s loudest, most passionate, most frustrated fanbase.

It’s reasonable for Blues fans to be saddened by Voss’s departure – not because he was a Premiership coach in waiting, but because he gave them some joyous moments and always carried himself with dignity in an industry where not everyone does. He took Carlton closer to the summit than anyone had since David Parkin. But the evidence that he could not solve the problems posed by modern footy had become impossible to rebut. Being a head coach is a daily plebiscite, and he had way more of a go than most get.

Making the right decisions isn’t incidental to the process – it is the process. The player who makes the right choice at the right moment in September is the end-stage of a chain that begins with the board appointing the right list manager, who identifies the right players, who are developed and instructed by the right coach. Carlton’s opportunity now is to finally get the beginning of that chain right. Few decisions signal more about a club’s perception of its own identity and predicament than its choice of head coach. Everything else flows from there.

Straight from the chart

The way some sides have embraced aggressive handballing as a means of piercing opposition zones has been the biggest tactical change to start 2026. The average number of handballs per side per game is up almost 5% (from 146.6 to 153.5) while handball metres gained has surged by 27% (from 255.8 per side per game to 324.9). But the growth isn’t equally distributed across teams or players.

This graph shows a bespoke group: the 68 AFL players who have played at least five games in 2026 while also averaging 10 or more handballs per game. How much territory they gain is strongly correlated with the role they’re asked to play for their team. Some players win it on the inside. Others create damage and gain territory on the outside.

We’re now deep enough into the season to conclude that the changes to the ruck rules have had a real impact on scoring from centre bounces (sorry – centre square ball-ups). Scoring from that source has increased by 20% from last season (from 11.4 points per side per game to 13.7).

Given the increased premium on winning or at least halving centre clearances, I thought it would be interesting to see which players are most effective at winning them. Most of the usual suspects feature here. There are probably two things to say. The first is that not all clearances are made equal. Geelong, for example, are seventh for net centre clearance wins but second for the differential from centre clearance scores. Bailey Smith is very good, but not among the competition’s very best, at winning centre clearances. The second thing to say is: Jason Horne-Francis [eyes emoji]. He appears to be taking the next step in his development.

Let’s consider how many possession chains each side generated in Round 9. There were three games which featured noticeably less “churn” than the rest – Fremantle’s victory vs. Hawthorn on Thursday night, the Gold Coast-St Kilda game in Darwin, and the Richmond-Adelaide game to end the round. All three featured relatively fewer stoppages and turnovers.

A proposition I want to test in coming weeks is the strength of the correlation between the number of possession chains a side generates and its likelihood of winning. Qualitatively, I think there is one: good sides win more clearances, force more turnovers, and – all else being equal – force more difficult shots (and so earn more kick-ins). While it’s also true that good sides don’t turn the ball over (so have fewer opportunities to counterpress and win it back), and don’t concede as many shots (and so perhaps concede fewer behinds), I don’t think that effect will be as strong. At least, that’s my thinking. We’ll see what the numbers say!

Fremantle, Sydney, and Geelong’s victories were all built from the same material: significant superiority at converting their clearance wins into scores. As I’ve written before, scores from clearances aren’t just a referendum of midfield strength and structure, they’re also a test of how well defensive systems adapt to giving up clearances. Some teams set up specifically for that by dropping a spare player a kick behind a stoppage and trusting in their ability to force “dirty” exits.

Nevertheless, these results will increase the chatter about the defensive robustness of the Hawthorn and Collingwood midfields. Nathan van Berlo, Adelaide’s midfield coach, would probably not have enjoyed coding Sunday afternoon’s game, either.

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Footnotes

• Some closing Michael Voss stats. He won 50, lost 53, and drew 1 of his 104 games in charge. His cumulative points differential peaked at +644 points following an 18-point win against Geelong in Round 7, 2025. It stayed positive even as results deteriorated. The final tally was +280. As strongly implied by that number, Voss’s Carlton won bigger than it lost. His average winning margin was 31.1 points, compared to an average losing margin of 24 points.

• Courtesy of friend of the newsletter, Emlyn Breese: of the 48 coaches to reach 200+ VFL/AFL games, Michael Voss ended up with the third-lowest win rate (across tenures). Only Bill Stephen (Fitzroy and Essendon) and Ted Whitten (Footscray) were less successful.

• Melbourne have kicked 100+ points in six of their first nine games (and were a point away from making it 7/9). In the process, the Demons became the first team this season to bring up the ton against the #1-ranked Sydney defence. Before their game in Round 8, the Swans were averaging only 65 points against per game in 2026.

• While we’re on the subject of the Dees; their losing score (114) in that game against Sydney was the highest losing score in an AFL game since North (somehow) lost 118-119 to Collingwood in Round 14, 2024. There have already been eight 100+ losing scores kicked this season, which already matches the 2024 total. There were just five 100+ losing scores recorded in 2025.

• Round 9 saw the nine Melbourne-based sides play the nine non-Melburnian sides. That had only ever happened once before – Round 4, 2021.

Recommended reading

• Riley Beveridge on the problems Voss could never solve.

• Nic Negrepontis on the rollercoaster ride of Voss’s time at Carlton.

• Jono Baruch on how Voss restored belief but couldn’t take the next step.

• Nathan Schmook on the 10 leading candidates to succeed Voss.

• New Freo Substack alert! I really enjoyed this piece from Evelyn on how Justin Longmuir’s “boring” footy has taken Fremantle through their Long March. It’s time to get our best scientists to understand what draws introspective Dockers fans to Substack like moths to a light.

In addition to restarting paid subscriptions, I’ve also created a “Buy Me a Coffee” page so you can give me even more money. Here’s the link.

Reading

Books

Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë, 1847)

Partly in anticipation of the film – which I’ve not actually watched yet – I read Wuthering Heights. I knew of its reputation as a tragedy and anti-romance. I didn’t know that revenge drove so much of the plot. The themes, settings, and characters are all justly famous (Heathcliff truly is one of the great jerks in the history of literature), but I was most impressed by the power and vivacity of Brontë’s writing. Her depictions of carnal obsession – the desire to completely subordinate the self and absorb another – feel prurient and provocative today. Reading them in 1847 must have felt like a shock on par with hearing a Chuck Berry riff for the first time or seeing Dorothy step into Technicolor. I can’t help but like the world is poorer for Brontë dying so young. Wuthering Heights was the only book she ever wrote.

Hyperpolitics (Anton Jäger, 2026)

If, like me, you’ve been searching for an understanding of why it feels like we’re constantly careening from crisis to crisis without actually creating durable political or social movements, then you might appreciate this book by Belgian political theorist, Anton Jäger. According to Jager, the West has passed through four distinct political ages. The first was mass politics, where mediating social institutions – churches, unions, parties, social clubs – grounded political identity. The end of the Cold War and triumph of liberalism gave rise to what Jäger calls postpolitics, “a world both depoliticized and desocialized, in which citizens retreat[ed] from collective life into the private sphere”. After the rupture of the Global Financial Crisis came antipolitics, “a type of moral indignation and rebellion on the part of a growing number of fringe groups who seek to free themselves from the old politics”.

Jäger’s hypothesis is that we now live in an era of hyperpolitics, a state of affairs characterised by extreme politicisation (everyone is furious about everything, seemingly all the time), high atomisation (people’s social circles are shrinking), low-cost (why join a movement when you can sign an email petition?), and low-commitment (our employers and situationships don’t commit, so why should we?). Jäger does talk about causes – the declining influence of those stabilising institutions like unions and the church, the economic precarity created by financialisation and neoliberalism, social media – but he’s more interested in discussing the effects: volatility without progress.

Hyperpolitics is a short book, impressionistic in places, dense but not overwhelming, and clarifying. I highlighted lots of passages – here’s one of my favourites.

In September 1957, a shipwreck southwest of the Azores kept the German reading public in suspense for days. On August 11, the Pamir—a four-masted barque usually deployed as a trainee ship—set sail from Buenos Aires with almost 4,000 tons of barley on board, bound for Hamburg. On the morning of September 21, the ship sent out its SOS calls, but contact was lost around midday. No trace of its eighty-six crew members could be found, including several young cadets. Two days later, as part of an international search operation, an American steamer retrieved a damaged lifeboat with five survivors; within forty-eight hours, another sailor was rescued alive. Investigations revealed that a severe hurricane had crossed the Atlantic at the time of the disaster—a ship with the Pamir’s design should have been able to withstand such a storm, yet a fatal mistake had been made when loading the vessel due to time pressure: instead of stowing the barley in sacks in the barque’s hull as usual, the grain had been poured in without prior packaging. As barley has a particularly high flow velocity, the cargo shifted uncontrollably from side to side when the Pamir was caught in the storm in front of the Azores. Incapable of reequilibrating, the ship capsized and eventually sank. No other survivors were located.

Returning to Sloterdijk’s nautical metaphors, it is the Pamir, rather than the superferry, that offers a fitting emblem for the hyperpolitical present. In earlier times, individuals were embedded in dense social networks and participated in a wide array of intermediate associations. Today’s societies are composed of increasingly atomized and isolated individuals. As long as history moves along smoothly and predictably, this need not necessarily be a problem. But when societies enter choppier waters, atomization amplifies their volatility—and the collective incapacity to respond to today’s political and ecological crises.

The essay which introduced me to Jäger’s book is also well worth reading.

Blogs/articles/essays

What will be scarce? (Ghosts of Electricity, April 2026)

Probably the most thoughtful essay I’ve read to date about AI’s possible effects on work. Alex Imas, a rising star in economics, argues that AI-driven automation is less likely to eliminate work as it is to relocate it to areas which AI diffusion makes more valuable. His central insight is that, as the production of commodities becomes automated, an increasing share of employment and expenditure in developed economies will shift towards what he calls the “relational sector”: care, education, hospitality, craft, therapy – any domain where the human element is intrinsic to the product’s value. Drawing from French theorist Rene Girard’s concept of mimetic desire (the unquenchable thirst for things other people want and we can’t have), Imas argues that as material abundance increases as a result of AI, the goods which denote status will become more desirable.

The argument strikes me as largely true and empirically valid. You only need to look at the widespread revulsion at any product which has the slightest whiff of AI to know that many people will pay a premium for goods and services which can’t be “faked” (and/or those where the creator is outspokenly anti-AI). Imas opens the essay with the example of Starbucks. Starbucks tried automation, found that it undermined the product, and reversed course. This won’t happen in every economy, or every part or every economy, but it’s an intelligent middle ground between glib techno-utopianism and hyperbolic AI doomerism.

Infinite Midwit (Experimental History, April 2026)

I could easily recommend most things I read from Adam Mastroianni’s Substack. His writing tickles my brain in a particular way. He’s clever, he asks provocative questions, and teases out interesting conclusions. In this essay, he tries to articulate what AI will be good at and what he suspects it will never master. The fundamental distinction, Mastroianni says, lies in the difference between objective and subjective intelligence. LLMs score highly on the former, and terribly on the latter.

There are two characters you can find in most academic departments. One of them we can call Madame Stats: she knows everything about crunching numbers. The other we can call Mr. Encyclopedia: he’s read every paper and he can recite them to you from memory. Right now, AI feels like having unlimited access to very friendly versions of Madame Stats and Mr. Encyclopedia. LLMs are pretty good at finding papers; they are very good at writing code. So shouldn’t they make research projects go way faster?

Well, once you get access to an infinite Madame Stats and Mr. Encyclopedia, you realize they can’t get you very far. For one thing, you can’t rely on Madame Stats and Mr. Encyclopedia entirely, because if you can’t do any stats and you never read any papers, you’re probably not going to have many interesting ideas yourself.5 Plus, while the Stats/Encyclopedia duo can tell you whether your experiment has been done before and whether you’ve run the numbers correctly, they can’t give you the single most important piece of feedback: they can’t tell you whether your idea is boring.

There are parts of the essay I disagree with. Without claiming an expertise in cognition that I don’t possess, it seems to me that although the question “how do I live a good life?” is ultimately a question of values, it’s also one that can be made more intelligible by breaking it down into smaller chunks and reasoning from there. As a lively, intelligent writer, I suppose Mastroianni would say that AI writing can never have that extra, hard-to-define juju (although I happen to agree with him). But whether he’s “right” or “wrong” seems secondary to me. The point is that he’s posing interesting questions and reasoning through his beliefs and experiences in a way that’s both interesting and – not coincidentally – completely human.

Is Mike Wazowski Jewish or Polish? (Sproutstack, November 2025)

Finally, this important subject gets the serious consideration it deserves. My only quibble is that, having weighed up all the evidence, I think it renders the wrong verdict. Read it and make up your own mind.

Watching

The Studio (Apple TV, 2025)

The Studio wears its influences on its sleeve. It’s a workplace comedy, like The Office or Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Much like Curb Your Enthusiasm, it’s lightly scripted and uses mutual misunderstanding as a plot engine. And it draws from a rich tradition of shows that send up the business of Hollywood while wholeheartedly believing in its capacity to create magic. Yet despite risking pastiche, The Studio feels fresh. Seth Rogen, who directs, writes, and stars, is Matt Remick, the newly appointed head of the film production company Continental Studios. He has to deal with capricious stars, unreliable colleagues, and the challenge of wanting to make real art while needing to make the studio commercially viable.

The Studio is affectionately satirical, not bitingly critical. That might disappoint some. But given the people involved, it was probably unlikely to be anything else. It’s beautifully-made light entertainment, with enough formal innovation – it makes extensive use of single-take shots – to keep it interesting. And I have a real weakness for films and TV shows where the cast is clearly having a ball.

Oh, and I’d like to thank Sal Saperstein!

Listening

Emily Remler

The jazz guitar tradition has usually rewarded the ostentatious. There’s something about the instrument – this is by no means an issue confined to just jazz! – which seems to invite a certain kind of peacocking: speed, volume, gratuitous body movements and facial contortions. Emily Remler refused all of it. What she offered instead was economy: the right note in the right spot. Her restraint was a kind of mastery in itself. Remler always had the discipline to leave space where a more insecure player would have filled it with something.

That security was even more remarkable given how much of an anomaly she was. Jazz in the 1980s was overwhelmingly male-dominated, the guitar especially so. Larry Coryell, a jazz guitarist whose work I’m not familiar with (but who seems very highly regarded) wrote in his memoir that Remler was “creative, smart, swung like crazy and had a time feel that was just about the best I had ever heard from any guitarist, male or female.” That feels right.

Unfortunately, like so many jazz musicians, Remler struggled immensely with substance use. Her last-ever concert was in Adelaide, in May 1990. The full show is on YouTube. Before she began playing, she spoke about spending part of her day at the Cleland Wildlife Sanctuary, the same place I had a cherished childhood memory of hand-feeding kangaroos just a few years later. Remler passed away from heart failure, widely believed to be related to opioid use, just a few hours later. She was only 32.

This essay about her life and music is well worth the read.

Angine de Poitrine – Live on KEXP (February, 2026)

Now that I’m too old to read Pitchfork (which apparently has a paywall now???) I rely a lot on the concerts uploaded to the YouTube channel of KEXP, a Seattle-based indie station, for my new music recommendations. It was how I learnt about Mdou Moctar. And it was how I learnt about Angine de Poitrine. Maybe I haven’t listened to enough King Gizz or math rock. But these French Canadians blew my socks off. Part of what makes them so arresting is the visuals: in this performance, both members – as a long-time White Stripes superfan, I’m partial to two-piece bands – are decked out in monochrome polka dots and wear masks with proboscis-style noses. But there’s clearly an astonishing level of creativity and originality on show here. Angine de Poitrine make extensive use of “microtonality”, which Google tells me utilises “tuning systems and intervals smaller than the standard 12-note semitone system used in Western music” and “allows for pitches between conventional keys, enabling unique harmonies and melodies.” That’s a neat trick – but it’s the fact that they use that as a starting point to create mesmeric grooves that makes it work. You can hear traces of krautrock, desert blues, and new wave in their music. The Swedish group Goat try for a similar brand of weirdness. But Angine de Poitrine sound new. As one of the best comments on the video puts it: “I can’t believe I was alive to witness the release of Music 2.”

This video, which is already the 12th-most popular video on KEXP’s YouTube channel, helped create considerable buzz around the band. They released an EP a few weeks ago. It’s very good, but without the visual element, doesn’t quite have the impact of this extraordinary performance.

Playing

Slay the Spire 2 (2026)

Regular readers won’t be surprised to see this; I mentioned Slay the Spire 2 in the lead of my polemic about the AFL’s meddling with the rules. I described it in general terms there, but I’ll happily go into more detail here. I had faith that Mega Crit, the developers, would deliver an excellent sequel because the original game was brilliant in a specific way which suggested a sophisticated understanding of the mechanics that make these types of games work. The challenge was to do more of it – more characters, more cards, more strategies – while maintaining balance and that addictive feeling that almost any game is winnable if you make the right choices

It’s an almost-total triumph. I love both the new characters. The Necrobinder employs a skeletal sidekick called Osty which can fight on its behalf. The Regent, meanwhile, draws from an entirely parallel energy source to play its cards. They’re interesting and they’re different. The existing characters have been refurbished with new cards and new “build” archetypes. There is more of everything: enemies, events, relics, lore. It still feels recognisably like Slay the Spire. And there’s so much more to go. The sequel has only been in early access for a few weeks. There will be new playable characters and new biomes. Balance is being tweaked so there are many different ways to play because the developers – unlike the AFL – understand that it’s infinitely more satisfying to choose your own path than be led to it.

On a related subject, I highly recommend this essay on shopping like you’re playing Slay the Spire. It explores the concept, frequently used by one of the game’s most prominent streamers, of “archetypes and jobs”:

Over time, most people gravitate toward particular archetypes or builds. For instance, you might seek to design a deck around dealing poison damage. The problem with the archetype approach is that it requires betting you will find particular cards or other resources later. Maybe the game won’t give you the best poison cards in a given run. By waiting for them, you pass up good opportunities to deal damage and block enemy attacks in different ways. In the worst-case scenario, you might even take an ability that empowers poison and never come across the base poison-inflicting cards you need for it to work. Similarly, in real life, people often acquire objects—craft and hobby tools being the worst offenders—that are of no use without other objects, or without the most precious resource of all, an uninterrupted block of time.

A better strategy is to divide the game into a series of fine-grained jobs that your cards need to accomplish at different stages of the game: blocking a 45-damage attack, taking down a boss that inflicts status effects, helping you draw the specific card you want, and so on. You also know that later-game challenges will be more difficult, and you need solutions that scale—ways to deal or block increasing amounts of damage with the same cards. When you have a list of top-priority jobs in your head, it becomes much easier to evaluate any given opportunity. Does a card solve an immediate or upcoming problem for you, while also having enough scaling potential to meet later challenges? If so, grab it. If not, let it go.

The piece is nominally about shopping, but I think you can apply it to a whole bunch of different activities.

Doing

Joining YIMBY Melbourne

I’m officially a paid-up member of YIMBY Melbourne – a group dedicated to research-based advocacy for reforms that alleviate Australia’s profound housing crisis. YIMBY is a play on words of “NIMBY” (not in my backyard), the pejorative acronym for people who oppose new development near them. YIMBY Melbourne believes (as I do) that the only way to durably make housing more affordable in Australia is to build more – much more – of it, and that the best way to enable that is by arguing for broader reforms to a moribund planning system that systematically privileges incumbency and heritage over growth and progress. I admire their work and support their mission.

Turning internet friends into real-life friends

One of the loveliest things that’s happened as a result of starting this newsletter is joining a community of friendly, like-minded footy nerds – people I can chat to about even the most niche fascinations and preoccupations. It’s nice to log into Twitter or Substack and see a familiar cast of digital faces. Over the last couple of months, I’ve been lucky enough to be able to move a couple of those digital friendships into the physical realm. This is hardly a novel insight, but making new friendships in one’s thirties isn’t easy. People tend to already have well-defined life paths by that age – partners, careers, children, existing friendship groups. Breaking into that, and breaking out of the complacency that can creep in when you have enough of those things to fill your day, is worth the investment. It’s really cool to go to the footy with people you met online; I encourage everyone to do the same.

In addition to restarting paid subscriptions, I’ve also created a “Buy Me a Coffee” page. Here’s the link.

Social preview photo courtesy of the Adelaide website.

At some point during Brisbane’s imperious victory over Adelaide on Sunday afternoon – probably when Will Ashcroft strolled into an open goal to make the margin 41 points midway through the third quarter – I posted a tweet that might have passed for a disinterested observation, but was actually the frustrated lament of a disappointed supporter.

It’s very possible that this is overstating things. Being 3-4 after an opening run of fixtures that included games against Brisbane, Fremantle, the Western Bulldogs (when they still had fit players), and Geelong isn’t terminal. There’s lots of runway left in the season and the Crows have some good players to come back. But the trend is clear: they currently look a very long way from the confident, powerful side that finished a game clear on top of the ladder last season (ignore what happened after that!). They have regressed – possibly past the mean. I think it’s worth understanding why, what it says about how fine the margins are in today’s AFL, and the value of different coaching skillsets at different points in a club’s cycle.

The naive form of Crows pessimism is to point at the win-loss record. It doesn’t make for great reading, particularly when paired with the ignominious finals failures. That naive form of Crows optimism is to point out that all four of this season’s defeats have come against good sides (but then, aren’t the Crows meant to be a good side?). The slightly more sophisticated form of pessimism involves looking under the hood and recognising that the side’s regression is most apparent in the areas that enabled their surprising rise up the ladder last season.

Here is what I wrote about Adelaide’s style of play in my 2026 season preview:

Few sides could match Adelaide’s array of one-on-one weapons. Dan Curtin, Jordan Dawson, Riley Thilthorpe, Josh Worrell, and Izak Rankine gave the Crows elite aerial, ground-level and hybrid contest capability across the ground. Adelaide ranked top-three for offensive one-on-ones because they actively sought them out. Rather than stretching defences laterally, they compressed them vertically and trusted their athletes to win contests in high-value parts of the field. This helps to explain the apparent contradiction at the heart of their numbers. Adelaide were a great contested team without being good at winning clearances. Their dominance came in secondary and tertiary contests, where pressure, physicality, and endurance compounded. The Crows coaches tracked tackles laid and tackles broken during the game because it was a proxy for physical superiority. In my preview ahead of last season, I borrowed the concept “low block” from soccer to explain the Crows’ willingness to adopt conservative defensive positioning to facilitate counterattacks. In 2025, the trendy soccer term that best explained what the Crows were cooking was “duels” (i.e. direct one-on-one contests). The Crows sought them and won them at a league-leading clip.

Last season, the Crows depended on their superior post-clearance contest winning ability, not sophisticated overlap and handball receive patterns, to generate transition. That made them hard to get a handle on but, because contested footy is so sensitive to form and fitness, was always going to be difficult to maintain. Regression was likely – especially for a side that, while not especially young, had little institutional memory of finals success. Over the first seven games of this season, the Crows’ weaknesses have remained. They still bleed clearances and, as a result, concede territory. That’s compounded by their recurrent struggles to move the ball from defensive 50 – a problem itself exacerbated by the absences of Mark Keane and Mitch Hinge. Their kick-heavy ball movement patterns have become predictable and easy to plan for. While the rest of the AFL has zigged towards gaining territory via handball, the Crows have zagged. That isn’t necessarily a problem. There’s merit in tactical contrarianism. What’s more concerning for Matthew Nicks is that his side’s traditional strengths have gone missing. Adelaide’s press has lost its bite. While the Crows remain steadfast inside defensive 50, they have frequently looked too open on defensive transition. Their opponents are gaining too much territory without needing to incur the sorts of risks they were last season.

As I wrote above, it’s possible that the Crows’ fortunes will change enough to make my anxieties seem premature. The additions of Curtin, Keane, and Hinge could add the contested marking and back-half drive they’ve been missing. Variance could swing in their favour. But three pieces of evidence point towards 2026 being a more accurate reflection of the Crows than 2025. The first is that all their best players played the vast majority of games last season. Between them, Jordan Dawson, Riley Thilthorpe, and Izak Rankine played 72 of a possible 75 games. Eight of the Crows’ 10 highest-rated players last season played virtually complete seasons. That was unlikely to repeat. Second is that variance was already in their favour in 2025. Only GWS overperformed their “expected wins” by more than Adelaide did. The Crows won five games where they generated a lower expected score than their opponent. They could have been as healthy to start 2026 and normal variance would have made them a worse side. The third piece of evidence which suggests this season was always going to be trickier is that the AFL’s recent rule changes, designed to accelerate the pace of the game and create more uncontested possessions, work against what the Crows are trying to do. Matthew Nicks wants more of the game to be in dispute. The AFL wants faster, more free-flowing footy. The house tends to win. You might not think that tightening the stand rule and awarding a free kick for last disposal would disrupt a side. But when the margins are fine, marginal changes matter.

The Crows finishing top last season was the product of a set of circumstances that were always unlikely to repeat. I don’t think that means it was a fluke. They were genuinely good! But Sunday’s loss to Brisbane revealed a real gap to the best sides. Perhaps suggesting, as I did in my tweet, that it was the kind of loss which fatally undermines the belief needed to sustain a flag tilt, was overdoing it. Instead, a fairer question is: what is the evidence that Matthew Nicks can become a Premiership coach? Extrapolated more broadly: how do decision-makers at clubs form and act on beliefs about senior coaches? I touched on some of these ideas in a series of tweets from earlier this month, when Michael Voss Discourse was at its peak. Clubs often publicly talk about the importance of giving a coach time. Often that’s because it’s the easiest thing to say in public. Usually it’s because they sincerely believe the incumbent is the right guy or that they don’t think they have enough data to form an opinion yet. What you don’t hear about as much is the opportunity cost of giving that time – a very scarce resource for any club – to the wrong coach.

The evidence is almost never as clear-cut as it is with Voss. Carlton – perhaps partly out of a desire to challenge the perception that they sack coaches too quickly – have given him far more time than his output has merited, especially as Carlton’s list was entering what, demographically, ought to have been its peak years. Nicks is an example of a different, largely under-explored dilemma: how much political capital should a coach receive for steering a club through a rebuild when the evidence they can deliver a Premiership is thin? Regular readers of this newsletter will know that I believe list strength is the principal factor in team success. But I also believe that coaching talent is real. The challenging thing is that ‘coaching talent’ is a slippery thing. Coaches are evaluated for different skills at different points of a club’s cycle. When you’re in the open ocean of a rebuild, the job is broad and remedial: developing a resilient game model, establishing healthy cultural norms, optimising for player development. In other words, it’s about creating the conditions for flourishing. That part of the job accounts for 90% of the progress. The closer you get to success, the more the KPIs change. Coaches of contending sides are judged on their ability to effect in-game changes, to adapt game plans when opposition coaches devise bespoke plans, to identify the individual players who can drive improvement – to traverse the last mile. Coaches of rebuilding sides who fail at the first part don’t get a chance to show if they’re any good at the second bit.

Only Matthew Nicks’ sternest critics would deny that he was good at the first part of the job. He inherited a club in disarray. Less than two months before Nicks was appointed, Mark Ricciuto was forced to apologise after suggesting that fans who didn’t like the decisions the Adelaide Football Club was making should consider taking their support elsewhere. Nicks made the Crows competitive. His navigation of challenging political problems like Taylor Walker’s racist slur wasn’t to everyone’s liking, but it helped keep a brittle club together. The Crows appear united. He added attacking layers when the talent permitted it. It’s the second part of the job – a shorter distance, but a rockier path – where he’s failed to convince. The rigidity of the game plan despite rapid tactical evolution elsewhere. Conservatism in selection. Persistent struggles in close games. Continuity is an asset when you’re rebuilding. It can be a liability when you’re trying to win. The thing that got you here won’t necessarily get you there.

The counterargument, of course, is that despite the difficulty of finding a coach that can do both parts of the job, there are clubs that manage it. Cast your eye across the coaching record of the 21st century and apply a simple filter: coaches who survived at least two consecutive seasons finishing in the bottom six of the ladder. Under that definition, the genuine rebuild architects of the modern era are: Alastair Clarkson, who finished 14th and 11th in his first two seasons at Hawthorn before winning four flags; Damien Hardwick at Richmond, who finished 15th and 12th before constructing a dynasty; Chris Fagan at Brisbane, who spent 2017 and 2018 in the bottom six before shooting up the ladder and staying there; Ken Hinkley at Port Adelaide, who inherited a club that had finished 16th and 14th in consecutive seasons and turned them into perennial finalists; Alan Richardson at St Kilda, who oversaw three consecutive bottom-six finishes, never made the finals across seven seasons, and was sacked in 2019; Brendon Bolton at Carlton, who oversaw four consecutive bottom-six finishes before being sacked; Stuart Dew at Gold Coast, who never made finals across six seasons; and Matthew Nicks, who finished 18th, 15th, and 14th in his first three seasons at West Lakes. A further category worth acknowledging separately is coaches who did the hard yakka of the rebuild but handed over, not always voluntarily, before the window opened. This cohort includes Brendan McCartney at the Bulldogs, who finished 15th, 15th, and 14th before resigning at the end of the 2014 (Luke Beveridge famously won the flag two seasons later), and Paul Roos at Melbourne, who finished 17th and 13th before leaving Simon Goodwin with an improving club. These cases are instructive in their own right: the opportunity cost of misjudging the handover cuts both ways.

Of the eight coaches who satisfy the threshold and stayed long enough to be judged on it, three – Clarkson, Hardwick, and Fagan – have won flags. Dew, Bolton, and Richardson never made finals. That leaves Hinkley and Nicks. Hinkley is perhaps the canonical example in modern footy of a coach who was very good at the first part of the job and not good enough at the second. He got Port into the conversation. But in 13 years, he couldn’t even get Port to the final Saturday in September. There is a version of this story in which Adelaide, having avoided the Bolton/Dew/Richardson worst-case outcome, is instead heading for the Hinkley outcome: a decade of competitiveness without genuine contention.

The truth is that the base rate is low. Three out of eight coaches who met that threshold and stayed to be tested won flags. It’s hard to reason cleanly from a sample that small. Looking at finals performances doesn’t entirely clarify things, either. Clarkson and Hardwick got their sides competitive in finals almost immediately – Clarkson’s Hawthorn lost a preliminary final in its third season and won the flag in its fourth; Hardwick’s Richmond were competitive in every final they played before finally breaking the drought in 2017, the year after the club agonised over whether to sack him or not. Fagan is a more complicated case: he won just one of his first five finals, a run that included two straight sets exits. But Brisbane’s early finals losses were close – they lost the 2019 Semi Final by three points and the corresponding fixture in 2021 by one. They looked like a team that belonged and was learning. Adelaide’s 2025 finals campaign – two home games, cumulative losing margin of 58 points, zero quarters won – told a different story. Those were not the margins of a team on the cusp of glory. They were the margins of a side found wanting when it mattered most. Brisbane didn’t blink after slumping to 1-3 in 2021. The question for Adelaide is whether the 2025 finals calamity represents the same kind of instructive setback or something more diagnostic. Nicks’ supporters would argue he deserves the chance to find out.

It’s not simple. That’s why the Adelaide hierarchy has observed the correct process – it’s asked for more data. The club signed Nicks to a two-year extension on the eve of what was ultimately a hugely disappointing 2024. It extended him until the end of 2027 last December. These are the moves of a club hierarchy that clearly isn’t fully convinced that he’s the guy, but believes giving him the opportunity to prove it is the most prudent choice. You can disagree with that choice. (Many, many Crows fans do.) But it’s harder to fault the logic – and irresponsible, I think, to pretend the choice is obvious. You don’t get counterfactuals in footy. Clubs can’t run A/B trials to see which choice – keep the coach vs. sack the coach – yields better returns. What sort of “proof” does Adelaide’s finals failure constitute? If it’s not enough, how much more proof is required? Nicks’ critics argue that, given the 2025 finals performances and the club’s start to 2026, the burden of proof belongs to those who believe he can deliver that long-awaited flag — not the other way around.

The risk is clear and the risk is real: some clubs systematically underweight the evidence that the coach isn’t the guy because they are too eager to reward them for steering them out of the wilderness. They choose the known over the unknown. One of the main reasons underperforming clubs underperform is by conflating that loyalty – that gratitude – with confidence in the coach’s ability to finish the job. That conflation can close Premiership windows. Carlton with Voss is the prime example. Hinkley and Brad Scott (at North Melbourne) are others. The point of this essay isn’t to call for Nicks’ head, despite my growing suspicions (in my private capacity as an Adelaide supporter) that he’s not the guy. It’s to recognise that the datasets clubs use to reason from are thin, while the decisions they make are tremendously impactful. Punters on Bigfooty can afford to make assertions without evidence – it doesn’t matter. CEOs and club presidents can’t. But what counts as evidence in this game isn’t always clear.

Straight from the chart

As footy becomes faster, a side’s ability to move the ball and prevent its opposition from doing the same has become increasingly predictive of winning. Good sides need to move it quickly enough to avoid becoming trapped in their defensive half, patiently enough to structure up behind the ball, and precisely enough to avoid conceding devastating turnovers.

Seven games in, it is becoming clear which sides are handling this challenge most effectively. The graph below shows the differential of how well sides move the ball from defensive 50 to attacking 50 (basically: transition vs. denial of transition). Everything here is a percentage.

To repeat what I write here each week: it’s not perfect or definitive. This chart doesn’t account for fixture strength or capture the overall amount of in-game transition allowed by a side. Three sides – Adelaide, Fremantle, and Richmond – have a sum of D50 to F50 transition rate (their own success rate plus success rate allowed) below 40%. Six sides, meanwhile, have a total transition success rate of more than 50%. It is, however, an unorthodox measure of quality of structure. Transition and transition denial is one of the sternest and purest tests of coaching there is. Zones and pressing schemes are so sophisticated these days that you don’t luck into being good at it. All of which is to say: Sydney, Gold Coast, GWS, and Port (!) supporters should be very happy, Geelong, Hawthorn, and Brisbane supporters should be confident there’s room for improvement, and Carlton, West Coast, and Essendon fans… well.

Just as understanding how effectively teams generate and deny transition (and how much they embrace it in the first place) provides an insight into how teams play, so does looking at the distribution of their scoring.

Again, caveats: for reasons of convenience, this chart looks only at goals, not total scores, so it is influenced by finishing variance. And the borders between player types are porous. I’ve used the classifications found on Wheelo Ratings, but made some captain’s calls – e.g. including players like Josh Rachele and Sam Lalor as “mid-forwards” rather than midfielders. Kysaiah Pickett is classified as a pure midfielder (as he should be given his centre ball-up attendances) but spends most of time forward of centre. I’ve also excluded key defenders because the chart was becoming too noisy.

However, I still think this has real explanatory value. Melbourne’s midfielders are making massive contributions to their side’s scoring. St Kilda and Collingwood’s key forwards could be doing more. Brisbane’s brigade of small and medium forwards continue to present asymmetric threats for opposition defenders. Does it match the eye test for your side?

Round 7 was one of the first weekends of footy this season where sides generated fewer possession chains than the 2025 season average. Given that every game across the weekend was played in more-or-less perfect conditions (all else being equal, weather-affected games are choppier), this could be evidence that coaches are beginning to adjust their defensive systems to the increased speed of the game. Or it could be variance!

I think these numbers should provide a small measure of comfort to West Coast and (particularly) Richmond supporters. Your sides are generating chains with reasonable efficiency. The problems are concentrated elsewhere. Next week, I’ll look at how many possession chains each side fashioned over the first eight rounds of the season, and consider how closely correlated that is with success.

In a tweet previewing the Anzac Eve clash between Melbourne and Richmond, I highlighted both sides’ fragility at defending clearance losses. I’ll claim vindication on that front merely because it doesn’t happen very often. Elsewhere in Round 7, Collingwood and St Kilda’s ability to punish their opposition’s turnovers was a significant factor in their big wins, while North Melbourne’s inability to do the same in Canberra on Sunday night was probably the key reason they couldn’t quite get over the line.

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Footnotes

• From Useless AFL Stats: this Saturday’s game between West Coast (55.8%) v Richmond (54.2%) will be the first time since Round 19, 2013 that two sides with a percentage below 60% will face off.

• Inspired by another Useless AFL Stats post, which showed that the Western Bulldogs have registered the most posters since 2021, Tom O’Neil has run the numbers (courtesy of Wheelo Ratings) and confirmed that, yes, even controlling for shots, the Dogs hit the post more often than any other side – 5.13 times per 100 shots. Richmond hit the post the least – just 3.98 times per 100 shots.

• Scores from centre bounce were very frisky over the four completed rounds of April. All four rounds saw centre bounce scoring exceed the 2025 season average, often by a lot. It means that, overall, teams are scoring 12.8 points from centre bounce per game compared to 11.4 last season. Not big, but real. Here are the April numbers:

  • Round 4: 265 points, 16.56 per team

  • Round 5: 221 points, 12.27 per team

  • Round 6: 265 points, 14.72 per team

  • Round 7: 255 points, 14.16 per team

Recommended reading

• Jonathan Walsh checks in with how his beloved Essendon is travelling over at Don the Stat.

• I enjoyed the section in this piece on the Fox Sports website by Courtney Walsh (!) about how wily old forwards like Jack Gunston and Taylor Walker are enjoying Indian summers.

• Seb Morrison, over at his great new Changing Angles substack, writes about Fremantle’s start to the season.

• Nat Martin dives into the nuts and bolts of how Sam Mitchell has added speed to Hawthorn’s ball movement, which has had the effect of making them a much more dangerous attacking force. This one’s behind a paywall, so your best bet is to subscribe or ask Nat very nicely for access.

In addition to restarting paid subscriptions, I’ve also created a “Buy Me a Coffee” page so you can give me even more money. Here’s the link.

Social preview photo courtesy of the Richmond website.

Times are tough in Tigerland. Richmond’s scorched earth rebuild isn’t yet yielding enough of the green shoots that all fans crave and many expected. Despite the underlying metrics being better than a 75-point loss to North Melbourne on Sunday suggested, the result injected a little more black into yellow and black moods. Coach Adem Yze has won just seven of his first 45 games in charge.

The current state of affairs at Punt Road isn’t wholly unexpected. Richmond’s list is both callow and injury-riddled. Senior players, like Toby Nankervis and Tom Lynch, whose backups can’t shoulder the demands of senior footy have succumbed to injuries that might benefit player development in the long run but certainly hurt results in the short run. Losing almost every week sucks, and the pain isn’t necessarily dulled by the lingering glow of a recent dynasty or the tantalising prospect of future glory. But I’ve still been surprised, and slightly perplexed, by the depth of frustration and despair I’ve encountered among some pockets of the Richmond fan base. If you’re anything like me, you’re interested in what that discontent might suggest about living with uncertainty, the difficulty of rebuilding in the modern AFL, and how a media ecosystem that rewards hyperbole has distorted supporters’ expectations.

A key factor which doesn’t necessarily make rebuilding tougher, but makes the subjective experience of rebuilding more fraught, is the modern footy media landscape. Today, there are more mainstream footy media shows than ever before. And because most are determined to talk about anything other than what actually happens on the field during games (I’m aware I’m doing something similar in this post), that means more airtime than ever is spent dissecting and criticising. Just in the past week, Caroline Wilson has delivered a withering monologue about the current state of the club while Matthew Lloyd, on an AFL-produced program (I’ll leave the strange ethics and incentives of the AFL effectively criticising one of its own clubs for another time), labelled the Tigers an uncompetitive mess.

The extra layer that didn’t exist 15 years ago is fan media. Club-specific podcasts, social media pages, newsletters and Discord servers are made by and cater for very specific types of supporters. Whether you call them nuffs, tragics, or obsessives, they’re bound by a single common factor: they have strong opinions about what their club does. And when a team is losing, it’s easy to claim that their specific counterfactual – picking Player X over Player Y, the coach’s stubborn refusal to develop a Plan B, whatever it is – is the main obstacle to success. The algorithm rewards that kind of conviction. Measured takes don’t travel.

There’s another layer to excavate here: new media that isn’t dedicated to single clubs, but uses humour to drive engagement. I’m talking here about the Dan Gorringes of the footy world: creators who make shareable content that’s fun to send to mates smarting over their useless footy team’s latest loss, and rather harder to stomach when it’s your useless footy team that’s the subject of banter. It’s worth pausing for a moment to consider the incentive structure here. Content about losing clubs – their haplessness, their dysfunction, their beleaguered supporters – generates clicks, shares, and laughs in a way that content about winning clubs simply doesn’t. Joy doesn’t travel through space with the same fluidity as humiliation. Happy fanbases are all alike, but every unhappy fanbase is unhappy in its own way. Creators like Gorringe are, by now, a permanent and, for many, a genuinely enjoyable feature of the footy media landscape. But the asymmetry is real: the ecosystem has a structural bias toward making losing feel worse, and no equivalent mechanism for making winning feel better.

The modern footy media amplifies the emotional experience of fandom. But those feelings have to come from somewhere. The discontent of Richmond supporters comes from three distinct sources. The first is injuries to recent draftees – in particular Josh Smillie, Taj Hotton, and Sam Cumming. Tigers fans have invested lots of hope in this trio, all of whom were taken in the first round of their respective drafts. But, as I write this, they’ve only played seven of 64 eligible games since entering the AFL. All seven of those games belong to Hotton, who impressed when he made his debut in the back half of 2025. The news that he would be out for an indeterminate time after bone stress was discovered in his hip on the eve of the season was a big blow to the morale of supporters who just wanted to see a bright prospect realise his potential. Hotton is one of four Tigers currently listed as TBC. Those are scary letters to see on an injury report.

The plight of Josh Smillie is just as troubling. The tall midfielder, taken with Pick 7 in the 2024 draft, hasn’t yet played a single game due to a raft of soft-tissue injuries. I can count five discrete injuries and setbacks. The worst-case scenario – that so many injuries, sustained at such a key point in his development, will permanently diminish him as a player – is now live. Injuries don’t just create pessimism. They also create uncertainty. To return to a sentiment I’ve expressed in past pieces: data is one of a club’s most valuable resources. How young players get on in training and around the club generally can tell you a lot about their work ethic and their demeanour. But there’s simply no substitute for real reps. Had Smillie or Hotton played more senior games, Richmond and its supporters would have a clearer sense of whether they were future stars (Hotton does look like one, albeit on a minuscule sample size). Their ongoing absence is both disappointing on a personal level and creates the kind of doubt that can be corrosive to the positivity supporters need to get through the early days of a major rebuild. An important caveat: Sam Cumming, along with SSP pick Tom Burton, are making their senior debuts tonight. They could both contribute to a win over a talented but brittle Melbourne side. It’s a reminder that the picture can shift quickly, and that the week-to-week emotional boom and bust cycle is usually a poor guide to a club’s actual trajectory.

It’s not just injuries to young players causing discontent among some of the Tiger faithful. Injuries to senior players have had a pernicious concertina effect. Consider the case of Nick Vlastuin. He had a great year in 2025 before he broke his leg in the second-last game. His entire pre-season was basically ruined. And he hasn’t come back at the same level as he was before the injury. Just five players in the entire AFL averaged more intercept possessions than Vlastuin in 2025. His experience and composure provided the perfect platform for the likes of Luke Trainor, Tom Brown, and Sam Banks to hone their craft. It’s no surprise that, as Vlastuin tries to rediscover his form, his younger defensive peers are battling to improve theirs.

Rebuilds succeed and fail for many reasons, but the best ones thread the needle of surrounding talented youth with reliable veterans. The performance of core senior players matters a lot in the early days of a rebuild. When the old pros play at a high level, they buy wins in the short term while delivering invaluable experience to the next generation. I’m old enough to remember when many pundits predicted that Richmond might not win a single game in 2025. In the end, the Tigers won five games, despite having lost Shai Bolton, Liam Baker, Daniel Rioli, and Jack Graham over the 2024 trade period. Many neutrals and supporters interpreted that as a sign that the rebuild was well on its way to success. I saw it a little differently. Seth Campbell’s backflip after kicking the sealer against Carlton in Round 1 and Sam Lalor’s breathtaking introduction to senior footy notwithstanding, Richmond’s veterans did most of the heavy lifting last year. The list of Richmond players who recorded the highest average player rating for 2025 from a minimum of 10 games, in descending order: Nankervis, Taranto, Prestia, Vlastuin, Hopper, Campbell, Ross, Lalor, Ralphsmith, Miller. A couple of future stars, yes. But mostly established players with mature bodies and temperaments. Early in a rebuild, if the output of that senior cohort declines (for whatever reason) before the next generation is ready to assume the mantle, performances will decline, results will suffer, and the developmental path of young players becomes more complicated. There are few clearer examples than Richmond’s start to 2026.

Injuries to exciting draftees and the pain of regression after a promising 2025 are two of the reasons for the long faces at Punt Road. The third is the, thus far, underwhelming output of the two key forwards Richmond drafted in 2024: Jonty Faull and Harry Armstrong. Comparison is the thief of joy. And you can’t draft in hindsight. But those aphorisms are easy to forget when you look West and see Murphy Reid (taken three picks after Faull) and Jobe Shanahan (taken seven picks after Armstrong) tearing it up for their respective sides. Both are succeeding in different contexts: Shanahan is showing more flashes in an approximately equally bad West Coast side, while Reid has settled well into a strong Fremantle team. Both players so far look like better prospects than the Richmond pair. But even here, there are meaningful caveats: Armstrong has also been whacked with the injury stick. He played only eight senior games in his debut season and is currently sidelined with a bone stress issue in his foot. Faull, meanwhile, has had to play more games than he or Adem Yze would have liked against seasoned opponents due to repeated absences of older forward line colleagues Tom Lynch and Mykelti Lefau. Even the best prospects would struggle with the service Faull has received and the direct opponents he has faced.

None of this is to say that there aren’t grounds for concern – with Richmond’s drafting, Yze’s coaching acumen, or the club’s strength and conditioning program. Yze himself admitted, with surprising candour, on last Tuesday’s episode of AFL 360 that, in an ideal world, Faull would be sent to the VFL to rediscover form and confidence. Yze’s sceptics claim the Tigers play with no identity, no character, no dare. But guess what? This is what life is like down the bottom of the ladder. By definition, it involves residing in a world that’s far less than ideal. You don’t get “dare”. You mostly get what you get. It could be that every anxiety felt by Richmond supporters eventually comes to pass. The good kids could be injury prone. The healthy kids could be busts. Yze himself might not be the guy. The whole rebuild, or meaningful chunks of it, might need to be redone. Right now, the discovery process is much less fun than Tigers fans thought it would be. But one of the main points I’ve tried to make throughout this piece is that the current footy media landscape creates too many incentives to proclaim that a player or coach is bad, or that a rebuild is busted, and not enough to say the boring truth: it’s too early to say. Catastrophism and doom-mongering are more likely to go viral than calls for patience.

There’s one more cause I’ll advance for the current pessimism of Tigers fans: perhaps there’s a section of supporters that attained footy consciousness circa 2017 and thinks this footy lark should all be a bit easier? And perhaps the views of those disappointed supporters are overrepresented on social media and fancasts? I don’t mean entitlement. But there were Richmond supporters who were really excited by the return their club was able to get for Bolton, Rioli, and Baker in 2024, enamoured with the players those draft picks turned into, and convinced themselves that a big chunk of the rebuild had already been done. Again, it’s important to stress that the excitement of Richmond supporters – and envy of many opposition fans – could yet be vindicated in the long run. Fitness permitting, Lalor looks like he’ll become one of the game’s best players. He might be Richmond’s best player already. Trainor has looked good, as has Sam Grlj, Pick 8 in 2025. There really isn’t enough data yet in either direction. On some individual players, yes. On the overall status of the rebuild – no way.

The ability of some clubs to defy gravity for years at a time has probably blinded some supporters to how unusual and difficult indefinite contention really is. A look at Richmond’s historical ladder position confirms this.

Since 1950, the Tigers have won eight flags and six spoons (number seven is in the post). The club’s average finishing position in those 76 completed seasons? 8.51. Pretty much smack bang in the middle. Almost everyone wants to be Geelong, Hawthorn or Sydney. But that wasn’t an option available to Richmond this time around. That door shut as soon as the club committed Picks 12, 19, and 31, along with its 2023 first-rounder, for Tim Taranto and Jacob Hopper. The bigger the swing you take, the more it hurts when you miss.

Sunday’s game against North Melbourne serves as both a cautionary tale and a hopeful one when it comes to rebuilding. It’s bloody hard. And, as I showed in my recent piece about the Father-Son rule, it’s getting harder. The top four and bottom four spots on the ladder have become more entrenched over time: harder to rise, harder to fall. Sides at the top enjoy advantages in unobstructed access to club-tied players and desirability as a free agent destination that the AFL’s equalisation methods are struggling to overcome. Even miserable, years-long rebuilds aren’t guaranteed to succeed. Ange Postecoglou was talking about Tottenham when he said that sometimes the approaching light at the end of the tunnel turns out to be a train. But he could well have been talking about his beloved Carlton. Looking at North Melbourne, however, is also a source of some comfort: accumulate enough talent and results will eventually begin to turn. North Melbourne should be good – or at least much better than Richmond is in 2026. That’s the way the competition is designed to operate.

The questions Richmond’s football department must answer are when the inflection point of the rebuild will arrive, and what to do once it does. A few days before I first had the idea for this piece, news emerged that Richmond had thrown its hat in the ring for Zak Butters. I hadn’t considered the idea before the news broke. My immediate thought was that, given the likely cost any club will need to play (unless they offer Butters a contract so lavish that Port can’t match it), the opportunity has arrived a year or two too soon. There’s still so much uncertainty about Richmond’s list. But the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. You draft players in the hope they become as good as Butters. He’d take attention off the kids in the midfield, he’d make the team more competitive, and he’d set an example to every young player on Richmond’s list.

They’re fascinating questions, condensed into the form of one pugnacious superstar, and they’re the same ones this piece has ultimately been interrogating all along. How much do clubs actually know, and when do they know enough to act on that knowledge? For supporters, commentators, and writers, “not yet” is sometimes the best and usually the most honest answer. For a football department, it’s a luxury. The Tigers chose to go a different way when they were building the list that delivered their recent dynasty: the club knew it had acquired proven talent through the draft and chose to supplement it with the likes of Toby Nankervis and Dion Prestia. Tom Lynch – the superstar free agent – joined after the first flag. Richmond are operating under a very different and much less certain set of conditions this time around. Bringing in Butters would be an admission that Richmond believes the foundation is solid enough to build on; that the uncertainty has narrowed enough to justify hitting the accelerator, even if it means forgoing some premium draft prospects in the years to come. Not trading for him would be a statement that it hasn’t.

Nobody outside or, frankly, inside Punt Road knows which of those judgments is correct. That’s the uncomfortable truth at the heart of any rebuild – and, really, the reason the frustration of Richmond supporters is understandable even when it isn’t quite warranted. (I’d like to believe I’d be more sanguine if my team was still less than a decade removed from a dynasty, but who knows.) At the end of the day, all of us – supporters, pundits, writers – are just guessing, with different amounts of information and different incentives to pretend otherwise. Clubs will make their choices. Fans will have their feelings. And reality, slowly and without sentiment, will eventually render its verdict.

Straight from the chart

Last week, I posted a chart of how efficiently sides are converting clearance wins into points this season. It’s by no means perfect – it doesn’t take into account accuracy, opponent quality, or a side’s quality on other lines. But as a single proxy for clearance quality, I think it works. This week, I thought it would be worth exploring the inverse statistic: how many points sides are conceding for each opposition clearance win.

Again, this is by no means perfect. It is also a proxy measure for the quality of a team’s defensive structures outside of the contest bubble (or, even more basically, a measure of how efficiently teams create spares in defence). But I think that, beyond saying something about midfield personnel quality (and age), it also tells you a bit about clubs’ risk tolerance. All else being equal, weaker midfields – and more conservative coaches – set up to minimise variance. Neither Justin Longmuir nor Matthew Nicks are universally beloved by their supporters, but they (and their midfield coaches) know how to set up to avoid leaking big numbers from clearances.

Last week, I also shared a chart showing how well teams are converting the turnovers they generate into points. Let’s look at the inverse.

The early-season performance of four teams surprises me here. Given how defensively secure Hawthorn look most of the time, the fact they’re currently conceding the fifth-most points from opposition turnovers – caveat: they’ve played GWS, Sydney, Geelong, and the Bulldogs, – would be a cause of mild concern for Sam Mitchell. Port Adelaide and North Melbourne, two sides usually regarded (justly) regarded as defensively flimsy, are both faring much better to start 2026. North’s defensive numbers have significantly improved through their first six games of the season: the real test will come over the next month, when they face a tougher slate of opponents. Then there’s Sydney. We know about the attacking power. I’m not sure we all knew they could put up those sorts of defensive numbers. For those keeping score: Sydney are second for points per clearance win, first for points per turnover affected, fifth for opposition points per clearance win, and first for opposition points per turnover. Pretty good!

Understanding the origin of teams’ scoring chains is one of the most effective ways, at least in general terms, to describe how they play. The basic, highly stylised contrast is between teams which press to win the ball back high up the ground versus those which are happy to allow the ball to come closer to their defensive goal, create intercepts, and then exploit large amounts of space out the back.

I certainly hadn’t anticipated the Eagles’ scoring profile to have changed so much. Last season, 49.7 percent of the Eagles’ scoring came from forward half chains (a stat highly reminiscent of the Damien Hardwick Richmond sides Andrew McQualter served his coaching apprenticeship in). Collingwood’s profile is also a far cry from their 2023 Premiership year, when they systematically generated scores from half-back. It’s early – these shares will likely shift. And again, it’s not perfect. A chain which began from a metre behind the centre circle is coded the same way as one that began from a kick-in. But it’s still illustrative.

As I do each week, let’s look at how many possession chains each side generated in its Round 6 matches. The numbers from the Carlton-Collingwood game slightly surprised; watching the game left me with the impression that the game was more interrupted by turnovers than it actually was (I think it was mostly just turgid – before sparking into life in the last quarter).

Elsewhere, Hawthorn would again be (mildly, given they still won the game) concerned to have generated under 100 possession chains. To an extent, possession chains are a proxy for chain quality and result. You can’t generate repeat turnovers and inside 50s if you score with your first one. But generally speaking, creating more chains is a reliable way to win games of footy. Richmond’s number – just 91 – is a stark illustration of where the side is so far in 2026.

Looking at how efficiently each side converted different types of possession chains into scores in Round 6 tells you a lot about how individual games were won and lost. Carlton had more opportunities than Collingwood, but weren’t as efficient. The injury-ravaged Bulldogs couldn’t generate volume or efficiency. The Giants would be kicking themselves for their inability to capitalise on multiple scoring opportunities generated from turnovers but, as the joke goes, they’d probably miss. Gold Coast bled a lot of clearances – a potential subject for a future post – but shot the lights out when they won the ball at stoppage. And Melbourne, historically unlucky last season (they won four fewer games than the numbers said they “should” have), are getting good rolls of the dice so far this season. What a difference it makes.

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Footnotes

• According to Wheelo Ratings, which uses a slightly modified form of Champion Data’s player ratings system, Caleb Serong was best afield in Sunday’s Derby – but his game only merited a 15.2 rating, the 51st-best game of the round. That sounded unusual to me, so I asked Andrew Whelan, Wheelo curator, how often that’s happened. It turns out Serong’s game was the equal-seventh lowest highest-rating game in all AFL games since 2012 (excluding 2020, the weird year we all try to forget). It’s also the lowest since the Crows played the Saints at a soggy Adelaide Oval in Round 18, 2024, in a game best remembered as Riley Thilthorpe’s return from injury and debut as a muscle-bound caveman type. The player who rated 15.2 that night? Lachlan Sholl.

• Melbourne had 729 games’ worth of experience go out of its side for last Sunday’s game against Brisbane. The Demons’ four inclusions accounted for 24 games’s worth of experience. According to friend of the newsletter, Emlyn Breese, 705 is the 12th-biggest net experience loss for a team that went on to win.

• Another one from Sirswampthing: Mason Cox (211cm) and Isaiah Dudley (168cm) set a new record on Sunday for the biggest height difference between two teammates in the V/AFL area.

• What unites Xavier Duursma, Nick Vlastuin, Mitch Georgiades, Josaia Delana, Jordan Croft, Jeremy Howe, Griffin Logue, Christopher Scerri, Chayce Jones, and Charlie Ballard? That’s right – they’re the 10 players who have played at least three games this season and have a 100 percent retention rate when kicking inside forward 50. Small sample sizes can produce strange results.

Recommended reading

• Sarah Black also decided this was the week to write about the Richmond rebuild. It’s a scrupulous look at the club’s list, its young talent, and where the gaps still are.

• Gemma Bastiani picks her AFLW Team of the Decade. It’s well-argued, even if there are some players very unlucky to miss out. Bec Goddard or Doc Clarke to coach, of course.

• Jono Baruch, over at The Gardiner Stand (a great example of the intelligent and passionate club-focused content I mentioned in my essay), writes about Michael Voss’s combative press conference defending the club’s conduct during the sad Elijah Hollands saga. It’s well worth a read.

• Ricky Mangidis reviews North Melbourne’s big win over Richmond, reflects on the first quarter of the season, and looks ahead to a tougher stretch ahead.

• Leigh Eustace on footy, fans, and never forgetting the context of the Anzac Round.

In addition to restarting paid subscriptions, I’ve also created a “Buy Me a Coffee” page so you can give me even more money. Here’s the link.

Early in the third quarter of Sunday night’s rain-soaked closing game of Gather Round, St Kilda’s designated forward-50 ruck, Mitch Owens, was awarded a free kick after Jordon Sweet was judged to have held his jumper. As with many ruck frees, it was inscrutable upon first viewing. Subsequent replays didn’t really clarify things – if anything, it made the contest look more genuine. In the moment between the umpire’s whistle being blown and him announcing which team was to receive the free kick, there was confusion from both sets of players – which quickly turned into bewilderment among Port’s players and howls of frustration from the Adelaide Oval faithful.

Owens was no certainty to kick the goal. He was about 40 metres from goal, at a 45-degree angle, in the driving rain. He is not, it is fair to say, the league’s most reliable kick. But a possible goal became a certain one when, as Owens was beginning his approach to goal, umpire Nick Foot whistled for a 50 metre penalty. Ollie Wines and Zac Butters looked nonplussed, Owens kicked the goal, and the Saints were 21 points ahead. They were never headed. It soon transpired that Butters (the commentators initially believed it was Wines) had been reported for abusive language.

In a statement issued on Monday, the AFL confirmed Butters had been charged with using ‘Abusive and Insulting Language Towards an Umpire’. That’s the point where the facts end and the conjecture begins. It is in this space that discourse thrives. Later in the same statement, the AFL disclosed that Butters was alleged to have asked Foot “how much are they paying you?”. The they implied by Butters’ rhetorical question was both ambivalent and extremely important. “They” might have been referring to St Kilda and the uneven free kick count on the night. The 50-metre penalty awarded against Butters took the count to 16-8 in favour of the away side. A wag in search of a cheap gag might venture that St Kilda, after recruiting Tom De Koning, Jack Silvagni, Sam Flanders and Liam Ryan in last year’s trade period, wouldn’t have had any leftover petty cash to pay an umpire (to anyone affiliated with St Kilda reading this: this is a joke). If that had been the broad consensus – I should add the important caveat that Butters disputed this account in front of the AFL Tribunal – then perhaps the incident could have been chalked up as one of those “unfortunate things” that gets said in the heat of the battle.

The wrinkle, of course, is that Nick Foot isn’t just your average AFL field umpire. He is also, according to his LinkedIn profile, a “Broadcast Host and Racing Analyst” at Sportsbet and the “Head of Content & Form Analyst” at the 2 Units podcast, a “horse racing podcast and racing subscription service that provides punters with quality horse racing insight and accountable staking advice”. Which feeds directly into the second interpretation of what Butters is alleged to have said: the they are the betting companies which have attached themselves to footy like a parasite to its host.

Questioning the integrity of an official is serious business. I understand Foot’s indignation and the AFL’s choice to refer Butters to the tribunal. Had the AFL not sanctioned Butters, it could have been interpreted as implicitly endorsing the player’s criticism of Foot (assuming, of course, Butters said what he was accused of saying). The tribunal eventually found Butters guilty of ‘abusive, insulting, threatening or obscene language towards or in relation to an umpire’. The eventual punishment – a $1,500 fine – is a funny twist given the intensity of feeling the incident generated.

As I write, on Tuesday night, there are still many loose ends. Butters himself is adamant that he didn’t say “what are they paying you?” and instead said “surely that’s not a free kick?” (or some variant thereof). Foot’s microphone audio, which could have either exonerated or condemned the player, was curiously choppy and ambiguous – call it the Zakruder Film. Butters’ and Wines’ testimony appeared to line up. Port Adelaide chairman David Koch, not usually one to rattle the AFL’s cage, claims that Butters had no idea Foot is employed by Sportsbet. The club and AFL Players’ Association are said to be furious and considering their options. It’s a messy saga that, despite its anticlimactic outcome, has highlighted a number of intersecting issues that, together, constitutes a growing legitimacy crisis for the AFL.

The criticism AFL umpires receive is almost always disproportionate to their performance. Much of it is downright abusive, a non-trivial amount is conspiratorial. That abuse has real consequences: it wears down the people doing the job and, at the margins, deters people from taking it up. The AFL’s desire to protect umpires from this is not only understandable but genuinely laudable. What is harder to defend is allowing a senior umpire to maintain outside employment with a betting company – not because it is evidence of wrongdoing, but because the gap between a real and perceived conflict of interest is smaller than we tend to assume. Both require disclosure. Both create the space for questions about a person’s probity. And in an environment where the AFL is already facing significant scepticism about rule changes, draft distortions, player suspensions, and more, those questions don’t stay theoretical for long. When fans who distrust the administration see it move to protect an umpire who works for a betting company, they don’t interpret it as institutional loyalty to a veteran official. They read it as circling the wagons.

Clearly, Nick Foot’s employment with Sportsbet has been endorsed by the AFL. It’s on his LinkedIn page, he maintains an active Twitter presence, and – most obviously – he continues to umpire AFL matches. Allow me to add my voice to the chorus of thousands and ask: why, when it’s facing such hostility about recent decisions, does the AFL continue to allow an arrangement which only breeds more cynicism and conspiracising? Here’s my attempt at an answer: there is a conspiracy afoot. Only it’s not the conspiracy that many fans sincerely believe – that umpires have it in for their club. It’s one that plays out on electronic advertising boards, the Potemkin segments during TV and radio shows, podcast ads, and is increasingly impossible to untangle from the consumption of the sport: the sport and the industry that is slowly hollowing it out have become, by design, near-impossible to tell apart.

I’m a very occasional bettor. Maybe once a year, I’ll place a multi on a sequence of English Premier League games. Over my betting “career”, I’m probably a couple of hundred dollars on the positive side of the ledger. I’m lucky enough to not feel the pull of betting the way that so many people, mostly to their detriment, do. I’ve never bet on footy and, as regular readers know, I have specifically discouraged betting companies from inquiring about newsletter sponsorship. I don’t particularly like betting, it’s not very popular in my peer group, and I have a distaste for the immiseration it creates. I would probably prefer it didn’t exist – and I would certainly prefer that it wasn’t so intertwined with footy. But we don’t live in that world. Instead, we live in the one where a significant share of the footy media ecosystem is dependent on the tainted money that betting brings in.

Some people will say that we can’t have all the nice stuff without the betting. Besides, who are we to police how people spend their money? Perhaps that’s right. But I’ll say this: the AFL has invited betting companies to infiltrate the supporter experience. It sanctions a senior umpire’s ongoing employment with a betting company. Its former CEO departed for a sinecure at a betting company. We shouldn’t be surprised when fans recognise the conflict of interest – real or perceived.

The Butters saga would be a curiosity if it stood alone. But it didn’t. The same week produced another AFL disciplinary story with the same basic underlying architecture: an unclear evidentiary record, a player who maintains his innocence, and an institution that moved to punish regardless. I’m talking, of course, about the AFL’s decision to suspend young Saints forward Lance Collard for nine weeks (two suspended) for a homophobic slur directed at a Frankston player in the VFL. Here, too, there are many layers. It’s his second offense. The incident wasn’t heard by an umpire or picked up by a microphone. The alleged victim is a final-year law student who went to Brighton Grammar. Collard is, in the words of the King’s Counsel who served as the tribunal chair, a young Indigenous man who “has had a difficult background” and “grew up with no positive male role model”. The victim and perpetrator were teammates at Sandringham for two seasons.

The major confounding variable here, and what differentiates this case from prior instances of players abusing opponents, is that Collard steadfastly denied using the slur, insisting instead that he called his Frankston opponent a “maggot”. He even signed a statutory declaration to that effect; a stark contrast to his first offense in 2024, when he admitted use of the slur. But, of course, Collard would deny that. Even prior to this incident, he was standing at the crossroads of his AFL career. This is precisely where the AFL’s past choices, laudable as they may be, have created an interlocking set of incentives that frequently contradict one another and arguably make the ultimate goal – a more inclusive game – harder to achieve.

Speaking to reporters after Collard’s first suspension for use of a homophobic slur (which was itself at least the fourth such incident of the 2024 season), AFL CEO Andrew Dillon said that “you will see sanctions increasing until we don’t have it any more”. This signalled a clear preference by the AFL – it sought deterrence and was prepared to achieve it by punitive means. Almost two years on, we’re entitled to ask questions about both the justice and efficacy of that approach.

The first question which comes to mind is whether escalating penalties are commensurate with a harm minimisation framework. Is stamping out homophobic slurs a worthy goal? Yes, clearly. Will the knowledge that a player will receive a seven, eight, or nine-week suspension instead of a five-week ban deter them from using a homophobic slur? Perhaps. Is it more likely instead to create incentives for doubling down and strict denial? I think so. Is that state of affairs amenable to the outcomes that (presumably) everyone actually wants – contrition, reflection, growth, and minimising harm to LGBTQI+ players and supporters? No.

The second question (I’m pretending I only posed one in the preceding paragraph) is what kind of harm to LGBTQI+ fans is caused by the partisan sentiment these cases generate? It is, I’d argue, often greater than the harm caused by the original incident. When a club chooses to fight a suspension – as Adelaide did with Rankine last season, as St Kilda may yet do here – it unwittingly licences a discourse in which the player’s innocence becomes a cause, and the people harmed by the language become collateral damage. The slur becomes a lit fuse. Every AFL club pursues its self-interest over broader moral obligations to the game, and it’s probably naive to think otherwise. It’s worth adding the caveat that St Kilda’s statement after the verdict did acknowledge the impact the matter has had on LGBTQ+ and First Nations communities.

Thirdly – what importance do we assign to the role of education? Following Collard’s first suspension in 2024, he undertook a Pride in Sport training course to better understand the impact of homophobic and transphobic language on people who wanted to participate in footy. St Kilda called one of the convenors of that course, Pride Cup CEO Hayley Conway, as a witness during the AFL’s investigation. Conway spoke about Collard’s engagement and demeanour, noting that Collard “seemed quite nervous at the start… he was quite remorseful, shy and also really thoughtful in his comments especially as the session went on.” I suppose the fact that Collard was, on the balance of probabilities, found to have used the word again is evidence against the premise that he gained greater empathy for LGBTQI+ people. But I’m not convinced it means we should stop trying.

You might never have heard of “carceral liberalism”. But you’ve probably seen it in the wild. It’s, roughly speaking, the tendency exhibited by some political progressives to reach for punitive mechanisms – suspensions, fines, gaol sentences – to address social harms, while leaving the structural conditions which produced those harms (or allowed them to fester) untouched. The critique is that carceral liberalism satisfies the symbolic demand for accountability without doing anything to shift the underlying culture, and that its costs fall disproportionately on already-marginalised people. I’m by no means the first person to apply this concept to the case of homophobia in the AFL. Asha Steer, a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, made it in an elegant piece last September. “Focusing on single acts of bigotry,” Steer wrote, “releases institutions, like the AFL, of any responsibility and ensures ongoing homophobia and racism in football.”

The Collard case, like the Rankine case and several before it, adds a racial dimension that makes the concept bite hardest. St Kilda’s Indigenous Player Development Manager Katrina Amon – mother of Hawthorn player Karl – testified on Collard’s behalf and spoke to his difficult background: “He hasn’t had a strong male role model in his family… he went and lived with his Nan to support her, he financially supports his Nan now and they have a really strong relationship.” What weighting, if any, should we give that evidence – especially when applied to a second-time offender? The AFL decided it didn’t excuse the action.

A carceral liberalism argument would observe that an institution, desirous of burnishing its progressive credentials, has imposed a severe punishment on a young Indigenous man in the name of protecting another marginalised community, without interrogating why the culture that produced the behaviour exists or what the AFL’s own institutional responsibility for it might be. There are obviously real and strong rebuttals to this line of thinking. The AFL is big, but it’s not big enough to shift tectonic cultural plates. Our sympathies should lie with the victim before the offender. Footy has an inglorious record when it comes to LGBTQI+ inclusion. Almost everyone who’s been to a state league or country footy game has probably heard the slur Collard was found, on the balance of probabilities, to have used. Just two former players – Mitch Brown and Leigh Ryswyk – have publicly admitted to being anything other than straight. Collard had agency and access to elite legal representation. But I think the comments about Collard’s upbringing, beyond being a ploy to have his suspension reduced or tossed out, get at something real: the pro-equality attitudes that I and, I presume, most of my readers possess shouldn’t be taken for granted – they are the products of upbringing, culture, and educational programmes that are more available to people higher up the socioeconomic ladder. I’m troubled by the fact that, by my count, four of the six players to have been suspended for the use of homophobic language are either Indigenous or Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (the white senior coach, who’d already spent decades in the system, escaped with a fine). To be clear, I’m not suggesting this is anything other than a coincidental product of small numbers. But I suspect the AFL hadn’t fully anticipated that outcome before it pledged to eliminate homophobic abuse.

I’ve posed questions. I’m afraid I don’t really have answers. And neither case has reached its final destination. What I have instead is this observation. The AFL has started, in both cases, with genuinely good intentions: support umpires, eliminate homophobic abuse, and maintain the integrity of the competition. It has then made specific public commitments – permitting a senior umpire’s employment with a betting company, escalating penalties until the language disappears – without adequate consideration of what might happen downstream of that. What happens when the umpire gets accused? What happens when the penalties create incentives to deny rather than reflect? These aren’t unforeseeable questions. They are the predictable consequences of treating complex problems as though they can be resolved by drawing a clear line and daring people to cross it. The AFL keeps drawing lines. The problems keep evading them.

Straight from the chart

Last week, I made a note to explore how effectively teams are converting clearance wins into scores. There are several ways of measuring “midfield strength”. In a loosely descending order of fidelity, they go: results, raw clearance count, scores from stoppages, points per clearance win. I like the latter because, although like most other measures, it’s confounded by the fact that it involves non-midfielders, it helps to disentangle the knotty problem of clearance quality.

Five rounds in, most sides are about where you’d expect them to be. Carlton, Gold Coast, North Melbourne, and Sydney are all converting clearance wins into scores efficiently. Somewhat less expectedly, so are Essendon and St Kilda. Richmond, Collingwood, and Adelaide, meanwhile, struggle to convert clearances into scores. Overall, teams are scoring about six percent more from clearance wins so far in 2026 compared to 2025 – early season noise, or evidence of a faster game? We’ll see.

About 60 percent of scoring in modern footy come from turnovers. So it stands to reason that, just as forcing turnovers is an essential ingredient of success, so is having the blend of system and talent required to create maximum damage.

This looks a little more like a proxy ladder: Sydney, Hawthorn, Gold Coast, Fremantle, and Brisbane all fare very well. Carlton, Richmond, and St Kilda, rather less so. Two interesting details that aren’t captured in this graph: just like they were last season, the Crows are still #1 in the AFL for opposition turnovers – they’re just not quite scoring from them as efficiently. The Western Bulldogs, meanwhile, are forcing the second-fewest turnovers of any side in the league (and 11th for scores from that source). The defensive shift is real. Just two sides feature in the top three for both points from clearance wins and points from turnover wins: Sydney and Gold Coast.

As usual, examining the total number of possession chains won by each side provides an interesting glimpse into the underlying structure of the game they took part in. The numbers from the Adelaide vs. Carlton game leap off the page – 289 total possession chains, 178 of which were intercepts, is an astonishingly high number. Rain is only a partial explanation – the Friday night game between the Dockers and Pies had “only” 234 chains.

The Crows-Blues game was choppy even before the rain came. Both sides were anxious when they had the ball and energetic when they didn’t. I also wasn’t surprised to see a high number of possession chains in the Saturday twilight game between Sydney and Gold Coast. Both sides thrive on forcing and exploiting turnovers at high speed. West Coast and Richmond supporters, meanwhile, should be mildly encouraged by the fact that their sides did a good job of generating possession chains – the problems came mostly with what they did with them.

As it reliably has been for the whole season thus far, teams converted clearance wins into points at higher rates than turnover wins. As I wrote above, points from clearance wins are up about six percent leaguewide compared to last season. My prior was that most of this increase would have come from centre clearances (recall the discourse from about a month ago about how teams would exploit the extra space created by longer ruck taps).

It turns out that the increase in clearance win scoring efficiency has been driven entirely from around-the-ground stoppages. In fact, scores from centre bounce clearance wins are actually slightly down so far in 2026 (from 0.958 points to 0.938). Scores per stoppage clearance win, meanwhile, are up more than 10 percent thus far (from 0.872 points to 0.960). This means that, five rounds into 2026, teams are actually scoring more from their average stoppage clearance win than a centre bounce clearance.

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Footnotes

• Courtesy of the doyen of Australian sports stats, Swamp: Essendon’s first 100+ score since Round 2, 2025 means that the longest active 100+ score drought now belongs to… Collingwood. The Pies have played 14 games since last breaking the ton.

• Another fun fact (also courtesy of Swamp) about that Essendon vs. Melbourne game at Gather Round, and that’s not even counting the fact that, by winning, Essendon avoided setting a new streak for consecutive games lost: it was just the third AFL game this century where the first 17 goals were all kicked by different players – and the first since Round 17, 2003.

• How about that Cooper Trembath, eh? Is he already North Melbourne’s best forward? I suppose that depends on how highly one rates Paul Curtis. He took five contested marks against the Lions on Saturday – including that spectacular pack mark in the goal square – in just his eighth game. That feat has only been matched once by a North player in the last three seasons. Trembath also has the highest hitout win percentage in the entire AFL (admittedly, part-time rucks are often over-represented).

• If you thought that Fremantle winning with only 10 scoring shots was unusual… you’re absolutely right! According to Oliver Gigacz, the last time a V/AFL side won with fewer scores was in 1909, when Melbourne (4.4 – 28) defeated University (2.15 – 27). I wonder what University’s expected score would have been that day.

Recommended reading

• Marnie Vinall wrote about Lance Collard’s recent suspension for the ABC and came to the correct conclusion: there were no winners, just different shades of losers.

• Also for the ABC – I can’t believe taxpayer money is being used to subsidise my competitors! – Sean Lawson and Cody Atkinson dug into why long-range scoring is at its highest point in a decade and what it might mean.

• Jonathan Horn writes in The Guardian with his characteristic grace and eloquence about the Butters and Collard verdicts.

• The return of a semi-guilty pleasure of mine: Jasper Chellappah is back with his draft power rankings of the year. It’s shaping up to be a diverse, talented, and – with the notable exception of the possible top two, Dougie Cochrane and Cody Walker – quite open pool.

• This is an Instagram Reel, not an article, but I’ve been really enjoying the tactical snippets I’ve seen from Jack Ginnivan and Tom Mitchell’s new show. This clip is a great examination of how Izak Rankine was able to manipulate his direct Geelong opponent to create space to receive and initiate a scoring chain.

• Over at his Substack, Leigh Eustace puzzles over the problem of building a better AFL fixture.

In addition to restarting paid subscriptions, I’ve also created a “Buy Me a Coffee” page so you can give me even more money. Here’s the link.

On last week’s episode of Footy Classified, journalist Cal Twomey reported what most people inside the game had already been expecting: big changes are coming to father-son and academy bidding at the draft. The graphic below provides a summary.

Clubs which finish in the top four will be forced to pay a premium when matching a bid on their star kids. They’ll only be allowed to use a maximum of two picks to match. The current 10 percent matching discount will be abolished. And, most intriguingly, clubs that see their natural top five pick pushed back as a result of bids will be compensated with an additional end of first round pick. The AFL Commission apparently committed to changes following its competitive balance review, and Twomey’s reporting – which, as anyone who follows the draft closely knows, is not so much speculation as it is advance notice – makes their implementation for this year’s draft a near-certainty. The AFL’s choice to soft launch the changes via Twomey’s spot on an insider-y late night footy show suggests both a knowledge that the changes, like any to the draft, would be hotly debated and (perhaps) a desire to gauge public sentiment before they’re made official.

The nominal intent of the changes is to make it harder for already-strong sides to cheaply match bids on their tied talent, thereby directing more of the best kids in the draft to sides at the bottom of the ladder. Equalisation, in other words. That’s a laudable goal. But the changes certainly aren’t perfect. I worry about the potential for sides to collude by bidding on each other’s father-son and academy talent to effectively manufacture extra picks. I’m not convinced the gap between fourth and fifth-placed sides – often only percentage – is wide enough to warrant penalising the former but not the latter. Yes, one plays a qualifying final and the other an elimination final. But those teams are often equally strong. And I’m hardly the first to comment on the seeming peculiarity of the timing: pulling up the drawbridge the year after Gold Coast has secured its windfall of academy talent, that will sustain a long period of flag contention, for cents on the dollar.

But the biggest problem isn’t with the new bidding rules per se. It’s the fact that, despite being a gesture towards equalisation, they’re better understood as yet another distortion to what’s become a highly compromised draft system. The AFL, caught hopelessly between its ardent desire to grow the game in new markets, its ardent desire to preserve the sentimentality of the game, and its apparent desire for equalisation, has added layer upon layer of rules, fudges, and fixes to the draft to mollify different stakeholder interests.

The result is that the draft – notionally the engine of equalisation – has lost much of its equalising power. Alastair Clarkson believes clubs will never willingly bottom out again. St Kilda has complained bitterly and pivoted to a new list management strategy. The data bears this out structurally. In the 15 seasons between 1996 and 2010, an average of 1.73 sides which featured in the previous season’s top four stayed there the following season. In the 15 seasons since, that number has increased to 2.13. The bottom of the ladder is just as sticky. Between 1996 and 2010, 1.6 sides from the previous year’s bottom four stayed there. In the ensuing 15 seasons, despite most of that covering an expanded 18-team competition, an average of two sides per season have remained rooted in the bottom four. Economic mobility, especially for the least well-off clubs, is declining in the AFL.

The success of sides like Hawthorn and Fremantle – both now genuine flag contenders with virtually no father-son or even academy players to speak of (apologies to the promising Calsher Dear) – is sometimes cited as evidence that the effects of the father-son rule are overstated. Their experiences don’t prove that the advantage of the father-son rule isn’t real. The clubs that have benefited most from the father-son rule didn’t need it to be competitive either. But they were granted a margin for error that most clubs today do not have.

If footy is like chess – a game played according to mutually understood rules, where coaches begin with a given set of pieces and attempt to win by outthinking their opponents – then list management is the art of optimising the value of your starting pieces. It’s the meta-game. And although the meta-game doesn’t determine the outcome of any individual contest, it tilts the scales before the contest begins.

The reverse-order draft is meant to address that asymmetry. The dividend of being the worst side, one with an unhealthy number of pawns, is first dibs on the prospect that’s most likely to become a king one day. The draft was never meant to legislate equality of outcome. It was meant to guarantee something like equality of opportunity. By conceding that it’s OK for some clubs, often precisely those which have better starting pieces, to jump the queue because their father played for them, the father-son rule cuts against that idea. The new bidding rules are the AFL’s attempt to tax that advantage more punitively without removing it. But both the rule and the rule that’s been made in response to the rule ultimately concede the same thing: the starting position isn’t equal, and hasn’t been for a long time.

The father-son rule was introduced in 1949 to fulfil a sentimental request: sons should be able to play for their fathers’ clubs. It’s widely believed the VFL introduced it following successful lobbying by the Melbourne Football Club, which wanted the young Ron Barassi to follow in the footsteps of his father, who’d been killed in action in World War II. The rule is an emotional recognition of footy’s deep emotional roots and rich tribal continuities. The game is, among other things, about lineage and belonging. You can understand the romantic impulse. Many fans, typically those who support clubs that have been net beneficiaries, love the rule and believe it’s one of the things that sets our game apart from other codes.

That’s all true and important. But I also think it’s reasonable to ask if the AFL owes a higher duty to romance or to fairness. Perhaps you think I’ve loaded the dice there. It’s true that the father-son rule is procedurally fair, in the sense that the distribution of talented father-sons among established clubs should be largely random. It doesn’t really have anything to do with how well a club has managed anything other than its relationship with past players and its admin. But randomness doesn’t produce fairness. And, in the case of the father-son rule, it hasn’t produced either.

There’s another romance that defenders of the father-son rule rarely talk about. That’s the romance that belongs to supporters of clubs that have spent years in the wilderness, have watched flags go to the regular suspects, year after year, and been told that the draft will eventually give them their turn. That hope isn’t just a core part of the footy fan experience – it’s key to the functioning of the entire footy-industrial complex. The Essendon fans that are still subjecting themselves to the weekly horrors are doing so in the belief that it’ll amplify the satisfaction of the good times. By contributing to the increasing ossification of the ladder, the father-son rule subsidises the romance of certain supporter groups over others. It concentrates the experience of glory at one end of the ladder and rations it elsewhere. Not enough people make what seems to me an obviously true argument: meritocracy, properly realised, is romantic. The open draft represents the idea the best players find the clubs that need them most, where merit rather than lineage determines who gets a shot at glory. All 16 clubs made a prelim between 1998 and 2006. In the last nine years, just 13 of 18 have. Perhaps you don't believe that's a big difference. I do.

Despite being theoretically open to all clubs, the father-son rule has in practice produced highly skewed results. Of the – by my count, which is likely to be a bit off – 120 father-son selections made since the introduction of the reverse-order draft in 1986, 15 (12.5 percent) have been made by Collingwood. That includes some fairly handy names – the Daicos brothers and Darcy Moore come to mind – and some answers to pub trivia questions. Geelong have had fewer but made them count: Gary Ablett Jr., Tom Hawkins, and Matthew Scarlett formed the backbone of the Cats’ dynasty era of the late 2000s and early 2010s.

St Kilda, meanwhile, is an example of the pendulum of variance swinging the other way. In the pre-bidding era, David Sierakowski – son of 1966 premiership player Brian – played 93 games for the club before being traded to West Coast as part of the deal that brought Fraser Gehrig to Moorabbin. In the modern bidding era, Bailey Rice (son of Dean) played 11 games. Two other selections never managed a senior game. The club’s situation became sufficiently acute that, last year, it launched a formal father-son and father-daughter academy, reasoning that it needed to manufacture what other clubs had accumulated by accident. Funny how the least successful clubs are also the unluckiest.

About two-thirds of Premiership sides this century have featured a father-son player in a meaningful, best-22 role. Dustin Fletcher anchored Essendon’s defence in 2000. Jonathan Brown was the spearhead of three consecutive Brisbane flags. Gary Ablett Jr. and Matthew Scarlett were central to Geelong’s dynasty, while Tom Hawkins extended it into 2022. Travis Cloke and Heath Shaw were key pieces of Collingwood’s 2010 flag. Tom Liberatore, son of Tony, drove the Western Bulldogs’ miraculous 2016 flag through the middle. And in 2023, Collingwood became the first premiership team to field three father-son players in key roles – Moore as the captain and defensive lynchpin, Josh Daicos as the flying winger (and eventual Best & Fairest winner), and Nick Daicos as, well, Nick Daicos. Will Ashcroft has already won two Norm Smith Medals. The clubs that have accumulated the most father-son talent are, almost without exception, the clubs that have won the most. They’re the best and the luckiest. Good for them.

The strongest back-up for these claims comes from an unlikely source: the AFL itself. In 2014/15, the league’s football operations department undertook a review of the father-son and club academy rules ahead of the introduction of the Draft Value Index. I’m not sure if the AFL knows this, but the review document still lives on its servers. You can read it right here. Two lines jump out. They’re delivered matter-of-factly. But they’re actually admissions that the AFL has been perfectly aware for years about the distortions produced by the father-son and academy provisions. The first is the recognition that, despite the theoretical equality of father-son access, the winner-takes-all structure of the competition has created effects that greatly favour some clubs over others:

The second is the report’s (breezily evidence-free) assertion that, despite its acknowledged anti-competitive effects, the father-son rule is still worth it:

The governing body knew what it was doing, knew the cost, and chose romance over competitive integrity. A decade on, it’s tightened the rules, but is still making the same fundamental choice in an era where the divide between the haves and have-nots feels more pronounced than perhaps ever before.

Let’s consider some first principles. In his magnum opus, A Theory of Justice, the liberal political philosopher (and baseball tragic) John Rawls proposed a thought experiment for evaluating the justice of a system: design it from behind a veil of ignorance, without knowing which position within it you’ll occupy. From that position, Rawls argued, you’d choose to design the system according to principles that protect the least advantaged – because you might be one of those least advantaged.

Apply this to the draft. Behind the veil, you don’t know which club you support. You don’t know whether your club has an elite father-son prospect incoming or hasn’t had one worth getting excited about in 30 years. You don’t know whether your club is more likely to finish in the top four or the bottom four, whether it has the corporate knowledge to exploit the new bidding rules, or whether its list was built for the style of football the AFL’s on-field rules currently reward. From that position, would you design the father-son rule? It allocates a scarce, valuable, randomly distributed asset on the basis of sheer dumb luck. It bears no relationship to competitive merit, list management quality, or draft strategy. A rational agent behind the veil would reject it.

Rawls articulated another test to measure justice. He called it the difference principle. The difference principle states that “social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged.” I’m sure I’m not the only one who was immediately struck by the similarity between Rawls’ difference principle and Kane Cornes’ recent assertion on SEN Fireball that “every decision the AFL make from here on in has to be with the end goal in mind to make the competition as even as possible.” Pass the father-son rule through that test. Cui bono? Clubs with historical depth – most typically, the oldest, most established ones that have had more prominent fathers playing in earlier eras. Not, in other words, the clubs one immediately thinks of as needing extra help. The father-son rule fails the difference principle.

Practically, what might recent footy have looked like had the father-son rule never existed, or had clubs been forced to pay fair costs for their prospects? Perhaps Geelong would have had to choose between one or two of Ablett Jr., Hawkins, and Scarlett. St Kilda would probably have won at least one flag. The broader balance of power across the late 2000s and early 2010s might have been different. Ultimately, it’s impossible to say – counterfactuals are slippery. But I’m confident that whatever was lost in romance and tradition would have been more than offset by the thing the AFL claims to prize above all else: a fair contest. And nothing would have actually prevented Geelong, or Collingwood, or the Western Bulldogs from going after the sons of their club greats. They’d have had to back their judgement in the open draft – to decide, without a safety net, that this particular kid was worth that particular pick. That seems like a more honest test of a football club than the one the old system provided and the new one still. And if Gary Ablett Jr. had gone to Geelong with Pick 7, or 8, or 23, instead of going for a song at Pick 40, wouldn’t the story still have been just as good? Josh Dunkley is a Premiership hero at two clubs his dad didn't play for.

The trade-off between tradition, growth in new markets, and competitive integrity is hardly a new one. Fans have been grumbling about it since before non-Victorian sides joined the league. Things are different now, of course. The ruleset which enabled Geelong to draft Tom Hawkins with Pick 41 in the 2006 draft no longer exists. Nor, soon, will the rules that enabled Collingwood to match Gold Coast’s bid on Nick Daicos using Picks 38, 40, 42, 44. But I suspect the longevity and familiarity of the father-son rule has blinded people to its actual effects. The influence of a gun father-son pick (or three of them at once, as in Geelong’s case) can be felt for years. The Geelong trio, Daicos, Darcy, and the Ashcroft brothers help their sides stay good for longer. They make a difference on the field, and players at other clubs want to run out alongside them.

A quick word on what I’m not arguing. The Northern Academies and the Next Generation Academies have each come with their (frequently changing) own bidding mechanics, their own exceptions, and their own patches. Each has contributed to the draft’s disfigurement. But they rest on different moral foundations. The Northern Academies exist to grow the game (both commercially and in participation) in New South Wales and Queensland. The Next Generation Academies were introduced to create pathways for players from culturally and linguistically diverse communities, and for Indigenous players that the elite talent pipeline has bypassed. Although both distort the draft, neither distort it in the same way or for the same reasons as the father-son rule, which has principally benefited the oldest, most established Victorian clubs – the ones that needed the least help. Whether broadening participation and incentivising clubs to develop local talent are worthier goals than preservation of tradition is a debate for another day.

In a piece a few weeks ago, I argued for what I tentatively called ‘footy libertarianism’ – not a call to abolish rule-making, but a meaningful distinction between establishing the basic parameters of a system and steering it toward a preferred outcome. I mostly applied footy libertarianism to the AFL’s most recent set of rule changes. But the concept applies equally to the meta-game – the game which determines what chess pieces you begin the game with.

The architecture of the draft should preserve plurality. It should create conditions in which different list-building philosophies can coexist and compete. The father-son rule distorts that pluralism. Two clubs with similar draft positions, similarly effective salary cap management, and similarly effective development programs will have systematically different list compositions if one happens to have more prominent alumni with football-playing sons. I don’t know about you. But I prefer my governing body to remain neutral on the question of which style of play is most viable, and to establish principles that, where possible, minimise the effects of luck.

The proposed father-son bidding changes aren’t really a remedy. They’re the latest fudge on top of a series of fudges that have come before. But there is a way to overcome the tyranny of the Empire of the Son. Not reform. Not another patch on the patch. Full abolition, on the grounds that no one standing behind the veil of ignorance would design it, that it fails the difference principle, that it violates the footy libertarian commitment to plurality and organic evolution, and that every attempt to correct its distortions has produced new distortions that inevitably require further correction down the line.

The counterargument is emotionally powerful. Lineage matters in our tribal game. There’s genuine romance in the idea of a Daicos or a Ricciuto or a Pavlich pulling on the same colours as their father – and real horror in the idea of them in navy, or teal, or blue and gold. Perhaps cold competitive logic shouldn’t be the only principle by which football is governed. But abolishing the father-son rule wouldn’t prevent any of those stories from happening. It would just stop the AFL from subsidising them. A club that truly believes in a young player can take him in the open draft, back its judgement, and pay the full cost. That’s a more honest expression of loyalty, and a better test of some of the things clubs should be tested on (talent evaluation and asset management) than a rule which compels the rest of the competition to underwrite the sentiment. Tradition isn’t enough to excuse inequality; not when it helps determine which teams win flags and which win wooden spoons, and not when the AFL itself knows the cost and chooses to pay it anyway. Andrew Dillon has a chance to actually do something meaningful during his tenure. He should revolt against the Empire of the Son.

Straight from the chart

Over the past month, I’ve approached the subject of the increasing speed of the game from a few different angles: full polemic and more granular looks at the changing shape of the handball game, score sources, and centre bounce attendance concentration. This week’s charts continue on in that latter vein and ask what’s happening to uncontested possessions?

The best place to begin is to look at the share of contested vs. uncontested possessions. I’d expected a shift away from contested possessions, reflecting the fact that a faster game strongly implies a more uncontested one – but I hadn’t expected such a big shift through four rounds.

I suspect these numbers will moderate over the course of the season. Not because 36 games isn’t a representative sample, but because – due to weather conditions and team’s systems not quite having clicked yet – March and April aren’t always representative of the rest of the season. The cold will come, the ground will soften, the run will slow.

If the share of contested possessions is going down then at least one of three things is happening: there are fewer contested possessions, more uncontested possessions, or both at once. Turns out it’s the third thing. Contested possessions are declining in absolute numbers, but not by very much: games in 2026 are currently averaging 127.1, compared to 130.5 in 2025. The bigger change is in the number of uncontested possessions per game. The current competition average (227.9) is the highest since 2018, when there was an average of 228.8 uncontested possessions per game.

Uncontested marks are following the same trend, to an even more exaggerated degree. 85.6 uncontested marks per game is the highest on record (or the highest that Wheelo Ratings, which goes back to 2012, can find – which is basically the same thing). Teams are moving the ball faster and players are running faster and further. Footy is becoming a more cardio-intensive sport.

Round 4 yielded some mildly interesting results when it came to how often teams started with the ball. Brisbane having 18 more possession chains than Collingwood wasn’t a surprise. Adelaide having more chains than any other side across the entire round probably was. Sydney “only” had 117 chains because 45 of them – 38.6 percent! – ended in shots. Hawthorn generating eight more chains than Geelong was statistical confirmation of the eye test: they were the better side for most of that titanic Easter Monday clash.

An early-season trend I want to explore in greater depth in next week’s review is how heavily teams are scoring from clearance wins. Only Fremantle, West Coast (just – and not that it particularly mattered), and Sydney scored at higher rate from turnover wins than clearance wins in Round 4. Perhaps that’s expected: stoppages are rarer, set-ups are more sophisticated, and the type of player that attends them is changing (think more Kysaiah Pickett, less George Hewett). But it still jumps off the page.

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Footnotes

• Some interesting league-wide trends shared by Champion Data’s Daniel Hoyne on his most recent appearance on SEN Sportsday: scoring is at its highest in a decade, ball movement is the fastest on record (by more than 10 percent), inside-50 entries per game are at their highest rate in 27 years, scores per inside-50 are the highest they’ve been for 10 years, and the number of marks is the second-highest for 18 years. As a result? Pressure is the lowest on record through four rounds of the season.

• Courtesy of Cal Twomey: “The numbers say the best players are, on the whole, spending more time off the ground this year. Of the top ranked 49 players in the competition according to AFL Player Ratings, 36 had lower time on ground in the opening month than last year.” (Note: this doesn’t include Round 4.)

• The 10 youngest players in the West Coast vs. Sydney game on Saturday night all wore blue and gold guernseys. It doesn’t justify the result. But it partly explains it.

• There have been six games with 128-point margins in VFL/AFL history. Jamie Cripps has played in two of the last three – for different clubs, and on different ends of the result.

Recommended reading

• If you don’t already, make sure you’re doing the Friday Footy Quiz. Test yourself, your friends, family, neighbours – anyone who’ll listen. It’s always good fun.

• Friend of the newsletter, Mimi Birch, writes that we should have sympathy for the Saints – they’re just doing the rational thing in the face of a broken draft system.

• Toby, author of the always thoughtful Jousting Sticks substack, doesn’t like the way the footy media talks about money.

• Jonathan Horn on the scourge of goal songs and the general cacophony of noise at footy games these days (writing that made me feel so old).

• The Vulture Street Journal is feeling good about Brisbane’s big win over Collingwood last Thursday night.

• Over at Jumper Punches, Nick Rynne reviews Round 4 from the perspective of the WA clubs (spoiler: good, then bad).

In addition to restarting paid subscriptions, I’ve also created a “Buy Me a Coffee” page so you can give me even more money. Here’s the link.

Another reminder that I’ve turned paid subscriptions back on. I’m not planning to put up a paywall, but if you think my work is worth supporting, a paid subscription – just $6 a month – is greatly appreciated.

Carlton second half fade-outs. Adelaide being on the wrong end of a call in a close loss. West Coast beating Port by a kick at the Adelaide Oval. Tagging back in vogue. A player accused of making a homophobic remark. Grand Final timing discourse. Essendon discourse. We didn’t start the fi––nope, not going there. You know how The Force Awakens, the first film in the most recent (mostly terrible) Star Wars trilogy, used virtually the same story beats as A New Hope? That’s what Round 3 of the 2026 season felt like. Footy doesn’t repeat. But there are times it rhymes.

I’ll get three of those topics out of the way in short order. Yes, Zac Taylor should have been awarded a free kick for incorrect disposal. But Matthew Nicks was right: it didn’t affect the result. I can’t summon strong feelings about when the Grand Final should be played, although, like all people in their mid-thirties, I am increasingly perplexed by the AFL’s ceaseless drive for unnecessary change. And Essendon’s plight is almost certainly the most tedious recurring subject in footy media. I know why it’s so persistent: Big Vics get clicks, and talking about the sins of the past is easier than analysing the games of the present. But it’s so much sound and fury, signifying nothing (I’m sure when Shakespeare wrote those words he was thinking about the fact that many pundits are pretending to not understand that Essendon are rebuilding because senior figures at the club haven’t used the literal word). Essendon are bad because most of their players are bad. That failure has many fathers – poor drafting, poor development, internal dysfunction. But one underrated cause of Essendon’s current plight is that they didn’t bottom out sooner. Instead, they made decisions which kept them in the worst part of the ladder: the bottom of the middle third. That’s the worst of all words. It’s harder to draft elite talent, and harder to turn the heads of elite free agents. Winning while trying to win is great. Losing while trying to lose is good. Losing while sort of trying to win? Not advisable!

Essendon’s plight is a neat enough segue for me to discuss what I think is probably the most misunderstood subject in footy and (hyperbole klaxon) broader society – opportunity cost. Simply put, the opportunity cost of an action is the potential benefit foregone when that action is taken over another. Opportunity costs compound hundreds of times across every club’s list build process. The opportunity cost of using a first round pick on an established player is that you forgo the chance to use that pick in the draft. The opportunity cost of your list manager only offering your skilled but defensively flakey half-back/winger a one-year deal is that Sam Mitchell might swoop in and pluck him away. The opportunity cost of delisting a talented but wayward third tall forward is that he’ll learn what it takes to make it in the big time, go West, and become part of one of the most feared attacking tridents in the game. Opportunity cost, then, is a framework for better understanding the consequences, both within games and across seasons, of the decisions that footy clubs make all the time.

Opportunity cost – one of the few things I still remember from my economics degree – is where my mind always goes when the subject of tagging comes up, which it does two to three times a season and has popped up again in the aftermath of Finn O’Sullivan’s “tag” on Zach Merrett and Koltyn Tholstrup’s brief to stay close to Patrick Cripps on Sunday afternoon at the MCG. I want to advance a proposition. Tagging can be situationally effective. But the median footy fan – this excludes you, discerning reader – doesn’t always fully comprehend the opportunity cost of tagging. Instead, they (not necessarily unreasonably) think that tagging is shorthand for “nullifying the opposition’s best player” and effectively playing 17 vs. 17. This makes sense if you believe that all that happens when you apply a tag on an opposition star is that the output of a high-value player is nullified by a lower-value tagging player. But there are opportunity costs many people don’t consider.

This piece from last season, written by Cody Atkinson and Sean Lawson (the doyens of smart footy writing) lays out the trade-offs very well. As with all of Cody and Sean’s work, the piece is well worth reading, especially in how it lays out the stress that carrying a hard tag on an opposition star can place on a side’s own structures. But perhaps the most interesting part of it is the insights the authors got from different senior coaches. I especially appreciated Dean Cox’s comments on the flexibility that James Jordon brings to his tagging role. “The great thing about James is the balance that he does have between ‘OK, I need to restrict’ but also ‘I need to impact when I get the chance as well,’” Cox said. Reading that, and then seeing friend of the newsletter Ricky Mangidis’s excellent breakdown of Finn O’Sullivan’s work on Saturday night, makes me think that our mental model of what constitutes a tag in 2026 probably needs updating. Perhaps there’s still a niche for the strictly defensive “hard tag”. But perhaps the modern tagger needs to bring a blend of defensive accountability and attacking threat – in other words, they need to be a good player on their own merits.

Opportunity costs probably aren’t the first thing which comes to mind when considering why Carlton keep fading out so spectacularly in second halves of footy games. Despair and mirth, depending on one’s allegiance, would be higher up the list for most people. But it’s still a useful lens to apply – because, almost every week, the Blues demonstrate the opportunity costs of over-investing in a brand of football that is becoming increasingly obsolete. Diagnosing Carlton’s second half fade-outs has become its own cottage industry. I’ve read all kinds of purported explanations. The two I find least convincing are that the players don’t want it enough (except, apparently, early in games) and that they get tired (harder to sustain given the game against Melbourne came after a 17-day break). The one I find most persuasive is that the Blues have over-indexed on contested footy. This graph tells its own story.

Since Round 1, 2022 – Michael Voss’s first game in charge as Carlton coach – no side has been more dependent on stoppage wins to generate its scoring. Only four clubs have scored more than 42% of their points from stoppages over this period. Two of those four have been historically bad. One is studded with dynamic midfield talent. And the other is Carlton. That’s a problem for a few reasons. Firstly, stoppage setups are easy for smart midfield coaches to counter – say, at half-time. Second, stoppages are harder to win when your players are tired. And thirdly, as I’ve written in these pages before, the AFL has introduced a series of rule changes to encourage speed and deter stoppages. Combine it all and Carlton’s dependence on winning stoppages looks increasingly anachronistic. Across the first month of the 2026 season, the Blues have generated a whopping 61.4% of their scores from stoppage wins. Next best? West Coast at 47.47%.

That statistic rather flies in the face of pre-season talk that Carlton would look to re-balance its game plan (and, by implication, rely less on contested footy). But this isn’t just a 2026 problem. The Blues are feeling the pinch of years of decisions – player acquisitions, personnel appointments – that have deepened their dependency on an increasingly outmoded and unsustainable style. They appointed a coach who preaches a bash-and-crash style, who was himself the blue chip version of a bash-and-crash archetype, and have loaded up on key position players and big, slow inside midfielders. As regular readers know, I believe the characteristics of a playing list are a major and often underplayed constraint on everything that happens on the field. Carlton have chosen to keep adding hammers, even though they already had plenty of them, at the same time as the AFL has systematically reduced their value. No wonder everything looks like a nail at Princes Park. That’s opportunity cost in action.

Opportunity cost is usually presented as a negative. The word ‘cost’ can be scary. But it’s neutral in theory and often value-positive in practice. Consider West Coast’s stirring win at the Adelaide Oval on Sunday. Much has been written – justly – about how exciting the Eagles’ young players suddenly look. It’s certainly nice for Eagles fans to rediscover some joy after a grim few years. But, early in a rebuild, even the best kids need the guidance and protection offered by senior players. I’m old enough to remember the meltdown triggered on the West Coast part of the internet by the club’s choice to trade Pick 3 in the 2024 draft to Carlton in eventual exchange for Liam Baker, Bo Allan, and Matt Owies. Why are we passing up the chance to draft an elite midfielder, went the consensus, in favour of a utility and a more speculative prospect? The rage and misery was in especially abundant supply after the player Carlton turned that early pick into, Jagga Smith, found a lot of the footy in his first games in navy blue.

A few weeks on, however, and that decision by West Coast suddenly doesn’t look as short-sighted as it might have appeared. Allan was the Eagles’ fourth-highest rated player on Sunday. Mark Ricciuto (perhaps not the font of all footy truth) called his first goal Chris Judd-like. Several other baby Eagles ran amok. And, in the background, quietly doing the less fashionable work which enabled them to shine… was Liam Baker. Baker had a good if not particularly memorable game. But his influence goes well beyond last Sunday. He’s the third-highest rated Eagles player across the last 20 games (second if you exclude Milan Murdock, which – as exciting as his start to AFL life has been – you should). Beyond that, there’s the fact that the argument for the Baker signing rested on a conception of value that was harder for traditional metrics to capture: off-ball defensive work that allows more talented teammates to flourish, and an on-field lieutenant that helps translate a new coach’s instructions to a young team.

The correct conclusion to make about the Baker trade, beyond the fact it’s still too early to reach a definitive one, is that it’s always important to factor in opportunity costs. Most Eagles fans – most footy fans, full stop – considered Jagga Smith to be an unacceptably high cost for securing the services of Liam Baker, Bo Allan, and Matt Owies. A year and a half later, it’s beginning to look like the Blues and Eagles are travelling in opposite directions. I wrote in my West Coast season preview that rather than wins, Andrew McQualter would instead be better served by looking for improvements across three key performance indicators: scores from forward half, turnovers forced, and post-clearance contested possessions. The Eagles were 16th, 11th, and 16th respectively in those categories last season. Through three games of 2026, they’re 13th, 13th, and 5th. It’s still a work in progress. But, all of a sudden, there are green shoots everywhere. If you consider just the second halves of games, the Eagles are currently +35 for contested possessions. They’re beginning to cook. Having an experienced Baker helps.

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The Video Room

I’ll keep this week’s video section (relatively) short and sweet, given how prolix I’ve been elsewhere. As we all know by now, handball is the new meta. Every club, except, apparently, Adelaide, is embracing the forward handball and increased overlap run as a means of breaking down opposition defensive structures that are becoming increasingly good at repelling kicks. That action naturally prompts an equal and opposite reaction, namely: how are sides responding defensively to prevent opposition territory gain by hand? In last week’s review, I posted a clip of Rory Sloane explaining Hawthorn’s intricate cascading forward press that slowed Sydney’s handball exits. Today, I want to take a look at how Collingwood smothered Greater Western Sydney’s handball game on Friday at [checks notes] Marvel Stadium???

The Giants were 1st in the AFL for handball metres gained in 2025 and, although they’ve slipped in both absolute and relative terms thus far this season, it’s clear from watching them that overlap handball remains the cornerstone of their ball movement. The Giants use handball in all key phases: to initiate chains from half-back, access the corridor, and to create better inside-50 launch points.

Friday night was no exception. The Giants had more handballs than any other side in Round 3, and – at a glance – kicked at the lowest rate. That’s how they wanted it. That was also how Collingwood wanted it. The Magpies didn’t strictly set out to restrict the Giants’ handballing. Doing that would have incurred an opportunity cost of space out the back that, watching at the ground, it was clear McRae’s men didn’t want to concede. Instead, they set out to minimise the amount of space that Giants players had to do anything productive once they got the ball in their back half. Here’s some vision of how they did it.

In this first clip, Lachie Ash – who will feature prominently – began with the ball on half-back, as he so often does for the Giants. He carried the ball far enough to prompt Jordan De Goey up to press him. De Goey’s choice to press immediately made Scott Pendlebury, about 15 metres further up the field, realise he also needed to press up to prevent Lachie Whitfield from receiving in space. He timed his press perfectly and also – here’s where having played 428 AFL games helps – knew to stick out a hand to disrupt Whitfield’s attempted handball. Tim Membrey picked up the pieces and Dan McStay ended up walking the ball in for a goal. De Goey’s press which forced a loopy handball, Pendlebury’s realisation it was his turn to press up, and the hand in – three small, compounding pieces of experience that created a turnover goal.

The second clip, from late in the first quarter, didn’t actually involve a handball – but it demonstrated how well Collingwood was able to anticipate the Giants’ preferred ball movement patterns. Lachie Ash received the ball at centre half-back and saw this:

He made the prudent choice of honouring Lachie Whitfield’s short lead on defensive 50. But what’s also visible is that, despite needing to shuffle its zone across to account for the switch, Collingwood had already set up with five players across the full width of the centre square.

Here’s the rest of the play. What Whitfield ought to have done, and indeed what GWS focused more on doing to get back into the game, was kick it to Callum Brown, who was waiting in space on the broadcast wing. Instead, Whitfield couldn’t resist the temptation: he kicked it to Oliver Hannaford. But Brayden Maynard had already anticipated that and was able to affect an unorthodox turnover (and avoid conceding a front-on contact free kick) by turning his back at the last second and diverting the ball to Isaac Quaynor.

The remaining clips – these are all demonstrations of the value of effective oppo analysis as much as anything else – highlight how well Collingwood understood how GWS would accelerate when needing to chase the game.

Stephen Coniglio marked the ball on defensive 50. He immediately made a mistake by dishing off to an overlapping Ash, who shouldn’t have called for the ball because Tim Membrey was still in the vicinity, tracking another runner. Nick Daicos quickly twigged what was going on and directed Membrey to press up on Ash before Coniglio even handballed it to him. As a result, Ash had no space to continue to chain and ended up kicking a poor grubber in the vague direction of Whitfield. Collingwood mopped up the loose ball and eventually kicked it to a waiting Membrey.

The next clip didn’t end in a direct turnover, but it might as well have. Once again, our hero Lachie Ash (that man again!) was involved. Corralled by two Collingwood forwards, he dished out a long handball to the waiting Joe Fonti.

If you stop the clip at the moment Fonti received the ball, you can see he probably could have kicked it towards the corridor. It would have been the better choice given the game state. Instead, probably partly because of his own inexperience, and partly because of Collingwood’s success in affecting turnovers, Fonti immediately looked boundary-side and sent a handball to Harvey Thomas. Thomas tried to do the right thing – immediately send another handball inboard to Stephen Coniglio – but by this point, Collingwood’s players knew they’d effectively removed all other options and were able to swarm the former captain. The chain eventually ended in a boundary throw-in.

The final clip shows how desperation can worsen decision-making. Whitfield handballed it off to Fonti. You can see Fonti ignore his pleading teammate on the wing – Collingwood were happy to concede a mark that wide – to instead try and burst past Membrey and Lachie Schultz. He made a decent fist of it but, knowing that Fonti would probably be forced to handball, Dan Houston had made the correct decision to push up and block the next link in the chain. Steele Sidebottom mopped up the ground ball and Harry Perryman found Membrey alone in the pocket.

None of this was rocket science, exactly. Nor was it ultra-aggressive pressing. It was good coaching that correctly anticipated the preferred ball movement patterns of the opposition and good, experienced players who executed and exploited the Giants’ predictability. The proof of Collingwood’s success is evident from looking at the shot map of Friday’s game. The Giants took 24 shots on goal; only slightly below their season average of 26.4. But the real difference was in the quality of shots they manufactured. Those 24 shots were only worth an average of 2.62 expected points each – a staggeringly low value. For reference, Richmond took the hardest shots on goal in 2025, averaging 3.09 expected points per shot. The shots the Giants were forced into taking on Friday night were significantly more difficult than that!

There’s a clear lesson here: as advancing the ball upfield by hand becomes a more dominant ball movement strategy, coaches will dedicate more time to countering that strategy. Not every response will look the same, and there will be counter-responses. It’s an interesting and rapidly evolving branch of footy tactics. If anyone from Champion Data is reading this: please start tracking handball turnovers!

Straight from the chart

DFS Australia is a great resource. Although it’s primarily used by and for SuperCoach types – of which, I admit, I am not one – it’s the best single source for centre bounce attendance statistics. I like CBA stats because not only do they tell rich stories about the fortunes of individual players, but they tell you how different sides approach one of the fundamental parts of the game. So I thought I’d look at the distribution of player usage at centre bounces for each club since 2023.

I decided to represent the data using the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, a standard measure of market concentration calculated by squaring the percentage share of each firm in a market (in this case, players in at centre bounce) and summing those squares, resulting in a number from near-zero to 10,000. The bigger the HHI number, the more that a club’s centre bounce attendances are concentrated among a small set of players (theoretically, 100% of centre bounces across a season could be attended by just four players – the primary ruck and three on-ballers).

What I like most about these results is how they show there are many different paths to success. Brisbane have regularly had a highly concentrated centre bounce mix over a period where they’ve made three straight Grand Finals. The Bulldogs are similar. Collingwood’s centre bounce concentration is middle of the pack; a reflection of Nick Daicos’s primacy, the emergence of the likes of Beau McCreery and Ned Long, and Craig McRae’s clever rotation of his older players. Then there’s Geelong. The Cats recorded the least concentrated/most dispersed centre bounce attendance mix across the entire sample period in 2024. Unlike sides like North Melbourne in 2023 or West Coast in 2025, Geelong wasn’t rebuilding (it never is!). Instead, Chris Scott opted for a full horses-for-courses approach. 23 Geelong players – fully half the list – attended a centre bounce in 2024. Does it mean Scott is indifferent to the result of centre bounces? I’d say it’s more likely to be evidence of his pragmatism – his willingness to adapt whatever tactic is most likely to yield success.

In my introductory essay above, I showed a graph of how all 18 clubs have generated their scores by chain type since the start of 2022. 70-odd games of data have created convergence. Even Carlton, the side most reliant on stoppage wins for scoring, generates “only” 11% more scores from that source than Richmond, which has relied the least on clearances. Unsurprisingly, the data for the 2026 season is far more volatile.

The leaguewide average is close to the 2022-2026 average (stoppage scoring is a little down), but that masks some significant disparities. Richmond and Carlton are still the bookends; the Tigers are highly reliant on turnovers for scoring (Dimma DNA), while the Blues still need to win clearances to score (Voss DNA). Of course, a caveat applies: this graph doesn’t say anything about volume of scoring. Essendon and Fremantle have similar scoring profiles. But it doesn’t mean they’re similarly good.

This week’s chain data showcases one of footy’s more enduring truisms: wet weather games contain lots of possession chains. That’s because the conditions force lots of turnovers and lots of stoppages. The other noteworthy result here is how broken/choppy the St Kilda vs. Brisbane game really was. That result certainly aligns with the impression I got from watching the game (and all St Kilda’s games this season). The Saints conceded and forced the second-fewest turnovers in 2025. It’s early days, but they’re closer to mid-table for both thus far this season. I suspect that’s a symptom of trying to play a more adventurous style (and not entirely succeeding).

Turning our attention to how teams actually capitalised on their possession chains and, as with much else in Round 3, the most interesting things here came out of the two Sunday games. The Eagles scored an average of exactly one point from each stoppage win chain against Port Adelaide, continuing a productive run of scoring from this source (and underlining concerns about Port’s defensive frailties). But it was the game at the MCG which provided the most eye-popping results. Both Carlton and Melbourne scored (and conceded) prolifically from their clearance wins. But the outcome ultimately hinged on what each side was able to do when it forced turnovers. The Demons weren’t especially dangerous. But the Blues were positively impotent.

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Footnotes

• Collingwood scored 29 points from stoppages against GWS on Friday night at Marvel Stadium. 27 of them – 93% – were from the centre bounce, surely a record. How about that Oscar Steene debut? The early-season bye appears to have come at a good time for a bedraggled looking Giants side.

• One from former Carlton captain and potential future friend of the newsletter, Sam Docherty: when the Blues win the contested possession count in a game under Michael Voss, they win about 70% of the time. When they lose contested possessions, that win rate drops to about… 7%. Yikes!

• More evidence for the Western Bulldogs’ defensive improvement and more reason for their fans to feel bullish: Luke Beveridge’s side has improved its defensive-50 ground ball gets ranking from 17th last year to sixth through three games of 2026, and gone from 18th to eighth for defensive-50 intercepts.

Recommended reading

• The most disappointing news of the nascent footy season, at least for me, is that Ricky Mangidis’s many professional commitments will give him less time to write over at his own blog, The Shinboner. As the name suggests, Ricky’s a North Melbourne fan. Thankfully, he’s still finding time to write in-depth reviews of North’s games throughout the season. His write up of the game against Essendon included thoughts on how both sides moved the ball, some of North’s positional shifts, and the cost of putting the cue on the rack so early. Essential reading, regardless of one’s allegiances.

• I don’t promote This Week in Football enough here. Each week, some of the sharpest minds in indie footy writing apply their gifts to different subjects they’ve been thinking about. Last week’s edition featured Jeremiah Brown on the changing composition of marking, Lincoln Tracy on why the early-season spike in scoring isn’t as big as we think, Emlyn Breese on what GPS tracking can tell us about early-season hamstring injuries, and Joe Cordy on Hawthorn and Sydney’s different set-ups in their Round 2 game at the MCG. Read, enjoy, and subscribe.

• Jonathan Horn, very much a friend of One Percenters, writes in The Guardian about how Carlton’s choice to back in Michael Voss is admirable – but for the fact that Voss isn’t the right man (and perhaps never was). Jonathan’s weekly columns are always a delight.

• Cody Atkinson and Sean Lawson ask a provocative question: has Queensland become the second footy state?

• Over on his Substack, Lincoln Tracy writes about an under-appreciated element of the Western Bulldogs’ early-season defensive strength: good spoiling.

• I’m sounding the New Footy Substack klaxon again! Franco Greco, a clinical and counselling psychologist, writes on his belief that Carlon’s fade-outs are a stress response more than they are a deficit of fitness or talent.

In addition to restarting paid subscriptions, I’ve also created a “Buy Me a Coffee” page so you can give me even more money. Here’s the link.

More housekeeping: now that I’m satisfied I’ve rediscovered a good writing rhythm, I’m going to turn paid subscriptions back on. I’m not planning to put up a paywall, but if you think my work is worth supporting, a paid subscription – only $6 a month – is greatly appreciated.

My polemic last week about the AFL’s choice to iteratively engineer a faster game style through rule changes generated more discourse than I’d anticipated. It was even cited by Xander McGuire – yes, Eddie’s son – on the most recent episode of the “Dan Does Footy” podcast. I tried to make a more nuanced argument than simply “game’s gone”, acknowledging that most seasons start off quite frisky in terms of overall scoring before cold weather, hard grounds, and adaptive coaches increase stoppages and decrease scoring. Instead, I advanced the claim that the AFL’s rule changes were undermining a more organic evolution of styles and evenly-matched competition between different styles.

One thing I didn’t account for in that piece was the potential effect of an ever-faster game on soft-tissue injuries. That looks like an important omission given that the seven games of Round 1 yielded nine separate hamstring injuries: Callum Ah Chee, Tom Liberatore, Christian Petracca, Tom Lynch, Toby Nankervis, Anthony Caminiti, Connor Rozee, Griffin Logue, and Milan Murdock all pulled up lame. That doesn’t even include other soft-tissue injuries like those sustained by Rory Laird and Josh Worrell, or the bevy of soft-tissue injuries sustained over earlier rounds and pre-season.

The medical literature is clear: hamstring injuries are strongly associated with high-speed running and the specific biomechanical demands of, say, picking up a footy at pace – hip flexion, knee extension, and full stretch under load. If you were trying to design an injury that tracks changes in the speed of the game, you would probably end up with something that looks like this. It’s a slightly macabre index, to be sure, but an effective one.

Anomalous results of any kind tend to generate lots of discourse in a footy media that most closely resembles a dog chasing after a car. Still, nine hamstrings in a single round is an arresting number, and certainly suggestive of something real. But does it meet the threshold of statistical significance? I thought I’d try to answer that question. Rather than fixating on Round 2 in isolation, I tracked the cumulative number of hamstring injuries that were recorded prior to or in Opening Round, Round 1, and Round 2, across the past three seasons (in other words, for as long as Opening Round has existed). This task was only possible – or at least, less than infuriatingly fiddly – because the AFL publishes weekly league-wide injury reports. My digging yielded the following:

• 2024: 23 new hamstring injuries (through 21 games)

• 2025: 25 (19 games)

• 2026: 33 (21 games)

Caveat: it’s eminently possible that there were hamstring injuries which weren’t included in these reports, or that I accidentally under- or over-counted somewhere. And it’s dangerous to extrapolate from what are ultimately still small sample sizes. But it’s still possible to make some provisional comments. There’s a small increase from 2024 to 2025, but well within the range you’d expect from early-season noise. 2026, meanwhile, saw a 20 percent jump in hamstring injuries per game from 2025 (1.31 to 1.57).

Some history can help us put these numbers into a broader context. Here’s something I didn’t know: the AFL publishes injury reports for full seasons. They’re supposedly “annual”, although I couldn’t find a more recent report than the one covering the 2023 AFL and AFLW seasons, published in September 2024. That gripe aside, they’re interesting reading, and provide a long-run baseline for comparison. Unsurprisingly, hamstring injuries are the most common cause of missed games. Across recent seasons, clubs average roughly five hamstring injuries per year. Multiply that across 18 clubs and you land in the vicinity of 85-95 hamstring injuries league-wide in a typical season. The exact number moves around the margins (there were 4.94 hamstring injuries per club in 2021, 5.19 in 2022, 4.71 in 2023), but is generally stable. Interestingly, there were fewer injuries in the 2023 AFL season than in any of the previous 10 years.

2026 looks rather different so far. Through 21 games, barely 10 percent of the Home & Away season, the season has already produced roughly a third, perhaps a bit more, of a typical full-season total of hamstring injuries. That isn’t a perfect comparison: we shouldn’t necessarily expect soft-tissue injuries to be evenly distributed throughout the season. Early rounds tend to see more of them as players ramp up from pre-season. However, even if we assume that something like 20 percent of all hamstring injuries occur by Round 2, and there haven’t been any exogenous shocks which might systematically increase the incidence of soft-tissue injuries, you’d still expect something more like 20. 33 is, well, quite a lot more than 20.

What might it mean? That probably depends on which model you think best describes injury accumulation in the AFL. We can probably discard the simplest model: naive extrapolation. That would imply there’ll be more than 300 hamstring injuries over the course of the season. A more realistic view is that, like scoring, hamstring injuries spike early and then settle. On that reading, the current trajectory might point to something more like 140-60 hamstring injuries across 2026. That’s still close to twice the average implied by the most recent AFL Annual Injury Report. A more conservative model would assume that the current spike in hamstring injuries really is anomalous, and that by season’s end, there’ll have been somewhere in the order of 90-100 of them. A slight elevation from past seasons, perhaps, but no great cause for alarm.

Of course, as I alluded to a couple of paragraphs above, just looking at the numbers is only half the story. 2026 has already produced about a third of a typical season’s worth of hamstring injuries. Well, what if footy isn’t typical anymore? What if there’s been a structural shift – say, in the speed of the game or the length of pre-season – that meaningfully increases the fatigue that makes hamstring injuries more likely to happen. Is there a magic whole-season hamstring injury number that should make the AFL (and the AFL Players’ Association) sit up and take notice? What about 110-120? What about other benchmarks, like severity (minimising the incidence of ultra-severe hamstring injuries like that suffered by Connor Rozee seems like a worthy goal!) or timing? Either way, when the time comes, I sincerely hope the AFL publishes an Injury Report covering season 2026 – for the men and women.

There’s an understandable temptation to draw a line from “the game is getting faster” to “players are twanging hamstrings more often”. The early-season data suggests there’s signal. But – and this could just be my natural scepticism – I’m not wholly convinced we can make that conclusion just yet. Early-season samples are volatile, and one or two anomalous rounds can skew the picture.

Instead, I think we can make a more modest claim: the early running from 2026 shows a materially higher incidence through Opening Round, Round 1, and Round 2 than the corresponding periods of 2024, and above what long-run trendlines would suggest. These injuries appear to be clustered, and they’re of a type that’s most closely associated with repeat high-intensity sprints. It doesn’t prove that footy is too fast for the human body. It does, however, suggest that something – it could be increased speed, it could be a shortened pre-season, it could, as certain critics claim, be related to a reduction in contact hours – has shifted enough to show up in the data. The next few weeks will tell us more. If, after that, the numbers look unequivocal, the focus should shift to solutions.

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The Video Room

Two of the most intriguing tactical questions coming into 2026 were how would opposition coaches counter Adelaide’s ultra-contested style now that the Crows had established themselves as a semi-serious team, and how would the Western Bulldogs try to cover up the systemic and personnel-based defensive weaknesses that plagued them last season. Their enthralling game on Friday night provided valuable information about both.

One of the Dogs’ persistent issues last season was that their territorial superiority, coupled with an aggressive high press, created significant space for opponents to transition when they beat the first layer. That exposed the Dogs’ relatively weak defensive personnel to repeated one-on-ones. Remember how Port Adelaide, in the Late Hinkley Era, would regularly be opened up in defensive transition? It was like that. Luke Beveridge has responded by largely eschewing the forward press and instructing his side to drop deeper when out of possession.

The early numbers are stark. In 2025, the Dogs allowed an average of 75.9 uncontested marks – the sixth-fewest in the league. Through three games of this season, they’re conceding 111. Only Essendon are conceding more uncontested marks than the Dogs, and the Bombers aren’t doing it on purpose. There was a stat on one of the few interesting panel shows (I think it might have been First Crack) which, in the aftermath of the Dogs’ defeat of GWS in Round 1, stated that no side is applying less pressure between the 50-metre arcs. In soccer parlance, what the Dogs are employing is usually called a mid-block. It’s an antidote to more aggressive pressing schemes which seek to win possession close to the attacking goal. Let’s see some vision of what that looked like in practice on Friday night.

This passage of play was actually one of the few times, at least in the first half, where Adelaide solved the puzzle of progressing from their back half into forward 50 – but it’s still illustrative of the Dogs’ approach. Rory Laird took an uncontested mark on the half-back flank. This was already good for the Dogs. Laird is a fine player but a conservative kick. As soon as he went behind the mark, a Dogs player – I think it may have been Joel Freijah, but it’s not totally clear from the broadcast – sprinted across the Toyota logo to cut off the inboard kick. Dogs compressed space to deny Wayne Milera space on the defensive side of the centre square (this was a consistent theme of the night). Eventually, Laird (who, it should be said, was nursing a calf injury), kicked it laterally to Chayce Jones, who did the same to Nick Murray, and onto Josh Worrell. The Crows generated three uncontested marks, all of which the Dogs were perfectly happy to concede, but didn’t advance the ball.

Later in the same chain, there was an example of what the Crows simply didn’t do enough of until they had no other option, late in the game. When Jordan Dawson, who dropped deep to try and initiate some positive play from the back half, marked the ball, he was confronted with the Dogs’ mid-block. Brayden Cook’s short lead towards Dawson should have been the trigger for Chayce Jones, who’d drifted to the back of the centre square, to move in the direction of the centre circle, creating a lane Dawson would have fancied his chances of finding. That didn’t happen, so instead Dawson just chipped it back to Murray. As I said, the Crows eventually made it inside 50 (this time). But it was a problem they struggled to solve all night.

It’s worth pausing here and commenting on the quality of the Dogs’ defensive structures, and the discipline required to make it work as well as they did. Here’s a still of that situation where Dawson had the ball at half-back. Yes, the Crows should have been much more proactive in creating a lane. But at the same time, they were deterred by how precisely the Dogs guarded space. Look at that kite shape on the right-hand side of the centre square. If Ed Richards (who’s at the bottom of it) was two metres closer to Dawson, Jones might have gambled on running forward and calling for the ball. Understanding teasing distances and the optimal distances between teammates are the fundamental ingredients of effective zones. The Dogs did that very well.

Here’s one final clip from the second quarter. The ball began in the hands of Murray. He actually executed a bold forward kick to Laird. Laird then made a small error which results in Adelaide once again being pinned back in its own defensive half. He immediately kicked it laterally to Izak Rankine. Rankine is a better kick than Laird – but he was in a worse position to do something productive with the ball. What probably should have happened instead is Max Michalanney becoming more active and making himself available for the overlap handball instead of remaining inactive. In the end, the Crows manufactured a decent switch across the ground to the broadcast wing. But their slowness was not without cost. The guy who ended up sending it long inside 50, from just past the centre circle? Jordon Butts. A fine stopper, but not a precision kicker.

This tweet, which I posted at half-time, summarised my thoughts on why, if Luke Beveridge does indeed choose to adopt a less aggressive forward press as a default stance, I think it’s such a great fit.

Most of the Dogs’ best players are attackers and attacking midfielders. Most of their weakest are defenders. The mid-block thus solves two problems at once. By slowing opposition transition and sending more players closer to D50, it makes it easier to crowd out opposition entries and apply effective defensive pressure. It also creates space further up the ground for the Dogs to run, find space, and generate one-on-one contests in the event of a turnover.

The Dogs’ strategy was an interesting contrast to this clip from the Sunday Footy Show, where Rory Sloane shows the benefits of Hawthorn’s forward press against Sydney on Thursday night. Sloane rightly identified the Hawks’ ability to force loopy handballs that created cascading pressure as an important factor in stemming the Swans’ ability to transition with handball. The risks involved with that kind of pressing scheme is that it only needs one player to miss their trigger to open a big hole in a defensive zone (see: Carlton in Opening Round vs. Sydney). By snapping into a mid-block as quickly as they did, the Dogs prevented that space from being created in the first place.

A few more specific comments on why this worked so well against the Crows (and it did – Adelaide scored with less than five percent of its D50 chains on Friday, compared to a 2025 league average of 10.1 percent). The Dogs were happy to sag off Murray and Butts because they weren’t afraid of what they could do with the ball. But they were vigilant in staying close to Wayne Milera, whose disposal and run was instrumental to the Crows defeating Collingwood in Round 1. Without Mark Keane’s creative, occasionally hare-brained disposal, and Dan Curtin’s contested power, the Crows are currently too easy to hem in like this.

The Crows have taken 90 or more uncontested marks in eight games dating back to the start of last season. They won all of the first six (all last season, shaded dark green) by 10 or more goals. They’ve taken 109 and 111 uncontested marks in their first two games of 2026, for a 14-point win and Friday’s six-point defeat. Given this is a recurring issue for them – and an easily foreseeable one, I discussed it in my season preview – and that Keane won’t be back for months, I suspect any short-term improvement needs to be driven by players like Michalanney and Josh Worrell becoming more willing to carry the ball out of defensive 50.

Adelaide played on just 13.1 percent of the time after a mark or free-kick in the second quarter. When there was no other choice but to go for it, in the fourth term, the Crows played on 47.4 percent of the time. They’re pretty conservative in general, especially in the back half (only Fremantle played on less often in 2025), partly because they have fewer good users in their defence than other sides of their stature. Simply dialling up the risk might not be the answer. It’s easy to look at the fourth quarter of Friday’s game – when the Crows staged a stirring, near-successful comeback, enabled by more risk – and conclude that’s how they should have been playing the whole time. But that ignores the reality that playing like that, especially if it meant more onus on Murray and Butts to make progressive kicks, could have seen the Crows go into the three-quarter break much further behind. These trade-offs aren’t as simple as the outcomes make them appear.

But full credit should go to the Dogs. They won’t always find an opposition as perfectly fitted for the mid-block zone. And part of their defensive improvement is down to the quality of individual performances (Buku Khamis has never looked more comfortable at AFL level) as much as it is a new defensive set-up. But it’s worked well so far. Three weeks into the season, Beveridge might have done something his critics believed he wasn’t capable of: improved his side’s defensive output without sacrificing scoring power. Old dogs, new tricks.

Straight from the chart

Here’s a logical proposition: if footy is getting faster, as per the current discourse topic du jour, then you would logically expect at least part of that to be reflected in how often teams play on from marks or free kicks. That data is available, and if you ask nicely, technically savvy friends like Emlyn Breese will dig it up for you.

The small uptick masks a big standard deviation. Some teams, for better and for worse, are playing on a lot. Others, meanwhile, aren’t. Per team play-on percentage is one of those statistics where it’s important to separate intent from outcome. Of the four sides currently playing on less than 35 percent of the time, only one – Fremantle – played on less often last season, when they did so just 31.6 percent of the time (the lowest rate, by miles, in the AFL).

Three sides are currently electing to play on more than 45 percent of the time. Essendon is a cautionary tale in what that can look like when done badly: turnovers when players caught upfield in anticipation of a handball chain that never eventuated, opposition players in space, and blown coverages. Geelong, befitting their status as the fastest team in footy, played on second-most often last season and have taken another step in that direction so far in 2026. The real riser is Sydney. Last season, they played on just 35.9 percent of the time – fewer than all but three sides. This season, they’re currently going at a breakneck 49.2 percent. Errol Gulden wasn’t kidding when he said the Swans would play a faster brand in 2026.

Let’s look at one of the regular charts – total chains. I think the main story from Round 2 was compression: only the Port vs. Essendon game featured a big discrepancy in how often sides began with the ball in the same game. The other is probably that – and this could very well be an artefact of fast early-season footy – only three sides created fewer possession chains than the 2025 season average. Over the course of the round, sides averaged 118 chains. Frothy.

Again, what’s probably even more interesting than how many sides begin with the ball is how effectively they score from different chain types. The Round 2 data is skewed by three outliers: Gold Coast’s frankly absurd 1.7 points per stoppage win chain, Port’s 1.48 points per turnover win chain (checks out), and West Coast’s 1.35 points per stoppage win chain. Wait – what? Polar bear in Arlington, Texas, etc. The Eagles were -9 for overall clearances, but +7 in scores from stoppages. Power, positioning, and – crucially – the ability to force stoppages in their own front half. The shorter the route to goal, the better.

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Footnotes

• Fremantle’s win over Melbourne meant that, for about 21 hours, the AFL team that has gone the longest since its last loss was North Melbourne. The baton has now been passed to the Western Bulldogs.

• Essendon crisis stats watch: the Bombers conceded their highest ever mark tally (157) to Hawthorn in Round 1. On Sunday, they fared even worse, conceding 165 marks to Port Adelaide, including 25 inside-50 – their worst tally on this particular metric since 2016. It’s been a demoralising start to the season at Windy Hill.

• West Coast didn’t just stop a run of 14 consecutive defeats when they beat North Melbourne in a banger on Sunday. It was the largest quarter-time deficit (24 points) they’ve overhauled to win a game in Western Australia… this century. The Eagles might not be flying high yet. But at least they’re off the ground.

• A good one from AFL journo Riley Beveridge, shared in the aftermath of Charlie Curnow’s one-handball second half against Hawthorn and the discourse that followed: since the start of 2025, Charlie Curnow has kicked 18.16 in first quarters. That stacks up pretty well against the top three in last year’s Coleman Medal count – Jeremy Cameron (17.9), Ben King (25.12), and Jack Gunston (17.11). However, in quarters two through four, Curnow has kicked just 19.16. Compare that to 74.38 for Cameron, 62.12 for King, and 69.32 for Gunston. Cause or effect of Carlton’s fadeouts?

• Centre bounce scoring watch: after Round 2, teams are currently scoring an average of 10.9 points per game from centre bounce chains. That’s…. less than any full season since 2021, when teams could only muster 10.4 points from that source. It’s still very early, there’s lots of volatility with small numbers, but perhaps footy isn’t broken beyond repair after all.

Recommended reading

• My good friend and self-admitted one-eyed Port Adelaide fan, Patrick McCabe, laments the banana republic status of the South Australian clubs that leaves ordinary members like him without a real say in how their club is run.

• Lincoln Tracy writes that everyone needs to calm down about Collingwood (spoiler: they won’t).

• Another new Footy Substack alert! Leigh Eustace, at Footy Analysis, makes the sensible assumption that a 20th AFL club will follow the 19th. He sees two outstanding candidates for where that club should be based.

• The Vulture Street Journal have used the Lions’ first bye of the season to re-evaluate the 0-2 start and what they need to do to finish in the top four.

• Over at Jumper Punches, Nick Rynne reflects on a very satisfying weekend for the West Australian sides.

• Rohan Connolly takes a playful swipe at the “young men yelling at clouds” (I appreciate the implication I’m young) in this piece, which suggests that the angst about the current state of the game might be misdirected.

In addition to restarting paid subscriptions, I’ve also created a “Buy Me a Coffee” page so you can give me even more money. Here’s the link.

Kayo rolled out a new interface between the conception and publication of this piece. My own experience has somewhat improved, while those of others has worsened. The timing isn’t perfect, but I don’t think it materially changes anything I’ve written here.

The scene: the start of the final quarter of the increasingly riveting Brisbane vs. Western Bulldogs game in Opening Round. Tim English had just kicked a goal, and the Dogs were wrestling back the momentum it appeared the Lions had definitively seized midway through the third term. Were they about to answer their critics – those who reckon they can’t get it done against the best – in the most spectacular way possible, or would the Premiers reassert control? It was footy at its most tense and electrifying.

The situation: my wife retires to bed. There’s no expectation that I join; she knows perfectly well how hopelessly addicted I am to footy.

The compromise: I’ll watch the end on my phone.

The twist: the Kayo mobile app totally fails me. All it displayed was an error message which suggested, tersely, the problem was probably my internet connection. I checked some other apps. They all worked, of course. It was only Kayo that didn’t. Attempting to watch through my mobile browser didn’t work either. A brilliant game continued elsewhere – at the Gabba, on TV, on radio – yet I wasn’t part of it.

The last resort of the powerless: I fired off an intemperate (by my very mild standards) tweet.

I put my phone away – OK, I scrolled until I was too tired to scroll anymore – and went to sleep. I awoke to dozens of replies. Many reported the same issue: Kayo failing in the last quarter. I noted that a few of those people had usernames or display pictures which clearly signalled an allegiance to the Dogs. They were denied the chance to see a special win as it happened. Other replies empathised in a more general sense: their version of Kayo malfunctions regularly, and usually at the worst possible moment. Stirred by righteous indignation, I posted a follow-up tweet. It was a resolution to write about Kayo – and a request for followers to share their horror stories. Step aside, Jacqui Felgate: citizen journalism has come to One Percenters.

I expected replies. You’ve probably gathered by now, given the state of the world, that populism tends to play well online. I experienced this in a very modest way with my last post. I didn’t expect to receive over a hundred. A handful were positive – noble attempts at introducing balance to the conversation. (My favourite, by far, was one user who reported a seamless experience on their Hubbl set-top box. Hamish and Andy knew!) The vast majority of the messages I received, however, were complaints.

Beyond the sheer volume of complaints, what struck me most was their breadth. They didn’t cluster around just one part of the product. They spanned almost every layer of the experience: buffering streams, blurry video, casting errors, connections, login loops, confusing menus, inexplicable ads, and customer support that insists your internet connection is actually the problem. Not a single part of the stack is immune. It turns out that for a hell of a lot of people, even a “good” Kayo experience - i.e. one not marred by technical errors – skews mediocre. I’ve gotten this far without even mentioning the rapidly rising cost of subscription, which was cited in many complaints and was at least implicitly present in all. Kayo was $25 per month when it launched in 2018. As of February, the “premium” offering costs $46 per month.

As a streaming service, its performance is abysmal. Every single game has lagged, stuttered, paused and buffered multiple times, almost every few minutes, yet somehow the adverts play smooth as butter. It’s just shameless and stupidly expensive. I hate that I have to use it.

But there’s one category of experience I keep coming back to, because it feels so egregious: the times people have been robbed of the chance to see memorable moments as they happen. Jack (not his real name) wrote to tell me how Kayo’s technical issues cost him the chance to see the end of two games decided after the siren. The first was the Sydney vs. Port Adelaide game in early 2023, when Ollie Florent had a kick to win it after the siren. “While the ball was mid air and looking like a goal,” Jack wrote, “my stream froze, buffered for a while and then a technical issue message popped up.” Jack had no idea that Aliir Aliir had spoiled the ball before it crossed the goal line – he had to look up the final result. Three months later, Jack was also denied the chance to savour, in real time, Dan Houston’s goal after the siren to beat Essendon at the MCG. “It was an epic finish to the game – if only I’d been able to see it”, he wrote. “My stream froze in the same way as the Sydney game, so another exciting finish was lost.”

Jack’s example of being deprived of the chance to see special moments as they happened was the most dramatic – but by no means the only one. People complained about entire matches being unwatchable, replays skipping to the end, even missing golden points (there’s no wrong door here at One Percenters!). A recurring sentiment that added to people’s frustration was that Kayo really is in a class of its own: other streaming apps – even those that cost a third of the price – seem to work just fine. Out of all of this emerges one key question: why is Kayo so terrible?

Part of the reason why Kayo fails so often and why its failures drive us up the wall the way they do is that sport occupies unique psychosocial terrain. Most forms of entertainment are abundant. Sport – and the ancillary “content” it generates – is by no means scarce. But the moments it creates and feelings it provokes are rare (or at least should be). A match exists only once. The post-siren goal, the golden point try, the wild momentum swings late in a game are fleeting events. They can’t be recreated later without losing the thing that made them meaningful in the first place. Sport is also a collective ritual. That’s most obvious when you’re at the stadium. It’s a bit embarrassing to admit, but I almost welled up before the first bounce of the Collingwood vs. Adelaide game; the majesty of the MCG, the crowd’s anticipation, the smell of beer and fried food – it’s a heady brew. But you can feel something similar at the pub and even, in an attenuated sense, when you’re watching alone, because you know others are strapped into the same emotional rollercoaster. When Kayo crashes during moments like Dan Houston’s shot after the siren, or the last quarter of the Brisbane vs. Dogs game, the frustration is existential: the moment is gone. A replay is a poor facsimile.

Kayo refused to stream when I was in Dawesville, a suburb of Mandurah. The reason? Kayo is not available in “remote Australia”…

Live sport is a shared collective experience that only the most hyped Netflix finales can compare to. That has social and psychological implications. It also has technical ones. Streaming live sport – this is probably the closest I’ll come to sympathising with Kayo in this piece – is hard. In a fragmented, post-monoculture media environment, live sport is one of the few things that still pulls thousands, sometimes millions, of people into the same moment. That creates a very different problem to the one Netflix is solving. Netflix has to solve for how to best distribute demand across time. When you open Netflix, you’re accessing a vast library of pre-existing content. The experience is asynchronous: people watch at different times. If a server is under strain, the platform can route you elsewhere, buffer slightly, or downgrade quality. Live sport doesn’t have those luxuries. Kayo has to handle everyone watching at once. That creates demand spikes that are semi-predictable but can’t be forecast with absolute precision. A close game entering the final quarter pulls in neutrals and casuals whose footy group chats are suddenly popping off.

Delivering that experience means handling enormous bursts of concurrent requests, pushing high-bitrate video with low latency across a network that’s subject to congestion. Content Delivery Networks and extra server capacity help, but the core problem remains. Traditional TV broadcasts solve this problem differently. A signal goes up, and (theoretically) anyone with a receiver can access it. The marginal cost of an additional viewer is effectively zero. Streaming doesn’t work like that. It scales with the audience. Every additional viewer is another stream, another load, another potential point of failure. None of this excuses poor performance. Many services seem to have more or less figured it out. But it does explain the central frustration: the moments you most want Kayo to work – the biggest games, the highest stakes – are exactly when it’s under the most strain.

Kayo texted me a $1 per month offer as they tend to do. I clicked the link, paid, was charged $25. The live chat refused to do a thing about it, they just hit me with the “we don’t do refunds for change of mind”. Immediately tried to cancel and they offered me six months at half price. There’s zero on their end suggesting that the discount will actually be activated, so it might be round two of this sh*tshow this week when it’s renewal time.

If you thought delivering video streams was tough, then doing it both well and profitably is tougher still. Live sport is the last truly scarce, time-sensitive content left. You can watch Stranger Things tomorrow. The only people who watch the game tomorrow are nuffs, analysts, and those with the discipline to avoid spoilers. Scarcity drives prices. So does demand. Live sport has both. The result is that its value to broadcasters has skyrocketed.

You could write a book about the information conveyed in this graph. The headline is simple enough: broadcasters have gone from paying the AFL about $100 million per season in the early 2000s to more than $640 million today (not adjusted for inflation). That’s the price of the one thing that still reliably draws mass audiences. Beyond that, there’s also a broader story about professionalisation, technological change, and rising consumer spending power. You can even see the effects of Covid. Each rights cycle sets a higher floor. The product hasn’t fundamentally changed, but its strategic importance has.

Where this bites for streaming providers is cost distribution. Under the old model, that cost was spread widely. Foxtel bundles worked because people who didn’t care about footy (they do exist!) still paid for it. Sport was subsidised by lifestyle channels, documentaries, and reruns of The Simpsons. You didn’t need every footy fan to turn a profit. Streaming breaks that logic. There’s no bundle, no cross-subsidy. If you want sport, you pay for it. Which means the full cost of those ever-more expensive rights deals is borne by the relatively small group of fans engaged enough (who have what economists call a “relatively inelastic demand function”) to eat the monthly cost.

Kayo refuses to learn my actual preferences in presenting links to live sport, e.g. properly prioritise showing me AFLW and NRLW games ahead of motorsports or golf or UFC which I have never, ever shown any interest in.

Kayo has about 1.7 million subscribers. That looks like a lot, but not when those subscribers are helping underwrite Fox’s share of the $4.5 billion footy rights deal. The subscriber base is narrow. It’s also unstable. Subscriptions are cyclical: fans sign up in March and cancel after the season; others drift away when their team drops off; others cancel (ironically) in disgust at Kayo’s price and performance. There’s lots of churn. Again, the contrast with Netflix is instructive. Its value proposition is continuous. Older content retains value. Sport doesn’t. Like a new car the moment you drive it off the lot, its value decays almost immediately. The result is a very imperfect storm: rising rights costs are concentrated onto a smaller group of customers. Infrastructure costs scale with demand. The AFL wants more money. Customers want to pay less – or at least feel like they’re getting more. Platforms like Kayo sit in the middle, assailed from all sides.

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I haven’t even addressed the elephant in the room, hovering conspicuously above all this. Foxtel, Kayo’s parent company, used to sit inside the most traditional Australian media ownership structure imaginable. News Corp was the majority owner, Telstra was the minority partner. But as of last April, Foxtel and Kayo are owned by DAZN (this is apparently pronounced “da zone”). DAZN is not a traditional broadcaster. It’s a privately-owned sports streaming platform, backed by the British-American-Russian investor and philanthropist, Len Blavatnik (technically, DAZN is owned by Access Industries, which Blavatnik owns). Two months before DAZN bought Foxtel, it secured a reported USD$1 billion investment from the “SURJ Sports Investment” group. SURJ – which, amusingly enough, is run by Danny Townsend, who briefly and rather ingloriously “ran” the A-League – is owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the Saudi state’s vehicle to launder its reputation (and counter Qatari soft power) through strategic investments. I don’t know about you, but I don’t much like the idea that a slice of my increasingly hefty Kayo subscription is finding its way into the bloody pockets of Mohammed Bin Salman.

WatchAFL, the product you cannot access in Australia and is for expats only, is fifty times better and probably staffed by one person and a dog.

DAZN has spent big over the past few years, hoovering up access to football (both soccer and American ), boxing and other combat sports, Formula 1, and ice hockey in multiple markets. Those bets have been motivated by the same underlying logic: acquire enough rights and enough fans, in enough places, would subscribe. Brute force blitz-scaling.

The results have been… mixed. DAZN’s way of doing business is expensive. The company has been dogged by reports of multi-billion dollar losses for years, as rights costs have outrun subscriber growth and churn has remained stubbornly high. In response, DAZN has shifted to something that looks more like consolidation. Less than a month after being acquired by DAZN, Foxtel announced around 100 job losses, concentrated in marketing and engineering functions. Barely two months after that, Kayo cut a handful of “digital content production” staff. Those moves – some of the first under the new DAZN leadership – reflected the group’s shift to a more streamlined operation. DAZN technically isn’t private equity. But it waddles and quacks in a way that’s startlingly reminiscent.

Kayo is no longer a local streaming service navigating the quaint Australian market. It’s now part of a massive, concerted, ethically dubious platform that’s under significant pressure to prove that sports streaming, at scale, can actually work as a business. That context casts the two recent price increases – in February 2025, two months before the acquisition, and February 2026 – in a different light. The experience we get as (long-suffering) Kayo subscribers increasingly reflects business decisions made outside of Australia. There’s a worryingly high probability that the person who now runs the numbers on behalf of Kayo does not know about Rodney Eade’s legendary Will Minson spray.

This is all explicable on a commercial level. Capital exerts its own logic. But it doesn’t mean we have to like it. There is a trendy term for what’s happening here: enshittification. The idea, popularised by Cory Doctorow, is that apps and websites tend to follow a predictable pattern. To begin, they’re good to users. Prices are low and features are generous. The goal is growth. Once users are locked in, the focus shifts to being good to partners – advertisers, rights holders, and investors. Prices go up. Costs are cut. Consumer surplus is methodically converted into producer surplus. Anyone who’s used Uber in the last 2-3 years understands what I’m talking about.

Why can’t you now cast to a screen off the app on your phone? When the heck did that happen?

It’s easy to forget now, but Kayo really did feel like a genuine innovation in the early days. It was much cheaper than Foxtel and also solved a real problem: how to pay for sport without paying for anything else. Unfortunately, it now looks like it’s careening down the same one-way road. I’ve already discussed the manifold technical problems. Prices keep on going up. Ads have slowly infiltrated the experience. The small frictions – the extra click, the few seconds of delay, the sense that the product is worse than it used to be, and worse than it should be – keep adding up.

Kayo is getting more expensive while the service it provides – and, of course, customer satisfaction is partly a function of value for money – seems to be getting worse. This isn’t aberrant. It’s how businesses like these turn the screws when it’s time to pay the money men. Growth gives way to monetisation and priorities shift accordingly.

Enshittification and the vague feeling that you’re locked into an ecosystem where enshittification is the point creates resentment. Obviously, negative feelings and sport aren’t strangers. Sport is, as many a wit has observed, mostly an elaborate mechanism to feel sad (unless you support Geelong, Hawthorn, Brisbane, the New England Patriots, etc.). But we’re used to those feelings. Sadness, envy that your rival club’s fresh draftee looks better than your own, anger that your idiot bald fraud of a coach has selected Fringe Player X over Fringe Player Y – to a meaningful extent, we invite those feelings. And, for all but the most emotionally maladapted among us, those feelings are self-contained. We feel anxious before the first bounce, excited/angry/happy/sad during the game, revel in the glow of victory or stew in defeat, and then move on (only to repeat the cycle the following weekend).

Frustration with Kayo feels different, and much harder to justify. I don’t want to know or care about the technical or geopolitical details of the app I use to mainline footy for 15 hours a week. To be perfectly honest, I’d rather not have needed to write this piece. But I’ve been forced to, because negative feelings – that we typically use sport to escape – have infiltrated not just watching our team, but accessing the product itself. Instead of asking normal footy questions like, “are we good?”, “why aren’t we good?”, “why are our hated rivals good?”, we’re asking questions like, “why doesn’t Kayo work properly?”, “if the AFL is making billions from this deal, shouldn’t the viewing experience actually work?”, and “how do I feel about subsidising Mohammed Bin Salman’s bonesaw fund?” Those aren’t questions about sport. They’re questions about power, fairness, and ethics. In other words, they’re questions about politics.

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It took me some time to realise that the common element underpinning the replies I received to my prompt was that they were all political. Not in the Labor vs. Liberal sense, but in the sense of customers expressing their frustration and powerlessness against corporate actors that don’t prioritise their interests over those of investors. The sense that they’re getting ripped off – and, short of denying themselves access to the sport that usually soothes the injuries inflicted by real life, they can’t do much about it. Every final quarter glitch, every unfulfilling customer service interaction, every price increase then becomes part of a broader narrative: this thing that is supposed to make me feel better is instead getting worse. I’m not saying there’s a straight line from Kayo-related irritations to the surge in support for One Nation. But I am saying that people are entitled to feel annoyed that an experience which should be a distraction from the messiness and meanness of real life has instead become another part of it.

I’ve got the premium version so that my grandparents can watch at their place. They’re in their late nineties, so not tech savvy at all but I set it up for them and they can watch their footy and basketball happily. Every now and then, it asks for a confirmation of the account, where you scan a QR code or put a generated code into the Kayo website and authorise use. They can’t scan a QR code, and they have no idea how to get to the website and enter the code manually before the code refreshes (you have about a minute to do it and that’s just not going to happen).

So once a month or so they call me to ‘fix’ Kayo, and I enter it on the website at my end. Takes 30 seconds, easy done. However now that they’ve sent the mass reset email out, we’ve signed them up for their own basic Kayo. My fear now is, which is something Kayo will never have considered, if I login in to theirs on my phone explicitly for the purpose of authorising them, it’ll trigger a two IP address at once thing and start the whole password reset process again. Zero chance Kayo has considered that some people who like sport can’t actually manage their own Kayo account due to being born in the Depression.

The AFL has never had more money, political power, or cultural influence. At the same time, the people who run it have rarely faced greater disillusionment. Some of that frustration is reasonable: the rule changes, the fixture, Opening Round, the state of the draft and equalisation. Some of it is less so: umpiring, or the vague sense the game has “gone woke”. But I’m convinced a meaningful share of it – and yes, I know the AFL doesn’t operate Kayo – comes from a much more mundane and protean place: people are paying more for a viewing experience that feels more fragile than ever (all while there’s no longer a free-to-air game on Saturdays). The Foxtel era was expensive, but reliable. Early Kayo was cheap and relatively reliable. The post-DAZN era feels both expensive and unreliable. Layer that on top of broader cost-of-living pressures and declining reliability across other parts of life, and the sour mood is easy to understand. We look at the buffering wheel and we think about Andrew Dillon, or the other products in our lives that don’t work as well as they should.

I kept up with the final quarter of that Brisbane vs. Western Bulldogs game on Twitter. It was fun. I’m lucky enough to have built a small following there, and between the excitement of the game and the laments of others whose Kayo let them down, there was plenty to entertain me. I experienced a different kind of moment. But it wasn’t the one I really wanted. It wasn’t the one I pay $46 every month to experience.

For most of the modern history of televised sport, watching a game was simple. You turned on the TV and a soothing, avuncular presence explained what was happening. The technology was complicated, but invisible. You could just fret about the footy. Streaming promised something sleeker and smarter. Instead, it has sometimes turned the basic act of watching a game – the collective ritual that shapes our lives, in ways little and large – into a software problem. When the software fails, the moment disappears. The after-the-siren kick, the golden point try, the final surge in a close match – the things that make sport memorable – happen somewhere else, while you stare at a buffering wheel, and Len Blavatnik and Mohammed Bin Salman sit in their gilded towers, grinning.