Now that we've convinced ourselves this podcasting lark ain't so bad, our aim is to resume a more regular episode schedule until the end of the year.

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

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocket Casts

• YouTube Podcasts

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

I’ve put links to Cody and Jonathan’s writing after the jump. Their work is the best in the business. I've also included a link to the first post from Jonathan's new Substack. Sign up now and you'll be able to legitimately say that you got in on the ground floor.

Links:

• Read Cody’s work here

• Read Jonathan’s work here

• Consulting the Toad: Mike Tyson at 60

• John Portsmouth Football Club Westwood

Brisbane conceded 100 points or more 10 times in 2026. Brisbane lost by 7+ goals five times in 2026. Brisbane conceded a higher average expected score than 10 sides in 2026. Brisbane was walloped in a Qualifying Final in 2026. Brisbane were 17 points down with barely four minutes to play in the Grand Final in 2026. Yet, despite all this, Brisbane are the Premiers in 2026.

When confronted with the overwhelming amount of data created by Saturday’s Grand Final, and the paradox of Brisbane’s impossible-yet-inevitable triumph, the mind tends to reach for metaphors. As Patrick Voss wheeled away in celebration after putting Fremantle 17 points up with five minutes left to play, it was tempting to think of Luke Skywalker destroying the Death Star. Except, in the version of the story that played out on Saturday, Darth Vader used the force to deflect the torpedoes back at his foes. Or if David had almost slain Goliath. Or if the final boss in a video game had revealed a second health bar after you’d exhausted all your ammo depleting the first one.

All these metaphors help tell the story of the end of how the Lions kicked four goals to win their third straight flag. But none quite capture the scale of their conquest. In the days since the game, a different metaphor has lodged itself in my mind. This Brisbane side is footy’s Roman Empire: decadently powerful, prone to temporary lapses but unstinting in the pursuit of victory on its own terms, led by a young ruler beginning to grasp the extent of his power, and destined to be the subject of awe and study for as long as people think about such things.

This game, this season, and very possibly Brisbane and Fremantle’s medium-term trajectories, was decided by individual moments of outrageous skill and impossible luck. The maddening thing about defeats like the one Fremantle suffered on Saturday – not that there’s ever really been one of those – is that you can point to half-a-dozen factors that might plausibly have swung the result. Lachie Neale didn’t have a great Grand Final, but if he wasn’t on the field in the last five minutes, would the Lions have been able to engineer those game-winning clearances? Ashcroft’s final clearance of the game was the product of a freak bounce that took it away from Caleb Serong, who was poised to take it away and deliver the ball inside 50. Josh Treacy missed from the goal square. Hayden Young was too afraid of being penalised for holding the ball when under tackle pressure so instead handballed it over the boundary to cede possession to the Lions for their game-winning drive. Karl Worner chose to spoil a kick he could have marked. Logan Morris, who had to that point of the game been shackled so effectively by Oscar McDonald, took a one-on-one contested mark and slotted the ensuing set shot. Yet it’s unthinkable that Fremantle would have been drawn up the field like that had captain Alex Pearce been on the field. Instead, the hirsute key back was on the bench, icing his injured Achilles. Those moments will be permanently inscribed into the psyches of Fremantle and Brisbane supporters and etched into the unfinished tapestry of footy folklore. None went the Dockers’ way on a day when they were otherwise the better side.

Only the most spiteful West Coast fan could have scripted such a ludicrously cruel defeat for Fremantle. Footy has never produced a finer yet larger gap between agony and ecstasy. Had the result that looked overwhelmingly likely after Voss kicked his third goal held, sensible Lions fans would have reflected on four successive Grand Finals which yielded two wins and two narrow defeats – an excellent run by any objective measure. Freo fans would have been celebrating a first Premiership and the end of a painfully long drought. Instead, they must confront the horror of what happened.

I had about an hour of the 2017 Grand Final to process the fact that Adelaide wasn’t the main character in the story that was unfolding, but was instead just one final adversary for the hero to vanquish on their journey. Dockers fans had seconds to try and comprehend the same. I’m not sure how they could. To paraphrase Dan Campbell, coach of another down-on-its-luck football side, the Detroit Lions of the NFL, when reflecting on his side’s capitulation in the equivalent of the prelim final: that may have been Freo’s best shot. We tend to remember the sides that rebounded from painful Grand Final losses to eventually win one because they’re romantic stories. But the reality is that it’s at least as common for that to be the apex of a side’s cycle. Freo are good and young, the two strongest predictors of future success. But the Dockers had a dream run: a good run with injuries, minor premiers, a home qualifying final, and prelim against a depleted Sydney side. They played a good Grand Final. As Emlyn Breese explained in his review of the game for This Week In Football, Justin Longmuir’s side largely succeeded in preventing Brisbane’s kick-mark chains. All this, plus a three-score lead with fewer than five minutes to play, and they still couldn’t quite get the job done. There’s really no precedent for rebounding from the sort of disappointment the Dockers suffered. The pain will burn until they actually win one.

The flipside of an improbable defeat is an almost-impossible dynasty. The Lions became just the seventh side since 2001 to win a game when down by 14-17 points at the 23-minute mark of the last quarter. At that point, their odds of winning were barely more than 1%. They’ve won four finals when behind at that late stage since 2022 – the same as the rest of the league combined. Brisbane appeared intent on exploring just how little energy they could expend while still winning the flag. They required three quarters to win the Grand Final in 2024, a half to win it in 2025, and five minutes to win it in 2026. Brisbane would get flogged – five defeats of 7+ goals! – and shrug their shoulders. Not even a Qualifying Final was enough to rouse them from their indifference. Rome was sacked several times even during the peak of imperial power. It didn’t matter. The empire would learn its lessons and flex its muscles to avoid the same outcome next time. It’s worth digging into just how much of an outlier Brisbane’s profile this season was.

The last flag-winning side to concede more points per game than Brisbane did in 2026 was North Melbourne in 1999. The deterioration in the side’s defensive numbers were offset by an improvement in the side’s already-formidable attacking prowess. The Lions averaged 109.6 points per game this season, more than any Premier since Hawthorn averaged 109.7 points per game in 2015. The end result of those shifts are that, as vulnerable as Brisbane appeared, their per-game point differential was more or less in line with sides that have won the flag in the last decade.

The evolution of Brisbane’s profile is the product of two factors, one psychological, the other tactical. The Lions’ players all carried the supreme confidence – the arrogance, some chagrined opposition supporters might say – of winning successive flags. That creates both the apparent indifference to shocking one-off results in Home & Away games and the belief that, when the stakes are their highest, they can perform to their maximum ability. You can map this belief. The Lions have played in 11 must-win finals in the last four seasons. They have won the second halves in all 11. The 2023 Grand Final (+2) was the closest. This is a side that, when it must win, simply never believes it will lose.

The Lions have also crested the wave of a league-wide shift in how footy is played. The AFL’s introduction of a suite of rules meant to incentivise speed, transition, and one-on-one matchups have benefited sides with Brisbane’s exact profile: elite midfields, precise kicking from half-back, and speedy small forwards.

Scoring increased by 6% in 2026, but total scoring in Brisbane’s games increased by 19.5%, the most of any side. Games featuring the Lions in 2026 averaged the highest total volume of scores of any Premiership side since… Brisbane in 2001. The league has made all-out attack more viable than ever. The Lions obliged – and, in the process, wound the clock back 25 years. They’ve gone back to the future.

Part of the reason why Saturday’s result has been regarded by many as a triumph of footy evil over good, of the Galactic Empire over the Rebel Alliance, of the Romans against the Gauls, is because it supposedly represents yet another nail in the coffin of the idea of rebuilding “the right way” through the draft. Beyond the contrasts in styles and recent success, the Grand Final was billed as a case study in two different approaches to list building. The Dockers, famously, don’t have a single father-son or Next Generation Academy player (of their own) in their best 23. List manager David Walls has built patiently from the ground-up: key backs and midfielders first, then key forwards (including one of the all-time Rookie Draft selections in Josh Treacy) and adroit trades when the side was primed to contend. It’s a narrow path that Fremantle has walked well. If they, or Hawthorn, who have similarly relied on good drafting and trading throughout their build, couldn’t do the job, then what hope is there for the sides currently down the bottom of the ladder?

There’s a lot to say about the state of equalisation in the AFL, most of which I’ll save for a piece I’m planning to write over the off-season. As worried as I am about it, I don’t think Saturday’s result, or Brisbane’s fragile dynasty, is quite the death knell for organic rebuilds that many people believe. For one thing, both Hawthorn and Fremantle were as close to knocking off Brisbane – an umpiring decision here, a freak injury to a key defender there – as it’s possible to get. Luck matters more than we realise. I also think that analysis oversimplifies how the Lions built their list. The crux of the argument is that the last mile to glory is the longest, and we don’t know if the Lions would have traversed it without Will Ashcroft. He, along with younger brother Levi and 2025 Academy draftee Dan Annable, will form the nucleus of a top four-calibre midfield for the next decade. Should a side that was already entrenched in the top rungs of the ladder have had priority access to such premium talents? Morally, probably not. But the counter-argument is that, by the rules of the day, the Lions were entitled to them. Perhaps, if forced to operate under the stricter bid matching criteria introduced this season, they might not have been able to draft Annable. But he has not yet made an impact at AFL level. The Lions would still have won this year’s flag without him on their list. The keener observation is that, had they needed to give up more to match a bid on the Ashcrofts, the Lions might have needed to give up the pick that they used to draft Logan Morris the following year. It’s much harder to mount a credible argument that Morris and Will Ashcroft haven’t been instrumental in the last two flags, or that they won’t be crucial parts of Brisbane’s future.

The Lions have been beneficiaries of a rich crop of club-tied players and generous bid matching criteria. Port Adelaide, to use an example, will be forced to pay a far steeper cost to draft their upcoming clutch of Academy and father-son prospects. That’s all true. But it’s also true that the Lions have taken their licks. Between 2010 and 2018, they won just 55 out of 198 games. For reference, North Melbourne has won 51 of 197 games in the last nine years. Concerns about Brisbane’s long-term viability as a club didn’t feel far-fetched, especially after the ignominy of the Go-Home Five. The Lions frittered away valuable draft picks and lamented what they didn’t have. Chris Fagan’s appointment as coach in October 2016 marked a break with the past. The club realised that only it was going to pull itself out of its predicament. And it started nailing its draft picks and trade targets. The first two players drafted under the Fagan regime were Hugh McCluggage (the best player in an otherwise underwhelming top 10) and Jarrod Berry. Cam Rayner and Zac Bailey joined the year after. The Lions were one of the first non-Victorian clubs to grasp the value of drafting players from country Victoria and, in the fateful case of Lincoln McCarthy and Lachie Neale, using close friendships as a lure to recruit players who moved the needle. They have benefited enormously since becoming an attractive destination. But they succeeded in arguably the hardest part of the job: becoming an attractive destination.

The more insightful criticism is that the combination of Brisbane’s skill and Brisbane’s luck has allowed the Lions to reach a level no one else can touch. Their recruiters had the inside track on Harris Andrews in the 2014 draft at a time when few other clubs bothered to do their due diligence on Northern Academy products because of how easy it was to match bids. Their list manager had at least two years to plan for the Ashcroft brothers and was able to roll the dice on more speculative types like Darcy Wilmot and Kai Lohmann instead, safe in the knowledge that the midfield did not require immediate attention. Beneficial side deals under the old Draft Value Index enabled the Lions to stash later picks for bid matching in exchange for first- and second-round picks. That those advantages have compounded matters in a league where the margins between first and second are this fine.

The hope is that, as the AFL has made it harder for top-four sides to draft their father-son and Academy prospects at deep discounts, it becomes easier for the worst sides to draft the best players. Ask supporters of clubs currently near the bottom of the ladder and you’ll quickly realise this idea is regarded with deep scepticism. They tend to grasp something important: equalisation isn’t just about upward mobility, it’s also about the likelihood of the best teams becoming worse. Brisbane has won three straight flags and shows no obvious signs of weakening. Beyond Lachie Neale, who will depart as an Unrestricted Free Agent, the nucleus of this side is in its mid-to-late 20s. Harris Andrews isn’t turning 30 until December. Charlie Cameron and Dayne Zorko will need replacing soon, but it’s eminently possible that their replacements are already on the Lions’ list. Morris and the Ashcrofts are really just getting started. More Academy talents are no doubt on their way.

The Lions have climbed out of the basement to the penthouse. We should accept that as a natural and healthy thing. What’s harder to accept is that, because of players they had priority access to when they were already ascendant, and because the easiest way to become good in the AFL is simply to be good already, the Lions will remain powerful for the foreseeable future. That’s why they’re the Roman Empire. They might get lazy or decadent. On their day, their capital might get sacked. But they simply shrug it off. Because they know there will be other battles and believe they will win them. They will be the standard by which other sides are judged for so long that it will become difficult to imagine a time when they weren’t.

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.

A small item of housekeeping: we’re taking a break for a couple of weeks, but we’ll back after that to talk AFLW, the trade and draft period, plus much more.

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

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocket Casts

• YouTube Podcasts

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

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

Links:

• Read Cody’s work here

• Read Jonathan’s work here

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

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocket Casts

• YouTube Podcasts

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

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

Links:

• Read Cody’s work here

• Read Jonathan’s work here

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

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocket Casts

• YouTube Podcasts

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

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

Links:

• Read Cody’s work here

• Read Jonathan’s work here

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

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocket Casts

• YouTube Podcasts

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

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

Links:

• Read Cody’s work here

• Read Jonathan’s work here

Social media preview image courtesy of the AFL website.

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

Finals footy is more contested

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finals footy is more chaotic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finals footy rewards ground level scoring

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does it all mean?

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocket Casts

• YouTube Podcasts

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

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

Links:

• Read Cody’s work here

• Read Jonathan’s work here

• Big Roo – The New Breed Ruckman

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

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocket Casts

• YouTube Podcasts

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

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

Links:

• Read Cody’s work here

• Read Jonathan’s work here

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

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocket Casts

• YouTube Podcasts

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

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

Links:

• Read Cody’s work here

• Read Jonathan’s work here

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

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocket Casts

• YouTube Podcasts

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

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

Links:

• Read Cody’s work here

• Read Jonathan’s work here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocket Casts

• YouTube Podcasts

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

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

Links:

• Read Cody’s work here

• Read Jonathan’s work here

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

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

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

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

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

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocket Casts

• YouTube Podcasts

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

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

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

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

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocket Casts

• YouTube Podcasts

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

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

Links:

• Read Cody’s work here

• Read Jonathan’s work here

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

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

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

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocket Casts

• YouTube Podcasts

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

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

Links:

• Read Cody’s work here

• Read Jonathan’s work here

• Read Marnie’s work here

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

• Footy Redraft

Social preview image courtesy of Reddit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Social preview image courtesy of the ABC website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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• Pocket Casts

• YouTube Podcasts

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

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

Links:

• Read Cody’s work here

• Read Jonathan’s work here

• Leigh’s Substack

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

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

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Pocket Casts

• YouTube Podcasts

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

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

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

Links:

• Read Cody’s work here

• Read Jonathan’s work here

• John Perceval: All That We Are