Every Road Led Here

Thoughts on a bumper docket at footy court and the AFL’s path dependency.

Apr 15, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Straight from the chart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Courtesy of the doyen of Australian sports stats, Swamp: Essendon’s first 100+ score since Round 2, 2025 means that the longest active 100+ score drought now belongs to… Collingwood. The Pies have played 14 games since last breaking the ton.
Another fun fact (also courtesy of Swamp) about that Essendon vs. Melbourne game at Gather Round, and that’s not even counting the fact that, by winning, Essendon avoided setting a new streak for consecutive games lost: it was just the third AFL game this century where the first 17 goals were all kicked by different players – and the first since Round 17, 2003.
How about that Cooper Trembath, eh? Is he already North Melbourne’s best forward? I suppose that depends on how highly one rates Paul Curtis. He took five contested marks against the Lions on Saturday – including that spectacular pack mark in the goal square – in just his eighth game. That feat has only been matched once by a North player in the last three seasons. Trembath also has the highest hitout win percentage in the entire AFL (admittedly, part-time rucks are often over-represented).
If you thought that Fremantle winning with only 10 scoring shots was unusual… you’re absolutely right! According to Oliver Gigacz, the last time a V/AFL side won with fewer scores was in 1909, when Melbourne (4.4 – 28) defeated University (2.15 – 27). I wonder what University’s expected score would have been that day.

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Every Road Led Here

Thoughts on a bumper docket at footy court and the AFL’s path dependency.

Straight from the chart

Footnotes

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