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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 stands to reason that key forwards would contribute a smaller share of scores in September. And 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. Each carried significant meaning, but nine games is 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.
So as a Crows fan, should I be more or less confident?