Greatness is a Loop
Appreciating North Melbourne’s dynasty, and asking what it might mean for the future of the AFLW.
In the end, the immovable object was little match for the unstoppable force. Brisbane’s intensity saw them jump out of the blocks on Saturday night, choking North Melbourne’s formidable ball movement and delivering the closest thing to an ambush they’d faced all season (and most of last). But after Bella Eddey kicked a goal to put North ahead with a couple of minutes left in the first quarter, it felt like the moment in a monster film when the hapless character empties their clip into the creature – only to realise, too late, that all they’ve done is get its attention. Brisbane’s guns were dry. But North were barely bleeding. Eddey’s goal marked the point where they clicked into ominous gear, kicking seven of the game’s final eight goals to crown a perfect AFLW season with an historic performance.
That win meant that North Melbourne have done something almost no club in Australian sport, women’s or men’s, has ever managed. The first side in the history of the AFLW to go back-to-back. 28 wins from 29 games, with the only minor blemish coming in a draw to Geelong in Round 2 last year (although it’s worth acknowledging Melbourne’s heroics in this year’s Preliminary Final). An average winning margin of 45.8 points, compared to 41.7 points in 2024). All made possible by a paradigm-busting style and standard; clean, consistent, ruthless.
Other Australian sporting teams have touched the sorts of heights that North have, but generally only for one season at a time. The Queensland Firebirds played a perfect season in 2011 but – despite going on to carve out a memorable dynasty – didn’t make the finals the next season. Canberra United didn’t lose a game in the 2011-12 W-League season, but they drew three of the 12 games they played. Melbourne City’s 2024-25 A-League Women’s campaign was “invincible”, but not perfect. St. George and Collingwood’s men’s sides both won multiple consecutive Premierships in the pre-professional era. But to fully appreciate North’s superiority, we need to broaden the lens. The University of Connecticut’s women’s basketball team reeled off perfect seasons in 2008-09 and 2009-10, part of a 90-game winning streak, and apparently bettered that with a 111-game winning streak between November 2014 and March 2017. Arsenal Women went 108 games without a defeat in domestic football, in the process producing the only perfect league season in English women’s football history (in 2006/07). OL Lyonnes carved out similar dominance, winning five straight Women’s Champions Leagues and a scarcely believable 14 [Anthony Hudson voice: fourteeeen!] French titles between 2007 and 2020. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that North’s AFLW side are breathing the same rarefied air.
The list of sides, across sports and sexes, that have done what North are doing is short for a simple reason: it’s almost impossible. Across two seasons, something will usually go wrong: injuries, form slumps, tactical stagnation, fixture quirks, the opponent developing an acute allergy to missing shots – you name it. Winning two successive flags is hard enough. Winning them without dropping a game is miraculous.
The longer one marvels at North’s accomplishments, the clearer it becomes that they’ve built more than just an incredible team. They’ve shown us how greatness compounds, even in a system putatively designed to prevent that from happening. North’s rise is more interesting than a simple underdog narrative. As Sarah Black’s excellent piece outlining their list build strategy made clear, North have created a lot of their own luck. Investing in women’s footy prior to the AFLW earnt them kudos among players. Former head coach Scott Gowans persuaded Ash Riddell to play for the University of Melbourne, a North Melbourne affiliate, in 2018. But there’s no doubt that they also benefited from the rather chaotic circumstances of the league’s first expansion. A reminder: prior to entering the league in 2018, North Melbourne (and Geelong) were given a 10-day window to sign existing players from other AFLW lists. No compensation was offered to those clubs losing players under this process, but the incumbent club could make a counter-offer to the player. North kept on hitting the bullseye, acquiring Riddell, Emma Kearney, Tahlia Randall, Jasmine Garner, and Emma King. It’s no exaggeration, nor is it any kind of backhanded compliment, to say that North built the spine of its dominant side in that window.
That timing mattered. It allowed North to leverage its reputation as an organisation that cared about women’s footy to appeal to players who weren’t quite sure if their own clubs cared as much. It meant they could recruit well above the level generally expected of an expansion side. And it gave them access to talent in a way later expansion teams, operating under tighter restrictions, could only dream of. North’s list management exploits in 2018 only partly explain what they achieved in 2024 and 2025. The deeper point was that 2018 didn’t just confer a one-off advantage: it created a feedback loop.
Players joined North because they believed they were going to a stable, ambitious, and well-resourced club. Those players helped build a competitive side. That competitiveness reinforced the club’s reputation. And that reputation then brought more talent. North established the blueprint of how you can go from being a well-prepared expansion side to being a destination club, and then to being the club that can reach perfection over two seasons.
You can see this in the composition of their 2025 list. Six of North’s list of 30 were acquired through trades (a mid-table figure by AFLW standards). But it’s the quality of those recruits that jumps out. Eilish Sheerin, traded from Richmond, was best-on-ground in Saturday’s decider. Tahlia Randall has given them years of high-end key position service. Kearney and Garner gave them contest and leadership. It’s not the number. It’s the leverage: North’s recruits, far from being speculative picks, were structural pieces that suited the side’s game plan and had an outsized effect in a form of the game where the best players make a bigger difference.
That system is the second ingredient of this unfolding dynasty. North play with a tactical coherence that, until now, was unusual in the AFLW. Their off-ball structure is consistent. Their stoppage method is reliably well-drilled and almost impossible to consistently beat. Their spacing behind the ball is disciplined. They have continuity in key roles on and off the field, which is rare in a competition whose first decade was partly defined by instability. While other clubs were working out who they wanted to be, North already knew.
Adelaide dominated the early years of the AFLW because they had easy access to both South Australia’s deep talent pool and because they had a human cheat code in the form of Erin Phillips. Just as explaining the circumstances of North’s success isn’t meant to diminish it, so it goes for Adelaide. Brisbane became a superpower through adversity. Their list was raided harder than probably any club’s during the AFLW’s expansion period. They lost four important players to North and eight – eight – to Gold Coast (including their captain and vice-captain) the following year. A lesser side would have collapsed. Instead, Brisbane adapted. Craig Starcevich and his lieutenants built a tactical and cultural system that regenerated itself under pressure. The results – featuring in all but two of the AFLW Grand Finals ever played – speak for themselves. North sit somewhere between these two archetypes. They were an expansion side given favourable conditions at the precise moment they were best-placed to exploit them. They had a reputation that attracted talent. Buy-in built trust. And then they developed a system that rewarded the kinds of players who wanted to win and stood up in the big moments.
North’s dominance is to be admired. But such supremacy – together with, perhaps, Adelaide’s and Brisbane’s before them – raises a slightly uncomfortable question: is it good for the AFLW? I think it’s possible to differentiate good dominance from bad dominance. Bad dominance occurs when lessons can’t be applied elsewhere, when fundamental imbalances are never corrected, and when clubs at the bottom (or in the middle) can’t ever truly catch up. See: European football. Good – or perhaps, in deference to supporters of the other 17 AFLW sides, tolerable – dominance is that which is built through clarity, strategy, and execution. North were assisted by the circumstances of their entry into the AFLW. Not every lesson can be applied in a post-expansion environment. But they’ve still made more good decisions than every other club. This sort of superiority can be productive. It can become something the rest of the league must respond to. It can lift standards. Focus thinking. Accelerate professionalisation. The optimistic view is that North, rather than holding the league back, have instead jolted it forward.
Still, I suspect that if you administered truth serum to the people who run the AFLW, they’d probably tell you that three clubs sharing all but one of the first nine Premierships isn’t their dream scenario. Knowing that, unless you support Adelaide, Brisbane or North, you won’t realistically challenge for a flag (and, sadly, I think you can erase Adelaide from that list for the next few years) can be demoralising; hardly the kind of feeling that engenders a long-term commitment to the league. There are lessons for both the AFLW and its less successful clubs to draw: pathways need time to develop, coaching trees need time to grow, administrators need time to get their sea legs, and clubs need to treat the women’s program as core business rather than a side hustle (coughCollingwoodcough). There’s enough evidence that this is happening. Hawthorn, Fremantle, West Coast, and Sydney are all improving and assuming clear identities. There is a genuinely exciting crop of young players emerging – and the upcoming draft, still the game’s most potent equaliser, is said to be a good one.
But, so vast is North’s advantage over the rest of the competition, it’s by no means clear this will be enough. Just this week, Kristie-Lee Weston-Turner, the #1 Pick from the 2023 draft, nominated North as her preferred home, while Brisbane’s Taylor Smith and Adelaide’s Zoe Prowse announced their intentions to seek trades that will surely hurt their current clubs in the short term. These aren’t isolated data points. They suggest a gravitational pull forming around North: a club whose success is now actively creating more success. And however justified a player’s desire to seek the best environment may be, in a league with smaller lists and match-day squads, even a handful of high-impact recruits can alter the geometry of competition. This is the equalisation paradox the AFLW has not yet resolved: when a league expands to 18 clubs before the talent base has fully matured, it risks creating the kind of top-end dominance that equalisation mechanisms are designed to prevent from occurring but are often too slow to unpick.
Perhaps the real concern isn’t that North Melbourne are too strong. Who are we – who am I – to caveat their greatness? And greatness, in its fullest expression, is what we are talking about here. Rather, it’s that the AFLW hasn’t yet (quite) accrued the depth of talent, off-field as well as on, to withstand a team this strong. If North continue at this punishing pace – which I certainly wouldn’t rule out – the AFLW will be confronted with a deeper conversation about list sizes, pathway development, and whether the AFLW’s competitive fabric can absorb full-spectrum superiority, especially when the league’s ability to create commercial momentum and affective bonds with supporters are under such close scrutiny. I think those are all important questions. But I also think they’re tomorrow’s questions. In the meantime, let’s not minimise today’s praise: North Melbourne have achieved footy immortality. It is up to everyone else to make them mortal.