2025 Pre-Finals Break – State Of The Game

 Last Week      8/10     Season Total 152/207 (73.4%)

We’ve reached that time of year again when we take a pause.  Not that anyone really wants one, but we are forced to sit through one anyway.  But this gives us time to reflect on the State of the Game.  If you’re a chronic reader or a masochist, then you’ve read all of my missives this year and noted that I’ve repeatedly said I’m getting a bit bored with the footy.  There’s just not that much in it these days.  I’ve been trying to pinpoint the reason why?

What the Stats Say

Is it because there is a clear two-speed economy going?  There are teams that have it and then teams that have not.  Most games are one sided and predictable and I think I only got 26% of my tips wrong just to mix it up a bit.  That could be it.  Or could it be that when I watch a game it’s usually pretty frustrating watching terrible ball movements patterns for most of the game, one team has a burst for about 8 minutes and that’s enough to win so it descends back into frustrating ball movement patterns?  Maybe it’s that too?  Or is it that if a game is (God forbid) close then it’s frustrating to see it decided by some ridiculous umpiring decision or non-decision?  Could it be that also?  Or maybe the gulf is just getting bigger, and the patterns are too darn regular.  For example, here is the average winning score by year for the last 3 years:

2023    100.027
2024    100.610
2025    101.211

That’s not a big spread.  What about the losing team score those last three years:

2023    68.0704
2024    68.6357
2025    67.3724

What a yawn-fest. 

Let’s see that graphically comparing the last few years back to the halcyon days of 1993 (we compare it back to then because that’s the type of footy that the AFL has been trying to get back to by making these rule changes).

You can see that the winning score is creeping back up to the types of scores we used to see back in 1993.  That’s great news!  The only thing is losing scores are way down.  In fact, as the next graphic shows, the average margin has almost doubled since 1993.

And remember this is just the average.  This means that there are a lot of margins higher than 33 and lower than 33.  Here is a histogram of all the matches in margin bins of lots of 6 points:

This makes it look like most of the games are decided by 2 goals or less.  But that’s just because we dragged out the number of bins.  If we were to decide on what constitutes a close game, say a 3-goal margin, and charted the histogram with numbers of games decided by less than that and more than that, we get the following:

You can see there are many more games that are not close than there are games that are deemed close.

Lastly, we can also see some more interesting patterns emerge.  A 6-goal margin happens more than 4 or 5-goal margins and a 9-goal margin happens more than 7 or 8-goal margins and a 14, 15 or 16-goal margin happens more than a 13-goal margin.  This might indicate that teams have their breaking points and if you can crack them, you can really do some damage.

I for one am not interested in seeing a team, especially my own team, get done by 5+ goals and call me a bastard, but I’m not really that interested in seeing my team smash another team by 5+ goals either (I might be in the minority there).  Then again, maybe we just need to re-evaluate what a close game is.  Teams can score quickly these days so maybe a close game is 6-goals, and we just have to accept that.

Fixture Folley

Fixturing has a big impact on who plays in the finals, so what about ladder positions.  You might remember this graphic I showed before the start of the season.  This shows who each team plays in the upcoming season based on the ladder positions at the end of the previous season.  It’s an indication of how favourable their draw is supposed to be.

But that is based on last year’s ladder positions, which is all the fixturists have to draw on when drafting up the fixture.  What if we run the same process over the ladder positions as they finished in 2025, we can get a comparison of how easy the draw was supposed to be versus how easy it retrospectively became.

The bottom 3 teams from last year were the same as this year so this helped with planning for the fixture, but then there are some anomalies.  They could be forgiven thinking that scheduling a match against Adelaide would have been an easier game given they finished 15^th last year.  Or similarly, you could say a fixture against Sydney would have been a tough match given they finished first last year.  Essendon had such a bad run of injuries that their performance was almost as bad as the bottom 3 so anyone who got a couple of matches against them received an extra benefit.

One interpretation of this is that Geelong, Fremantle, Adelaide, Gold Coast and GWS benefitted from a favourable draw which helped them get into finals and Hawthorn, Collingwood and Brisbane toughed it out in order to make finals.  That’s not a definitive analysis and I wouldn’t hang a hat on that conclusion, but it is worth noting if you’re going to have a punt in the finals.

Ladder Lamentations

One of the great ideas I heard this year was, given the fixture is uneven, why don’t we make the games against the teams you play twice in the season, only worth 2 premiership points.  That way, as far as awarding premiership points goes, everyone only plays each team once.  What would the ladder have looked like if that was the case.  I’m glad you asked…

Pts(Sh) is the premiership points adjusted for wins against teams played twice in the year and Position is their original ladder position.  As you can see, the same teams would be in the finals, just in a different order.  So, if the end result isn’t all that different, why bother doing it and causing confusion amongst supporters.

By the Power of Greyskull, I have the Power!

So, there’s a lot of surface statistics in there, but what does this mean regarding who wins the Premiership?  Based on the season just played, who they played, where they played, the weather they played in and who was in/out of their teams at the time, the scores have been adjusted and we get a ranking of the ‘power’ of a team.  Here are the top 9 teams based on their power rating:

I’ll let you decide what that list means for who you think will win the Premiership.  But, just because there’s a power ranking where everything has been balanced based on the factors mentioned above, just remember that some of those teams have two chances and the finals matches will be subject to home grounds, weather, players being in/out and a big factor that the statistics have trouble accounting for…momentum.

Good luck in the finals, I hope your team wins…unless they’re playing mine!