This week in football is a collection of some of the best in football currently outside the walls of AFL clubs or broadcasters. Each week a curated grab bag from regular contributors and special guests will provide insight into and beyond the game on subjects of their choosing. For more about our contributors, click here.
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Huge shout out to Polly Porridge who designed the new images and banners all across This week in football. Her design work is great. And if you are a Swans fan, or Sydney-curious, you should listen to the True Bloods Podcast.
Before the bounce
This week the entire footballing world congregates in the city of churches to watch as much top level footy as is possible in one weekend (outside of Melbourne). Nine games in nine timeslots in one city(ish) offer the most dedicated of footy fans the opportunity to overdose on on-field action.
It’s also rare that all eighteen clubs are in one place at roughly the same time. It provides the opportunity for discussions great and small between footy staff – hopefully away from the gaze of the tabloid media. Loose lips sink ships, or so the saying goes.
Week five is also getting preciously close to the point in a season where there’s enough information to really form opinions about teams across the league. This holds even stronger for clubs that have changed coaches or methodologies over the summer. A month and a half provides enough tape and data for opinions to form, and become concreted in. Opposition analysis gets easier to run after this point, and teams will increasingly start to adjust to these changes.
There’s also the real chance that a team or two comes out of Gather Round with their finals hopes severely dented, if not scuppered entirely.
This Week In Football we have:
- False Starts and Flag Fancies (on Fremantle)
- Eppur si (non) muove (also on Fremantle)
- Elements of Speed (you’d be shocked but also Fremantle)
- The fresh ball movement data underlining Carlton’s horror transition game (surprisingly, about Carlton, not Fremantle)
- More is not always better (not Fremantle)
- What is the real Gather Round cost? (also not Fremantle)
- The breakdown of a breakdown (about Melbourne, not Fremantle)
False Starts and Flag Fancies
Ryan Buckland
If I were shown a picture card of the current AFL ladder as part of a psych evaluation and asked for the first thought that popped into my head, it would be the disappointment that is the Fremantle Dockers.
With the team tucked away safely on Sunday afternoons, you probably haven’t been tortured the way I have so far this year. A team with top talent on every line, a credible and settled back six, adding Shai-frickin-Bolton, just can’t seem to Put It Together.
That’s my diagnosis. For fits and starts, the Dockers are breathtaking in their endeavour, their speed, their skills. But when the synapses need to fire on a balmy Perth winter’s afternoon in June, the drool starts pooling and the thousand-mile stare sets in.
Coming into the season Fremantle was a consensus top four selection. Bolton was the finishing touch on a team coach Justin Longmuir had spent five years curating, and it was all supposed to work. The results so far have been anything but the play of a team bound for September. The groans of a weary Dockers crowd – so conditioned to disappointment, so ready to feel it, but still not accepting of it – are already ringing in my ears.
Something said on the Sunday broadcast piqued my interest, and not (just) as a chance to sink the boot into little brother: the Fremantle Dockers haven’t grown up.
In a league which the excellent Cody and Sean are telling us is getting older by the year, the Dockers are getting younger. In fact, in the Longmuir Era, Fremantle’s selected team age profile has been below the league average every single week.
Ross Lyon, still the only coach to take Fremantle to a Grand Final, oversaw the early years of deleveraging once it became clear the team wasn’t quite good enough to win it all. Between 2015 and 2019 the average age of the selected Fremantle side declined from a peak of 26.7 years (~1.5 years above league average and the oldest team in the league) to a low of 24.3 years (~0.8 year below league average and amongst the youngest).
Hence, the team has bubbled along below league average, rising and falling but staying anchored in the depths of inexperience.
All things being equal, if a club picks 23 players and the team doesn’t change from one year to the next, the average age will go up by a year. The fact Fremantle’s age has continuously fluctuated around the same marker for each of Longmuir’s five seasons hints this isn’t happening.
This is a significant contrast to teams who have contended for flags for long periods of time over the past decade.
Consider Richmond, from 2016 to 2022, Brisbane from 2018 to 2024, or even West Coast from 2014 to 2020.
That’s a few selected examples (you can play with the data here). But pick any team who has been at the top for a sustained period over the last ten years and the same broad pattern repeats. Settled coach. Core team forms. The age and experience of the selected team grows by the week, and the contention window opens.
The Dockers have been hit hard by player departures over the past few seasons. Bradley Hill, Blake Acres, Lloyd Meek, Liam Henry, Jesse Hogan, Adam Cerra, Rory Lobb, Griffin Logue, Darcy Tucker and Lachie Shultz all left the club between 2019 and 2023. None of them are out of the league yet, suggesting they could have been critical cogs in the Longmuir machine.
They have been replaced by some experienced players coming through the doors, but in the main the Dockers have leaned into the draft. Murphy Reid, a strong Rising Star candidate for mine, is the latest in a line of quality players taken in recent years.
Fremantle want to play a very precise, controlling game. This is evidenced by an excellent observation of Emlyn Breese this week: the 2025 Dockers have the highest rate of kicking from behind the mark of any team since this stat is available to mere mortals. The second highest is the 2021 Dockers.
Longmuir himself moved over to a permanent employment contract with the Fremantle Football Club before the start of this season proper, ala Brendon Bolton at the Blues before him. Interpreted as a sign of comfort between coach and club, could it have been tacit recognition that there’s still a ways for the Dockers to go before they reach their apex?
A fortnight of opportunity to show us what they’ve really got awaits, with the young Tigers on neutral ground and hapless Dees on the wide expanses of the MCG on the slate. Anything less than eight quarters of excellence will be a resounding answer to this question.
Eppur si (non) muove
Emlyn Breese / bsky.credittodubois.com
In news that will surely make David King’s heart sing, Fremantle are by one metric the most stop-start team of any from 2021 onwards.
In the season to date, only 26.4% of frees or marks to Fremantle sees them do something other than taking the kick from behind the mark.
The next lowest is also Fremantle – in their 2021 incarnation – at 27.5%.
This year has an outlier at the other end also – This year’s Giants are the highest from 2021 onwards at a rate of 38.7%.
Now, the lowest from 26.4% to the highest at 38.7% gives a relatively narrow band, so let’s see if we can unpack it a bit more. A decent chunk of frees and marks in the forward half will be in viable scoring range. Most of the time a team is going to go back and take the shot – or at least think about doing so and then potentially find a pass in a better position.
If we only take marks/frees in the defensive half the differences become far more apparent.
Fremantle in 2025 are still the lowest we’ve got on record at 28.2%, but the highest we’ve got is up at 52.3%, and they’re another 2025 team.
In fact, the four highest on record are all from 2025 – Gold Coast (52.3%), Port Adelaide (46.0%), Essendon (45.2%) and GWS (44.3%).
If we limit it even further just to defensive half intercept marks and frees Freo are yet again the lowest in our records (17.6%), and four 2025 teams are on top, although not all four are the same – Port Adelaide (43.5%), Sydney (43.0%), GWS (41.9%), and Collingwood (41.7%)
Now, this may change over the course of the season. Small sample sizes will often lead to outlier results, but it’s certainly something worth keeping an eye on.
Elements of Speed
Off the back of Emlyn & Ryan’s analysis, let’s continue with the Fremantle theme. Here is a snapshot of how long it takes each team to dispose of the ball from a mark.
Fremantle are clearly the slowest team in the comp across all three zones leading into the forward 50m, closely followed by Collingwood. Essendon, Brisbane and Geelong like to keep the ball in motion. St Kilda, Richmond and West Coast appear to speed up as they move the ball up the ground, while the likes of Gold Coast and Carlton get slower.
These stylistic differences can part personnel, part where the game is being played. If you’re a front half team generating intercept marks high up the ground, you may need to be patient, rather than blazing the ball back into congestion. If you’re winning the ball in your back half with elite foot skills at your disposal, you may prefer to slice your way up the ground with quick release kicks.
If you’re neither of these, you may prefer slow long-down-the-lines while over-indexing at the contest to win the chaos game. There’s no right or wrong if everyone’s on the same page.
The fresh ball movement data underlining Carlton’s horror transition game
Jasper Chellappah
New ‘speed of ball movement’ captures from Champion Data in 2025 present a clear summary as to where Carlton’s transition footy is at. These metrics need to be unpacked, but they back up a fair bit of what you can figure out watching the 0-4 Blues yourself. They routinely panic bomb the ball on top of their key forwards’ heads, neglect to create overloads in transition and frustratingly go slow when they have the opposition on their heels.
Thanks to CD’s Chistian Jolly on the ESPN Footy Podcast for these fresh numbers.
To start, the Blues move the ball fastest of all 18 teams from an uncontested mark. That is to say, from the point that an uncontested mark is taken anywhere on the ground, Carlton players gain the most metrage in the least amount of time. Conversely, the Blues are the fifth slowest team in moving the ball from a contested mark. Let’s dive into what that means in a footballing sense.
When the Blues find an uncontested mark they throw the game back into chaos more than any other team. There’s little regard given to retaining possession, picking holes through defences and methodically working up the ground. In reality, AFL defences are best set up when allowing an uncontested mark – it often means midfielders have rolled behind the ball and allowed the open space. It’s been rare to see the Blues retain possession and work the ball up the ground through switches and the ‘45’ corridor kick. It shows in the fifth least uncontested marks per game.
Given they’ve struggled to retain the ball, it’s mind boggling to consider that Carlton would consistently bomb the ball forward to outnumbered situations. With no method to the madness, the Blues are systematically kicking long into set defences and turning it over from positions of advantage.
The game is quicker than ever before. But moving the ball quickly isn’t always wise, and the best teams pick their moments. For example, moving the ball long and direct when the opposition is well set up is not the method of Brisbane, Collingwood or Geelong, our three most recent premiers.
Michael Voss shoulders as much of the blame for this as his charges. It’s a game plan contrived from the ideals of territory footy and metres gained, where winning the midfield battle would more often than not win you the game. But footy has changed and the Blues haven’t changed with it.
What makes these numbers all the more confounding is the fact that Carlton is the fifth slowest team to move the ball from a contested mark. You can probably envisage those moments – where a bruised and battered Charlie Curnow has taken his time up off the ground after a big pack mark on the wing, or where Jacob Weitering’s intercept hasn’t kick-started transition but rather led to a slow-play bomb down the line.
They take the third most contested marks per game so it’s not a rare aspect of their makeup. Carlton win the aerial 50-50s better than the vast majority but concede any advantage they gain.
The Blues have elite aerialists in Curnow, Weitering, Tom De Koning and the returning Harry McKay. The upside of contested marks around the ground is opposition defences are typically unset. There’s space out the back or pockets of open grass in the corridor to exploit. These are the moments where good teams go quickly, take ground with handball chains or inboard kicks and drive the ball deep inside 50 over the back of the scrambling defence.
Adam Simpson explained this concept on AFL360; the ‘small bubble’ and ‘big bubble’ in relation to the fastest ball movement side in the AFL, Brisbane. As soon as they took a mark the opposition wasn’t willing to concede “the bomb goes off” and scoring opportunities present.
Applying this to the Blues, as soon as they take a contested mark they expand the bubble and the bomb should explode. But it doesn’t. Instead, Carlton becomes the slowest team in the league to move the ball. These are rolled gold scoring opportunities being snuffed out by a lack of recognition and impetus.
The Blues are playing transition footy the wrong way around. They kick long to shallow inside 50s off uncontested marks and go painfully slow after opening the ground up with contested marks. It therefore makes sense that the club is top four at intercepting the ball in the air, but bottom two for scores from turnover. This group sits at the bottom of the league for disposal efficiency and leads all comers for clangers per outing.
There’s an issue of personnel, but on these metrics the Voss game plan simply isn’t stacking up with modern footy standards.
More is not always better
Last week Cody Atkinson looked at this season’s Ironmen – the players who have spent barely spend any time on the pine across the matches to date.
Cody makes some great points about the potential benefits of allowing certain players extended stints on the ground.
But after reading his piece I couldn’t help but think about the fact that just because a player spends a lot of time on the ground doesn’t guarantee they will have a significant impact on the game.
For example, Ben McKay, who averages 99% time on ground across the three games he has played this year, has copped it from all angles over his performances thus far.
Which leads me to ask the seemingly obvious question: who has spent a lot of time on the ground but had little to no impact on the game?
(I will admit that I originally wanted to look at the relationship between distance covered and impact, but that question will have to wait for another day as detailed Telstra Tracker data are not publicly available, as far as I can tell.)
It’s worth noting the AFL Player Ratings only measures direct impact. For key position defenders a lack of impact can often be a positive – a sign that an opposition side is unwilling to attack them, or unable to due to superior positioning. Until there’s further development in this space (such as from including player tracking information), there’s missing information for the effectiveness of defenders.
The AFL have an official measure of the direct impact each player has on a game – player rating points – so we can use that in our attempts to find an answer.
The table below displays the minimum, maximum, and average AFL ratings points for players who average at least 95% time on ground across at least three games. As Cody highlighted last week, the list features a lot of key position defenders.
McKay doesn’t have the lowest recorded player rating in terms of an individual game – that “honour” goes to Brisbane’s Harris Andrews for his 12-disposal effort in the Lions’ 28-point win against Richmond over the weekend.
But he does have the lowest average player rating, with scores of 6.4, 5.9, and 4.0 from his three games to date.
Essendon fans will be hoping the week off will be just what McKay needed ahead of their Gather Round clash against Melbourne on Saturday night.
At the other end of the spectrum, Carlton’s Jacob Weitering just edges out Sam Taylor (Greater Western Sydney) and Tom McDonald (Melbourne) as the player who has spent the most time on the ground and had the greatest apparent impact on the game during said time on ground.
The Blues have left their fans frustrated this year, sitting with a 0-4 record despite leading at half time in each of their matches. If the same happens against the bottom-placed Eagles this week, Weitering’s consistency will be of little comfort.
What is the real Gather Round cost?
Gather Round is generally regarded as a success for the South Australian government, with the whole city seeming to get decked out with inflated footballs, club colours, and advertising boards, while several thousand travelers roll in to fill the hotels, and the eyes of the footy world fall on Adelaide for a few days.
All this comes at a monetary cost, however, with the ABC currently estimating 16 to 20 million dollars a year being spent by the government on the event. This is a fair chunk of money, easily the most ever forked out by a government other than Victoria’s on the rights to host footy games. The SA government outlay was enough to get the AFL to quietly put aside any plans of using its answer to the NRL’s Magic Round as a tool for footy promotion in New South Wales, an idea that eventually became the much more watered-down Opening Round concept without the actual addition of extra games to the schedule.
But how does the Gather Round expenditure, as reported, actually stack up with other outlays by state, territory and local governments for AFL content?
The Gather Round deal, taking $18 million as the median of the most recent reported values, costs almost double any other AFL content deal on a per game basis, with the WA government spend to bring North Melbourne to Bunbury and Perth, and the Hawks’ new Launceston deal the other contracts currently costing over one million dollars per game.
However, Gather Round caters to some fairly large crowds and when looked at on a per-attendee basis, looks about middle of the pack with the most comparable deals, roughly on par with what the ACT government spends bringing footy to Canberrans.
This also means that if other states do try to force the issue with the AFL before Gather Round gets entrenched as a permanent fixture in South Australia (and a permanent fixturing leg-up for its teams), another state is probably going to have to outbid the total expenditure, and in doing so they’ll perhaps do it without any guarantee of comparable crowds in isolated Perth or non-football heartland Brisbane or Sydney.
The breakdown of a breakdown
Cody Atkinson
Zero and four is not a good start to a football season. This is where Carlton, Melbourne and West Coast fans start to wince in unison.
But for all the issues to date with the Blues and Eagles in 2025, let’s turn our attention instead to the side that has most recently been premiers.
Most would point to Melbourne’s forward line as being the biggest source of their issues. After all, they’ve struggled to get the ball forward, mark the ball up forward and score at all.
The three teams at the bottom there? Yep, the 0-4 club. But let’s ignore that for a second – just a brief one.
When Melbourne was at their competition beating best it wasn’t because of their attack but instead their defence. Led by Steven May and Jake Lever, the Demons were as solid down back as any other side – providing room for their sometimes sputtering attack to…well, sputter. Between their defence and the weight of ball they could win from stoppages, the Demons could grind sides into submission.
This year their defence has struggled to find its rhythm through personnel issues and what seems to be broader communication problems.
Here’s an example from last week’s game.
This is ugly stuff. There’s at least five errors in the clip above – from not denying space for the lead, to not communicating who should be marking who, and even the poor kick at the start. Despite all of this Melbourne still spoil the kick (partially due to Stengle cutting the lead), but don’t have effective support at ground level to stop Dangerfield.
Again – how do you leave PATRICK DANGERFIELD so open in the forward 50?
The Demons are struggling in stopping both raw volumes of opposition scoring shots, and allowing high quality shots against them. Melbourne is bottom four in both these measures – usually a sign of a very, very, very bad defence.
At times Melbourne seems stuck between a more zone based defence – protecting space instead of players – and a man defence with spares utilised for protection. At times – from the comfort of the couch – it appears that exact roles and responsibilities aren’t getting communicated on the field effectively.
To be fair to Mebourne they have struggled with availability. However, with Jake Lever out for up to two months, this may not get better any time soon.
Melbourne are running out of time – if something doesn’t change soon, their season will be over early.
Around the Grounds
Here’s some more stuff that isn’t from here but is good to take in about footy
- Ricky Mangidis is doing some of the best stuff in football right now. This week at The Shinboner looks at the age spread of each team so far in 2025.
- The fantastic Marnie Vinall reports at ABC on the body dysmorphia and general mental health toll inflicted by online discourse on footballers’ partners.
- Gemma Bastiani charted the quarter by quarter breakdown of the top AFLW goalkickers, showing some fun trends in which players start strong or finish very well.
- Horn at the Guardian has a balanced take on the events surrounding the Oscar Allen non-event.
- There were more Tasmania stadium news reports, including Jacquie Lambie suggesting the roof be a tent, parliamentary ructions about possibly trying to renegotiate with the AFL and extensive reports about the independent assessor meeting with activists.
- The Friday Footy Quiz is always worth a go, but as it’s a self-reporting honour system, make sure you’re honest about how you did.