The Numbers Don’t Lie — But They Don’t Tell the Whole Story Either

Every season, without fail, somewhere around the bye rounds, a columnist will declare the AFL competition broken, the draft a lottery, and equalisation a fiction sold to fans by a Commission more interested in television ratings than competitive integrity. And every season, without fail, the data arrives to complicate that narrative considerably.

So let us do something unfashionable and actually look at the numbers before drawing a conclusion.

What Equalisation Is Actually Supposed to Do

Before we can judge whether the AFL’s equalisation mechanisms are working, it helps to be clear about what they are designed to achieve. The Commission has never promised — and nor should it — that every club wins a premiership every decade. What the system is meant to guarantee is a reasonable pathway for struggling clubs to rebuild, and a structural ceiling on the ability of wealthy, well-located clubs to simply buy sustained dominance.

The instruments in play are well known: the national draft with its reverse-order picks, the salary cap, list size limits, the trade period’s equalisation top-up picks, and the softer mechanisms like the cost-of-living and the northern academies. None of them is elegant in isolation. Together, they form something that broadly resembles a system.

The question worth asking is whether, in aggregate, they compress the gap between the competition’s haves and have-nots. And here the data is actually rather encouraging — more so than the weekly radio talkback would have you believe.

September Appearances: A Surprisingly Broad Spread

One of the most compelling arguments in favour of the AFL’s equalisation framework is the breadth of clubs that have contested finals over any meaningful rolling period. Cast your eye across the last decade and you will find that the vast majority of the competition’s eighteen clubs have played September football. A small number of clubs — and yes, you know who they are — have been persistently near the bottom, but even that group has seen genuine moments of competitiveness.

Compare this to, say, English football’s top flight, where the same four or five clubs contest Champions League places with almost metronomic predictability, and the AFL’s record starts to look rather good. The draft, whatever its imperfections, does demonstrably return clubs to relevance. Adelaide supporters know something about that, having benefited from high picks during the lean years before the golden run of the late 2010s.

What the data does show, and this is where the concern is legitimate, is that sustained dominance over rolling five-year windows has been concentrated in a smaller group of clubs. Making finals and winning premierships are two very different things, and the latter remains stubbornly elusive for a significant portion of the competition.

The Salary Cap: Mostly Holding, But Showing Cracks

The salary cap is the cornerstone of the AFL’s equalisation architecture, and on the whole it holds. But anyone paying close attention to the last several trade periods will have noticed that the gap between what rich clubs and poorer clubs can offer in non-footballing arrangements — the manager commissions, the commercial deals, the lifestyle sweeteners — has grown in ways that are difficult to police and possibly impossible to cap.

This is not a new problem, and it is not unique to Australian rules. But it does mean that the salary cap, as a standalone instrument, is doing rather less equalisation work than its headline figure suggests. When a player makes a location decision based on sponsorship access or a partner’s career opportunities, the cap number is largely irrelevant.

The Commission is aware of this. Whether it has the appetite to address it in any meaningful structural way is a different question, and one that tends to get buried under whatever the hot-button issue of the moment happens to be.

The Draft: Imperfect but Probably Irreplaceable

Every few years, someone proposes abolishing or dramatically reforming the national draft — usually in the aftermath of a blockbuster trade that has left a bottom-four club with future picks rather than immediate talent. The argument is that the draft rewards failure and creates perverse incentives for clubs to field uncompetitive sides.

There is something to this. But the alternative — an open market for teenage talent — would almost certainly concentrate the best young players at the clubs with the deepest pockets and the most appealing locations. We have seen enough of what happens in sporting competitions without drafts to know that this is not a hypothetical concern.

What the data does suggest is that the draft’s equalisation effect is real but slow. It typically takes three to five years for high picks to translate into contested wins and ultimately victories. Fans, understandably, find this timeline frustrating. But it is a timeline, not a dead end — and that distinction matters when evaluating the system fairly. A few of those picks, it must be said, turn into genuine stars who transform a club. Others drift. The uncertainty is partly the point.

Where the Data Gets Uncomfortable

The honest case against the current equalisation framework is not that it fails entirely — it doesn’t — but that it has not prevented a meaningful economic stratification between clubs, particularly along geographic lines.

Clubs in Melbourne’s football heartland, broadly speaking, continue to enjoy structural advantages in membership revenue, corporate support and media attention that compound over time in ways the draft and salary cap simply cannot offset. The expansion clubs and the interstate sides exist within a different economic reality, and the Commission’s efforts to bridge that gap through things like the Adelaide Oval and the Gabba redevelopments have been helpful but not transformative.

There is also a growing body of evidence — admittedly more anecdotal than rigorous — that the quality of academy products is increasingly concentrating at clubs with the resources to run sophisticated academies with full-time coaches, sports science staff and national talent identification networks. If the draft is the main equalisation tool and the academies are systematically tilted toward the powerful, then the system has a structural leak that data alone can’t paper over.

What a Measured Reform Agenda Might Look Like

None of this leads me to conclude, as some do, that equalisation is a myth or that the AFL is a rigged competition. It isn’t, and stating otherwise does a disservice to the genuine complexity involved in running an eighteen-club national competition.

But there are targeted reforms worth serious consideration. A more transparent and enforceable approach to non-salary payments and inducements would strengthren the cap’s integrity without requiring a fundamental redesign. A proper audit of the academy system — particularly the father-son and academy concession structures — is overdue. And a more honest conversation about revenue sharing between clubs, rather than the current patchwork of distributions, would at least acknowledge the economic reality rather than pretending the cap alone can do all the work.

For what it’s worth, the Commission under its current leadership has shown more appetite for data-driven governance than previous iterations. Whether that translates into meaningful reform, or gets lost in the usual stakeholder management exercise, remains to be seen.

The Verdict, for Now

The AFL competition is not broken. The equalisation system, for all its imperfections, does produce meaningful competitive churn across the competition — more so than most comparable sporting leagues around the world. The data, on balance, supports that assessment.

But the system is under pressure in ways that are structural rather than cyclical, and the answer to that pressure is not to wave it away with a reference to Sydney’s 2012 flag or some other proof that underdogs can triumph. The question is whether the mechanisms in place are adequate for the competition as it currently exists, and whether the Commission is willing to do the unglamorous governance work required to keep them honest.

That is a less exciting argument than declaring a crisis. It is, however, probably closer to the truth — and in football analysis as in most things, that is probably where we should be trying to get to.