I have loved footy for my entire life, but I’ve really started to think about it deeply over the last five years and even more deeply since I’ve been writing about it over the last three.
I say that to say this: footy in 2024 was as good as I remember it ever being.
Before we get into finals previewing, and even aside from my usual early week column writing about one team’s win or loss, I wanted to write about how good footy was in the 2024 regular season.
It was great from every angle, but I particularly want to focus on three:
- Play style this year has been intoxicating but not relentlessly attacking.
- There has been real parity in the competition.
- The evolution of the players.
I want to talk about each of those three facets of footy separately.
1. Play style
Since 2014, footy has been through numerous evolutions.
In 2014, obviously, we had the mid-year of the Hawthorn three-peat.
The Hawks played surgical footy, dominated by precise kicking and ball movement.
You couldn’t help but liken it to surgery with the way they carved teams up and scored heavily in the process.
I would include the 2018 West Coast premiership, with their slow and deliberate ball movement, in that discussion.
However, you ever seen that kind of footy on its own? Not for me.
In 2017, footy got its Woodstock.
The conservative Hawks got us into Vietnam and the rock and roll Tigers got us out.
I barrack for Richmond so I was a fortunate son, but footy was undoubtedly a more fun spectacle.
While Hawthorn played like they were doing surgery, Richmond played like they were in a jazz band.
Damien Hardwick said, time and again, embrace the imperfections of the game and chase territory above all else.
The positive mindset also extended to players.
Richmond took a Belichickian approach and asked what can a player do, rather than what can’t he do.
Framing footy in the positive rather than the negative created the “striker” position that the best players played.
We got to see the virtuosic Dustin Martin, Christian Petracca, even Marcus Bontempelli play as mostly forward half players who spent time on the ball, and we got the best of those players.
Melbourne and Collingwood riffed on that Richmond style, with an emphasis on territory and turnover but some with emphasis tweaks while Geelong had among the greatest forward 50 lineups in league history and won that way.
Effectively, we’ve been in a Richmond world since 2019.
This year that has started to shift slightly, but not so much that footy has got boring again.
Sydney is a very Richmond-2017 style team, at least in the sense that they rely on pressure and turnover to overcome what is not an excellent forward line (though they move the ball far differently to how Richmond did).
Teams have gone back to the future for a counter.
Five of Sydney’s six losses have come in games where they have given up their five highest mark totals.
The only game that the Swans won where they gave up more than 100 marks was in round 11 against the Bulldogs.
Footy is swinging back to control as an antidote to chaos style of ball movement that the mid-2010s Hawks were so elite at.
The best control teams in it are Hawthorn (who do both) and Brisbane.
Unsurprisingly both coaches are from the Clarkson tree.
Critically, though, it hasn’t swung all the way and the ledger is engrossingly poised between chaos and control.
2. Parity
Across the season, 43 games were decided by a kick or less.
For context, in 2023 there were 40 such games and in 2022 there were 28.
Those numbers are both including finals.
We had more one kick games just in the regular season of 2024, than we had across regular season and finals in each of the last two seasons.
Footy was especially close this year.
Usually that’s AFL spin for shitty, low-scoring games ending close because nobody is scoring.
Not so this year.
Across the home and away season, the AFL average was 12.3 goals per team per game which was the highest since 2018.
We all talked about how close the ladder was all year, but the games were exceptional too.
3. Players
Finally, I want to spend a few words on the players that have defined this season.
We have had a career-best year, at age 29 for Marcus Bontempelli who should go close to the Brownlow medal if he doesn’t win it.
Bont has been a perfect inside/out player, with equal numbers of contested and uncontested possessions, while going at better than a goal a game.
Only three players in the entire AFL who played more than 20 games had a hand in a higher percentage of his team’s scores than Bontempelli, and in terms of the raw numbers nobody had more score involvements per game than Bont.
He’s a super-duper star.
We have also had an extraordinary season for Jesse Hogan, also 29, to complete one of the more footy remarkable redemption arcs.
Just on the field Hogan’s numbers are absurd, winning the Coleman Medal by 9 goals, kicking a goal on 66.3% of his shots.
Among players who had more than four shots per game, Hogan was the most accurate by 8%.
He was also a highly physical presence forward of the ball and nobody took more marks inside 50, or more contested marks.
But it wasn’t all the Hogan show.
As a cogs in the well-oiled GWS machine he also had a hand in 29% of all GWS scores, good for third in the AFL among key forwards.
But what’s really interesting is what’s coming.
All 5 of the top players in AFL player ratings are over 28.
But in the top 20, nine are 24 or younger and none are 26 or 27.
Footy is undergoing a superstar image transformation, and the guys that are coming are going to be at the top of the pile for years to come.
There is no middle-age among the AFL’s superstar class anymore.
There are the stars at the absolute peak of their powers like Bontempelli and Patrick Cripps in their late 20s.
But then there are hyper-professionals in their early 20s who look likely to define the game’s future.
Players like Izak Rankine, Hayden Young, and Chad Warner all entered the superstar tier of the AFL in season 2024 and are all 24 or under.
Then you consider the other young players that are coming up and look likely to join their ranks, namely Jason Horne-Francis, Harley Reid and Sam Darcy, and the AFL has a bumper crop that looks ready to take the game forward.
What I love about those players, particularly, is that none of them are Tom Mitchell (derogatory).
They aren’t accumulators, they’re distributors, they look to damage to the opposition with their disposal, while lacking nothing in physicality.
In general, I think the “striker” position has necessitated a shift in coaching and list management.
Clubs are now prioritising damage and putting their best players in the position to inflict the most damage on opponents, rather than just getting the ball.
It’s been good for footy.
TLDR: I bloody love footy and can’t wait for the finals.