With winter looming and just over a third of the season gone, some patterns are starting to emerge across the AFL.
Scoring is up across the board as teams angle for a spot in the expanded finals.
Clubs tend to wait at least six or eight weeks to work out the trends and identify anomalies.
The early season is generally played in drier and hotter conditions with fewer injuries, tending to lead to higher-octane footy.
Cooler conditions make for the perfect time to take stock of what might be different this season 2026.
Possession and position
Like many teams, Brisbane is stronger in one of the two main footy styles, preferring to control possession by foot. (Getty Images: Albert Perez)
It’s one thing to get your ball to the end off the ground, but another to retain control of it. Good teams can consistently achieve one of the two objectives. Great teams can regularly hit both marks.
The last five premiers have been in the top two sides in the league for ball-control differential. All bar one (Brisbane last year) were in the top three for time in front-half differential.
A look at the teams winning control of the ball this year shows there are a couple of sides to watch.
Only Hawthorn ticks both boxes so far, establishing themselves as early contenders for the 2026 flag.
Some sides — Sydney and Gold Coast — dominate the ball in the front half of the ground but don’t control possession. Others, such as reigning premiers Brisbane, thrive off controlling the tempo of the game.
This split speaks to a growing divergence between differing footballing philosophies. The split between surge and control sides speaks to how the modern game operates.
Teams that control possession tend to move the ball more via foot while preventing their opponents from doing the same. The sides who dominate possession with quick movement utilise handballs to generate runners on the move instead.
Overall, handball metres gained has leapt from 255m per game last year to 324m this year. This shift is largely underwritten by Sydney’s more aggressive game style, the three premiership Tiger coaching offshoots (Suns, Giants and Pies) and Steven King’s rapid remodelling of Melbourne.
It’s also worth noting that teams are also breaking harder the other way. Marks per game have jumped this year as well, with the growth coming in uncontested marks and marks on lead.
North Melbourne have shifted stronger than most this year, beginning to move to become one of Alastair Clarkson’s great teams (as well as one of his former co-worker’s).
The Kangaroos have built a successful game out of taking lots of uncontested marks to control possession.
(Getty Images: AFL Photos/Mark Metcalfe)
“When they win they take 107 [uncontested marks]. When they’ve lost they’ve taken 67, or something like that. So taking the easy ball out of their hands is a key focus,” Adam Kingsley said after their win over the Roos earlier this year.
“I feel like they’re playing a lot like the 2014 Hawks, they’re playing a lot like the Brisbane team [right now].”
Teams are increasingly shifting to the edges of each footballing ideology. While centrism and balance aren’t dead, it’s becoming increasingly hard to stick to the middle without risking being overwhelmed at the extremes.
Launch zones
This split carries over to where teams generate their scores.
Scoring off intercepts continues to be the main source for all teams. About 60 per cent of all scores come off transition play, but the location and manner in which teams obtain these varies according to set-up.
Across the entire league teams score about 55 per cent of their intercept points from the defensive half — a rate in line with last year.
While teams capitalise more on turnovers closer to goal, they are more likely to win the ball in their own defensive half. This has increasingly encouraged teams to play higher presses up the ground.
There’s an art to being able to turn intercepts into scores however. The Suns and Lions turn their front-half dominance into points on the scoreboard, while Collingwood’s chaotic style means that they have over-performed when winning the ball close to their goal.
Other sides are more content to attack from their back half. GWS, Fremantle and Sydney have reaped rewards from turning defence into attack so far this year.
Conventional wisdom has it that back-half scoring dries up at the business end of the season as teams get tighter. That may suggest current ladder-leaders Sydney and Fremantle could need to find other routes to victory, but both will be confident that they have other tools.
The Swans also sit inside the top four for potency from other sources such as stoppages and forward-half turnover. On the western seaboard, the Dockers lean on their defence and are in the top two for restricting both stoppage and turnover scoring.
As an aside, scores from centre bounce are up about 2.7 points per game, but their proportion of total points scored is only up by around 1 per cent. Some optimism exists that the trend will continue, but most are waiting until deep into the second half of the season or even next year to see if the boost will hold.
Defending the lead
Sydney back themselves to turn defence into attack through ground balls. (Getty Images: AFL Photos/Michael Willson)
Defence in footy often gets overlooked for the work done with ball in hand, but it’s no less important in the modern game. The sheer size of teams and the field means that it’s nearly impossible to defend everywhere. Teams usually have to pick what to prioritise with limited player numbers and energy.
Teams that run a zone or a press look radically different to those who decide to go one-out across the ground. Some sides throw a spare at the contest, while others try to add numbers behind the ball. Teams that send multiple players can force easy turnovers, but risk being burned on the overlap if it doesn’t work immediately.
As a result, defensive metrics can look different for every team and clubs tend to develop their own KPIs to measure success beyond the scoreboard.
A great example of the trade-offs involved in defensive choices can be seen in how certain teams stack up in ground ball and marks conceded in their defensive zone.
The top two, Sydney and Fremantle, sit at the top for most forward-50 ground balls conceded per game while also conceding relatively few opposition marks. This runs against the league trend, which has seen a rise in marks inside 50. Both sides spoil relatively often, creating more ground balls.
A defensive ground ball is usually a chance for opponents to score as the ball hits the deck. But that risk can be balanced by the chance to turn defence to attack from a chaotic play — a choice these sides clearly relish given their ability to score in full field transition.
Transition scoring has become such a big worry in contemporary footy that many teams track this closely as a specific series of metrics. As the top teams become ever more deadly when left with time and space, thinking about how to stop them has had to advance as well.
Port Adelaide are still getting accustomed to new coach Josh Carr, but their defensive identity seems clear immediately. Carr’s squad has been very hard to move the ball against. The Power are conceding an inside 50 entry less than one in six times the opposition gets the ball in their defensive 50, with the league average around 25 per cent.
Sometimes there’s no accounting for luck on the defensive end. Scoring accuracy regularly decides games — with bad kicking often equalling bad football. While pressure and gameplay can influence accuracy by affecting the shots taken, sometimes a team just takes their chances.
So far this year, the Eagles and Hawks defences can count themselves a bit unlucky that opponents have shot the lights out against them more than average. Hawthorn’s draw with Collingwood, for instance, was only made possible because the Pies converted at about 5 goals better than an average team would have from their chances.
Over a season, this luck can add up. Melbourne’s surprise opening to 2026 might have caught less people off-guard if they hadn’t lost all their close games last year, mostly due to opponents turning into dead-eyes against them and snatching wins away.
Tight race for finals?
A glance at the ladder indicates that this year seems tight in the march towards a spot in the newly expanded final 10. Thirteen teams are within a win of a current finals spot, with one more side just two points further adrift.
While at first glance this seems particularly large and congested, it’s the same number of teams that were within a win of a finals spot at the same time last season. While the longer-term trend is for about 10-12 teams to be within shouting distance of the last finals spot at this time of the season, so far the expanded finals has yet to expand the finals race.
As a whole the competition has seemingly been more even across the board so far. While there’s a clear group of four teams at the bottom of the ladder, the remaining 14 sides have some shot of finals still.
Many will look to Sydney and Fremantle clear at the top of the ladder, but premierships are never won in May.
Thankfully, there’s still a lot of footy left to play this year.
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