AFL scoring in historical perspective

The Melbourne press this week is full of speculation about what the AFL’s Laws of the Game committee are cooking up. Many football fans, including your humble correspondent, are hoping something will be done about the rolling mauls which blight the modern game. This post will add some much-needed statistical analysis to the debate.

I recently calculated the following statistics for every VFL/AFL season since the end of the First World War: goals per team per match, behinds per team per match, score per team per match, and ratio of goals to behinds. Based on this, we can divide football into the following historical periods:

*1919-1924: teams averaged between sixty and seventy points per match and between seventy and eighty-five goals per hundred behinds.

*1925-1938: the introduction of a free kick for out of bounds in 1925 (something which was unpopular in Victoria and was pushed through the national governing body by South Australian and Tasmanian delegates) led to an increase in the average score, which never again went below seventy and which hit the nineties three times in the mid-1930s, and the goals-per-hundred-behinds figure, which was consistently in the eighties and nineties. This was the first era of the star full-forward, and the number of one-sided matches involving the new clubs introduced in 1925 (Footscray, North Melbourne, and Hawthorn) forced a reversion to the former out of bounds rule. One replacement player was permitted per team in 1930, but this had little effect on scoring rates.

*1939-1968: the boundary throw-in was reintroduced in 1939. The resulting movement of the play away from the centre of the ground lowered the goals-to behinds ratio (which stayed between 0.83 and 0.95 for the whole period) and the average score (which dropped below seventy-one points in 1956 and 1960, and which only topped eighty points twice between 1950 and 1968). Again, the addition of a second replacement player in 1946 had little effect on these statistics.

*1969-1977: in 1969, the modern distinction between out of bounds and out of bounds on the full, with the later punished by a free kick against the offending team, was introduced. The effect on scoring was immediate: the average score jumped fifteen points between the 1968 and 1969 VFL seasons, dropping back below ninety in 1970 but remaining in the nineties for the rest of the period. 1969 was also the first season in which more goals were scored than behinds, and the ratio of goals to behinds now hovered between 0.94 and 1.01. Another rule change occurred in this era which had little effect, namely the introduction in 1973 of a centre square, inside which no more than four players per team could be positioned during the bounce.

*1978-1993: 1978 saw the switch from two replacement players to a two-man interchange bench, with no limit on how often players could come on and off the ground. The average score per team per match hit triple figures for the first time in 1978, and only dipped below 100 three times in the next fifteen seasons. The goals-per-behinds ratio also went up, hitting 1.14 in 1987 and 1993, and making only one trip into negative figures in 1981 (which, as of 2014, is the last season in which more behinds than goals were scored). The other major rule change of this era was the introduction of the fifty-metre penalty in 1988, which contributed to the trend towards higher and more accurate scores.

*1994-1999: 1994 saw a revolution in the way the game was played: the twenty-five minute quarters were shortened to twenty minutes (although the stopping of the clock at boundary throw-ins means that the change wasn’t as drastic as it would seem) and the number of field umpires and interchange players were both increased from two to three. For the following six seasons, the shorter matches reduced the average score to double digits (it hovered between ninety and ninety-six for this period), but the goals-to-behinds ratio continued its upward trajectory, hitting a new record of 1.15 in 1996 and 1999; the 1.09 figure from the 1997 season is the lowest of any season post-1994.

*2000-2005: 2000 saw another radical change in the way football was played. The scheduling of matches at the newly-constructed Colonial Stadium, with its artificial turf and roof providing protection from Melbourne’s winter weather allowed Essendon to make the most serious tilt at an undefeated season in modern times. The average score in that season hit 103.39, the only 100-plus season under the twenty-minute-quarter regime, and the goals-to-behinds ratio hit 1.23, an all-time record. Things stabilised in the next five seasons, with the average score hovering between 93 and 99 and the goals-to-behinds ratio hovering between 1.18 and 1.2.

*2006-2013: the introduction of new rules limiting the amount of time players have to line up set shots might seem like a minor change, but it has had a noticeable effect on accuracy rates. In the eight full seasons played since, average scores have stayed between 90 and 98, but the goals-to-behinds ratio has been pared back to the 1.1-1.17 range.

From this, we can see that in historical perspective, today’s football is unnaturally high-scoring (given the reduction in quarter length) and has too high a ratio of goals to behinds. A small part of this can be attributed to the greater professionalism and fitness of modern players. But the other reasons are due to the conditions under which the game is played: 1) virtually unlimited interchange, which has made the sport too athletic by allowing players to utilise short bursts of energy instead of enduring one hundred minutes of football; 2) free kicks for out-of-bounds on the full and deliberate out-of-bounds, which encourage players to move the ball away from the boundary line, which in turn allows shots on goal to be taken from better angles; and 3) the replacement of windy and poorly-drained suburban grounds with roofed and astroturfed monstrosities like the Docklands (since the start of the 2000 season, matches at the Docklands have seen, on average, seven points per team more than matches played elsewhere).

You might ask what exactly is wrong with high-scoring and accurate football. Firstly, high-scoring games between unevenly-matched teams can quickly become one-sided. This is why the VFL opposed the introduction of the free kick for out-of-bounds in 1925: they knew that the newly-admitted Footscray, North Melbourne, and Hawthorn needed some protection from regular drubbings at the hands of more established clubs. Changing the match conditions to reduce scoring rates might have been a better way of easing in the Gold Coast Suns and GWS Giants than the salary cap and draft concessions.

Secondly, the way modern football is played reduces the potential supply of league footballers. In 1923, a year in which an average team scored nine goals and twelve behinds per match, Essendon won the premiership with their so-called ‘Mosquito Fleet’ of six players under five-and-a-half feet tall. Nowadays, the average height of players has jumped considerably because shorter players are no longer needed to mop up waterlogged balls off the floor of grounds like Waverley and the Western Oval. Fans often bemoan the introduction of the Gold Coast and GWS due to the talent pool being stretched more thinly with eighteen teams; but this overlooks the fact that in the Good Old Days prior to unlimited interchange, twenty-minute quarters, and boutique stadia, Australia had thirty top-tier clubs (twelve in the VFL, ten in the SANFL, and eight in the WAFL).

And that brings us back to today. The most fascinating proposed rule change is one restricting the movement of players, something long considered a sacrilege in a sport which prides itself on its lack of anything resembling an offside rule. The AFL is reportedly considering promulgating a charter to guide the Laws of the Game Committee in its deliberations, which would make some aspects of the game sacrosanct. According the Patrick White in The Australian, this would include the ability of players to move unmolested around the field. Such a move by the league would block any efforts to restore the game as it was historically played, and would have the effect of freezing forever the post-2000 game of ‘on-ballers’, ‘taggers’, spells on the bench, rolling mauls, and flooding.

In 1791, the revolutionary French government abolished the French East India Company, which had been granted a monopoly on trade with India by the monarchy. It was proudly announced that henceforth, any Frenchman was free to trade with India, a freedom which was rather meaningless to labourers and peasants who couldn’t exactly afford to sail to Calcutta to buy tea and spices from some jumped-up maharajah. The freedom of footballers to move anywhere on the ground is similarly useless. There is no good reason why a full-forward should be in his defensive fifty-metre arc, or why one half of the field should be completely deserted. An off-side rule or netball-style zones would go a long way to reminding players that there are supposed to eighteen distinct positions on the ground, and that Wills and Harrison didn’t intend for their game to be played by thirty-six generic midfielders. Moving to sixteen players per side, which produced some exciting football in the VFA of the 1960s and 1970s, is another option. Rather than being preserved in amber, the rules need to change in order to prevent the fundamentals of the game being altered by canny coaches who fancy themselves as the José Mourinho of the Antipodes.

Another example of this is the replacement of players. The previous system of two replacements was replaced by a two-man interchange bench in 1978. In the 1989 Grand Final, Hawthorn and Geelong made twenty-three interchanges between them; when they met again in the 2008 decider, they made 163 between them. In the early 2000s, teams were making between 20 and 40 interchanges per match (the least interchange-happy team being Kevin Sheedy’s Essendon and the most being Fremantle). This season, the league has had to cap the number of allowable interchanges per team per match at 120, and in a match in 2012, the Gold Coast managed 176 rotations. The result is that modern football is dominated by the type of player who can run around like a headless chook, come off the ground for a spell, and then go back on to run around like a headless chook (not to mention the ‘tagger’, who is the bloke charged with running around like a headless chook after the bloke who is running around like a headless chook). Capping the number of interchanges at twelve (as the NRL does) or even going back to the days of the 19^th and 20^th men would force players to hold their position and be footballers instead of athletes.

It’s not all bad news, however. Twelve rounds into the 2014 season, scoring and accuracy rates are down. The average score is 86.41, the lowest since 1968, when John Gorton was prime minister and decimal currency was two years old. 110.2 goals are being scored per 100 behinds, the second-lowest in the post-Waverley era. It’s possible that the 120-interchange cap is having a positive impact (the AFL’s own statistics say that clubs are limiting themselves to an average of 109 per match) or that the tendency towards higher scoring is being nullified by better defence, but the Laws of the Game Committee would have to do more than that if they wanted to restore Football As We Knew It.