Scoring rates: a post-season update

Earlier in the year, I wrote about how the average score per team per match in the AFL was trending downwards this season, and was then sitting at its lowest point since 1968. Over the 198 matches of the home and away season, 4962 goals (at an average of 12.53 per team per match) and 4501 behinds (at an average of 11.37 per team per match) were scored. Teams averaged a score of 86.55 points per match, and 110.24 goals were kicked for every 100 behinds.

The figure of 12.53 goals per team per match is a drop of nearly one whole goal per team per match from last season’s figure of 13.5. The previous lowest since the introduction of twenty-five-minute quarters in 1994 was 13.05 in 1997; the lowest in the post-Colonial era was 13.11 in 2010. In 2000, the figure peaked at 15.18. Prior to the lengthening of quarters, one would have to go back to 1970 to find a lower rate of goals per game (12.38) than this season.

The figure of 11.37 behinds per team per match is also down from last season, when it stood at 11.78. This is also the lowest in the post-1994 era, and the lowest since 1965, when 11.38 behinds were scored per team per match.

The figure of 86.55 points per team per match represents a drop of more than one goal per team per match from 2013, when it was 92.78. The previous lowest post-1994 tally was 90.34 in 1997; the lowest in the post-Colonial era was 90.47 in 2010. The last season in which fewer points were scored per team per match than this one was 1968 (82.08), the last season in which out of bounds on the full resulted in a boundary throw-in; the introduction of free kicks the following season forced teams to centre the ball to avoid being penalised, resulting in a jump in scoring rates of over fifteen points per team per match in 1969.

The fourth statistic, the 110.24 goals per 100 behinds, is the only one mentioned which is not the lowest in the post-1994 AFL; it was only the fourth-lowest, behind 1997 (when it reached 108.5), 1994, and 2007. The rule change made in 2006, which enforced a time limit on set shots, ensures that we will probably never again see the 123.06 goals per 100 behinds figure reached in 2000.

This was a superlative season, the lowest-scoring and fourth most inaccurate of the twenty-five-minute quarter era. Part of this is due to fluctuations in weather conditions, but the downward trend in scoring rates is also due to the way the modern game is played. Teams have mastered the art of defence, applying ferocious pressure when not in possession of the ball. Conceding fewer goals, they need to score fewer goals to win.

Paul Roos and Ross Lyon are the apostles of the new model football, and it arguably reached its apotheosis in the 2013 preliminary final in which Lyon’s Dockers swarmed any Sydney player in possession, and produced a twenty-seven-minute period in which i biancorossi failed to get the ball into their offensive fifty-metre arc. With thirty-six fit bodies huddling around the ball (when they’re not coming on and off the interchange bench), modern football can degenerate into a stop-start series of rolling mauls and ball-ups, but it makes for much more tactically intelligent football than the twenty-five-goals-apiece shoot-outs fondly remembered by nostalgics who preferred the way the game was played ‘back in my day’.

Football is not unique in this regard. Soccer goes through the same cycle, from the catenaccio of Helenio Herrera’s Inter Milan to the totaalvoetbal of Rinus Michels’ Ajax, and from the tiki-taka of Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona to the low-possession, reactive style of Inter and Chelsea under José Mourinho. Roos and Lyon are merely the eighteen-man code’s versions of Marcelo Bielsa, whose teams place great emphasis on retrieving the ball high up the pitch when not in possession, and then moving contested ball directly towards the goal. Bielsa has had success with this style in recent seasons at Athletic Bilbao, and is now working his magic at Olympique Marseille. (But the bielsista style affects the two codes differently: it increases scoring rates in soccer while helping to decrease them in football.)

So, congratulations to the league and the clubs for putting on such a great season of football – the best, in my opinion, since the 1990s. All eighteen clubs played to win this year (even Melbourne!) and the fact that three teams tied on points for the minor premiership demonstrates the evenness of the competition.