Being the manager of a team on the bottom of the ladder can feel frustrating. There are advantages to being a bottom team though. A bottom team can often take advantage of the desperation of a team trying for a premiership in a trade, and the draft is designed to be the ultimate equalizer. But how far away from a premiership is a team at any point in time. How settled does your line up need to be year after year? Do you need a career player in their 12th season at a club like Tom Hawkins at Natas / Nexus or even a Nic Natinui in his 13th season at the Marvels? Or can you build a premiership winning team in a shorter period of time? Let’s find out.
To answer this question, I decided to keep it as simple as possible and look at the experience of the players in the team engraved on the trophy. I decided to limit it to the selected team that won the grand final (as opposed to the experience of the 10 players who played the most games for a team that year) to remove any subjective analysis of who “should have been selected” and also because even if your superstar that played every game of the year is injured for the grand final, well you still have to win that game. As for the definition of “experience”, rather than looking at the age or actual AFL games played of a particular player, I chose to look at how many consecutive seasons that player had been on the list of the AFR winning team in the lead up to their premiership (though this can include a player that was delisted and then picked up again by the same team), as the idea was to analyse how quickly an AFR team could turn itself around. For example, in the 2021 Super League premiership winning Major Warriors, Jack Riewoldt was in his 7th season for the Warriors even though he was in 14th season of AFL and almost certainly was on another AFR list prior to being picked up by the Warriors. I started at last year and went back to 2015 for no reason other than that seemed like a big enough sample without the possibility of venturing into the murky early years of the competition before we all knew what we were doing.
| League | OL | SL | OL | SL | OL | SL | OL | SL | OL | SL | OL | SL | OL | SL | |
| Year | 2021 | 2021 | 2020 | 2020 | 2019 | 2019 | 2018 | 2018 | 2017 | 2017 | 2016 | 2016 | 2015 | 2015 | Average |
| KF | 11 | 2 | 10 | 6 | 3 | 9 | 1 | 4 | 5 | 7 | 6 | 2 | 7 | 1 | 5.3 |
| F | 5 | 7 | 4 | 12 | 1 | 8 | 2 | 4 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 3.7 |
| C | 3 | 2 | 5 | 10 | 3 | 4 | 7 | 10 | 3 | 2 | 4 | 8 | 4 | 5 | 5.0 |
| M | 3 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 5 | 3 | 3 | 6 | 4 | 1 | 2.7 |
| M | 2 | 3 | 1 | 7 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 8 | 1 | 3 | 4 | 2 | 2.7 |
| Ro | 1 | 6 | 5 | 1 | 4 | 5 | 7 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 10 | 4 | 9 | 4.2 |
| Ta | 2 | 6 | 1 | 4 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 4 | 1 | 8 | 3 | 3 | 1 | 7 | 3.1 |
| B | 6 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 5 | 4 | 2 | 5 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 2.7 |
| KB | 1 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 5 | 2 | 1 | 10 | 11 | 3 | 10 | 4.0 |
| Ru | 4 | 6 | 3 | 11 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 6 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 6 | 3.3 |
| Average | 3.8 | 3.8 | 3.5 | 5.4 | 2.5 | 3.9 | 2.9 | 3.7 | 2.7 | 3.6 | 3.2 | 4.8 | 3.1 | 4.6 | 3.7 |
(In the above table I have put each team from the Marvel’s in italics and Natas / Nexus team have been bolded to show the links between those teams and to assist in any analysis)
Interesting things to note:
- Out of the 14 seasons analysed, The Marvels have the 3 most experienced premiership teams
- The Heroes in 2019 were the least experienced team
- Key Forward is the position with the most experienced player on average (though this is skewed by the repeat entries of Tom Hawkins) followed by Centre
- Midfield and Back are the positions with the least experienced players on average
- The “average” team has:
- 3 first year players;
- 3 players in their second and third years with the team;
- 1 player in their forth year;
- 1 in their fifth;
- 1 from the ranks of sixth and seventh years; and
- 1 player with eight or more years experience.
- Every premiership winning team had at least 2 players who were in their first year with the club.
This analysis should give everyone hope for their future premiership aspirations. If you drafted well last year and this year, then next year is the opening of your premiership window. Or in summary, if you have just 2-4 players on your list that are long term keepers, then you should be able to win a premiership within the next 3 years.
Judge’s verdict – youth is more important than experience
