Every September, Australian Football League (AFL) fans are told the same thing: the grand final is the hardest game of the year – faster, fiercer and more brutal than the matches that came before it.
Authors
- Joel Garrett
Lecturer in Exercise Science and Physiology, Griffith University
- Hunter Bennett
Lecturer in Exercise Science, Adelaide University
It is something commentators, players and footy followers often repeat, but nobody checks.
So, we checked, ahead of this Saturday’s decider between Fremantle and Brisbane .
Using the AFL’s own match statistics and the historical records at AFL Tables , we built a dataset of all 5,111 games played between 2000 and 2025, to investigate statistics that pointed to harder, tougher contests – things like tackles and contested possessions.
What changes during the finals?
The first surprise is there are slightly fewer disposals (kicks and hand passes) in finals, compared to regular games. Teams average 347.5 disposals in a final compared to 361.5 in a regular game, and almost all of that drop is handballs, which fall from 152.5 to 140.6. Kicks barely change.
What also changes is how the ball is won.
Uncontested possessions (when a player kicks or handballs in space, away from physical contact) drop from 220.3 a game to 203.2, while contested possession rates climb from 38.6% to 41.1%.
Marking follows suit: uncontested marks fall from 78.9 to 72.7 while contested marks rise from 10.6 to 11.5.
These figures point to there being less free space in finals, with more body-to-body contests as players fight to win and dispose of the ball.
There is also a slight reduction in accuracy where disposal efficiency – the share of kicks and handballs that hit their target – slips from 72.4% to 70.8%.
Which final is the hardest?
From 2000 until this year , nine finals were played each September.
Week one used to feature two elimination finals (fifth against eighth and sixth against seventh, where the loser goes home) and two qualifying finals (first against fourth and second against third, where both losers get a second chance).
This is then followed by two semifinals, two preliminary finals and the grand final.
Since 2012, the most physically contested game of the year has not been the grand final. It has been the qualifying finals. Those games average a combined 138.6 tackles, 291.4 contested possessions and 43.0% of all possessions contested. Grand finals during this period averaged 135.5 tackles, 279.1 contested possessions and 40.9% of all possessions contested.
Qualifying finals are also the lowest-scoring games of the season, averaging 152.6 combined points.
If we rank each season’s nine finals on tackles, the grand final comes in around fifth. In the past 14 seasons, it has not once been the final with the most contested possessions.
So it appears, on those statistics at least, grand finals aren’t the toughest matches.
Grand finals did not always look like this
Wind the clock back and the old cliché about the grand final being the toughest test was true, for a while.
The grand final featured the most tackles of all finals from 2009 to 2012.
Tackling in grand finals (compared to other finals) peaked between 2008 and 2013. In 2014 and 2015 that flipped sharply: there were 12.7% fewer tackles compared to other finals, and it has not come close to that earlier peak since.
If you break these seasons into five-year windows, an interesting story appears.
The tackle count in grand finals climbed from 96.8 in 2000-2005 to 149.5 in 2006-2010, then held there through 2011-2015 (148.4) and 2016-2020 (148.0), before falling to 118.8 in the most recent five years.
The contested possession rate has fallen with it, from 43.1% in 2016-2020 to 38.9% now – the lowest of any five-year window in 26 seasons. Grand finals have not been top for contested possessions in finals since 2011.
The other finals moved differently.
There were 93.7 combined tackles a game in 2000-2005, 115.1 in 2006-2010, 129.6 in 2011-2015, 135.0 in 2016-2020, then 128.0 in the most recent five years.
In the past five years, the other finals have had more tackles (128.0 to 118.8) and more contested possessions (280.5 to 265.4) than the grand final, with the qualifying final alone still the toughest final.
Are they close games?
For a fixture built on drama, grand finals are surprisingly one-sided, with the average margin of 38.4 points being larger than any other round of football, finals or regular games.
A third of them have been decided by 50 points or more, compared with 23.1% of other finals and 24.8% of home-and-away games.
Interestingly, they tend to start close. Three-quarters of the way through a decider, the margin sits at 26.9 points, tighter than an average home-and-away match (27.7) and about the same as the other finals rounds (27.1).
Then it blows out. The margin grows by 11.4 points in the final quarter alone, against just 4.5 in every other finals round and 6.5 in home-and-away football. The team ahead at three-quarter time goes on to win 92.6% of grand finals, compared with 84.6% of other finals and 86.7% of home-and-away games.
Grand finals seem to be decided in the third quarter and buried in the fourth.
The biggest game of the year – just not the toughest
A grand final is unmistakably tighter and more contested than the regular season. But it doesn’t appear to be the hardest game of the year, and has not been for more than a decade.
There is one caveat worth making. This is based on a handful of counting statistics, not a controlled experiment.
Tackles and contested possessions are a crude proxy for how hard a game feels, and a single grand final can swing the picture. Treat it as a look at trends rather than a definitive verdict.
Of course, the grand final is still the biggest game of the year. It may no longer be the toughest one – but that probably says less about the decider itself than about how hard the rest of September has become.
