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West Coast2026-09-13The Bulldogs have reportedly put nine years and up to $2 million a season in front of Zak Butters. Set that money against what he produced across 2025 and 2026 and you can see exactly what they are paying for — the ball out of the stoppage, at a price the rest of the market can't match.
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He is, in practical terms, untaggable on the ball: nobody has kept him away from it. But the ball he wins isn't always the ball that hurts you — and five teams have found the difference.
Not voted by umpires — measured in every game. Ranked by contribution across all 175 matches so far, three points to the best player on the ground each week. Nick Daicos leads it, two clear; the round-by-round and club tables tell the rest.
The best game in this week's crop of newest players wasn't a forward's bag or a midfielder's ball-count — it was a half-back's number that would have held its own against the 300-gamers.
The single best game of the round belongs to a man who didn't make the eighteen — and the reason he's out is a better story than any name that's in.
After Round 20 the medicare ladder has two clubs beyond 200 estimated games for the first time — Port Adelaide on 240 and Essendon on 200 — while Richmond had three seasons end in a single week and the competition's bill grew by roughly 150 games, to an estimated 2,296. Fifty seasons have now ended league-wide. Every figure is a modelled estimate, not an official club count.
Two new games, four more clubs, eleven finals where there were nine. It is a genuinely new door — and the record of every league that has ever cut one, the AFL's own included, is remarkably consistent about what sits on the other side of it. Only the 2016 Western Bulldogs have ever come through this deep and finished the year holding the cup.
Isaac Heeney is the highest-rated player in the competition this season. Chad Warner leads the AFL for goal assists. Nick Blakey has moved more of the ball than all but four players in the game. They are five of twenty-three — and close to three of every ten disposals Sydney have had all year. What makes this unusual is not the size of the hole. It is the shape of it.
After Round 23 the season-ending register climbs from 74 to 80: eleven players ruled out for the rest of the home-and-away season this week, five earlier cases returned to a timeline. Conor Nash's neck is Hawthorn's first lost season of 2026; Toby Conway comes off the register and restores Geelong's. Port Adelaide still lead the medicare ladder on an estimated 275 games of a league bill near 2,906 — up 287 in a single week. And a first for the desk: the whole casualty list joined to the Boot Room, brand by brand and boot by boot. Every figure is a modelled estimate, not an official club count.
Nine seasons of ratings, 1,767 qualified player-seasons, two completely different ways to get better — and football only has a word for one of them. The leap is the biggest single-season rise ever measured here. The climb is bigger, rarer, and nobody announces it.
After Round 22 the season-ending ledger jumps from 64 to 74: five players ruled out for the rest of the home-and-away season this week — Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera and Mason Wood at St Kilda, Will Edwards and James Rowbottom at Sydney, Tim English at the Bulldogs — and five earlier cases recovered by audit. Port Adelaide top the medicare ladder on an estimated 270 games of a league bill near 2,619. Every figure is a modelled estimate, not an official club count.
We scanned every pair of boots in the AFL — 741 players, 27 models, seven brands — and mapped them to how those players run, kick and score. Nike owns the room, adidas runs the ball hardest, and the numbers still can't tell you a boot made anyone better.