One of these is the biggest single-season rise ever measured here. The other is bigger, took four times as long, and nobody announced it.
Between 2024 and 2025, Kysaiah Pickett's contribution rating went from 90.1 to 162.6. That is a rise of 72.5 in twelve months, and nothing in nine years of ratings comes near it. The middle player in the league moved +3.7 that season. Pickett moved roughly twenty times that, and he did it from a starting point that was already respectable — this was not a player climbing out of a hole. It is the single most emphatic season the engine has on file, and it earned every word written about it.
Behind him the pattern repeats with different names: Tom McDonald's +65.7 in 2018, Tom Sparrow's +62.4 in 2022, Jason Horne-Francis's +61.3 in his first year at Port Adelaide, Hugh McCluggage's +60.1 in 2019. Ten rises of 55 or more in nine seasons. They are what football means by a breakout, and they are rare enough to deserve the word.
What the leaderboard hides is where each of them started. Sparrow rose from 30.8 and finished at 93.2 — a huge move that lands him at roughly a league-average season. Sam Darcy rose from 116.6 to 171.6 — a smaller-sounding jump that ends somewhere almost nobody reaches. Same headline number, entirely different achievement. So here is the chart with the starting line left in.
Nine of these ten men climbed to somewhere between a good season and a great one. One of them, Sam Darcy, climbed to somewhere hardly anyone goes.
Now change the question. Instead of asking who rose most in one season, ask who rose in consecutive seasons — and add up the whole distance travelled. A different set of names arrives, and they have all covered more ground than Pickett's record-breaking single year.
Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera went 61.7, then 103.0, then 112.4, then 151.7. Four seasons, three rises, +90.0 in total — more than any single-season leap in the corpus. Paul Curtis went 25.7 to 110.3, a gain of 84.6. Jason Horne-Francis, who appears on both boards, kept going after his headline year and is +79.0 across the run. Ed Richards added 76.7. Noah Anderson added 76.4 over four straight rising seasons, the longest unbroken run in the group.
None of those had a season anyone called a breakout. They just never had a year that went backwards.
A rise is worth what a player keeps. So take each of the biggest leaps, wait a season, and measure how much of the gain is still standing. Twelve of the top fifteen have a following season long enough to judge — at least 15 games, the same bar used throughout.
The middle answer is 37%. Seven of the twelve gave back more than half of what they gained. One — Horne-Francis again — finished the next year higher than his leap. Exclude 2026, which is a down season across the whole competition and would flatter the case, and the middle answer becomes 44%. Either way it is well under half.
This is not a knock on any player on the list, and it is not a prediction about any of them. It is a statement about the shape of a leap: a season that far above a player's own established level usually contains something that does not repeat — a role that suited perfectly, a run of matches that fell right, a forward line that opened up. When the following season pulls some of it back, that is the ordinary behaviour of an extraordinary year, not a failure.
The strongest argument against the whole piece is regression to the mean, and it deserves stating properly. If a player has an unusually poor season, the following year will tend to look like a leap without anything actually changing about him. The starting points above show that effect is genuinely present — five of the fifteen biggest leaps began below 50, and Tom Sparrow's record-scale rise ended at 93.2, which is a solid season rather than a spectacular one. But it does not explain the top of the board. Sam Darcy leapt from 116.6, Jeremy Cameron from 112.7 and Toby Greene from 110.7 — three players already well above a good season who went up again anyway. A drop back to the middle cannot produce those.
Three figures in the brief this piece started from did not survive checking, and the corrected version is better. Max Holmes, Nick Daicos and Tristan Xerri were each described as having strung four or five consecutive rising seasons. Each has one season in the middle that dipped — Holmes in 2023, Daicos in 2024 by a tenth of a point, Xerri in 2023 — so none qualifies for an unbroken run. That is worth saying out loud rather than quietly dropping, because the dip is the actual finding: almost nobody improves in a straight line, which is exactly why the 25 who did are worth naming. Measured on total ground covered rather than an unbroken run, Holmes is the most improved player of the era — 100.2 in his first full season to 162.7 in 2025 — and the single down year in the middle takes nothing away from it.
Three things this measure cannot see. It has no 2020 season, so nobody can be measured across 2019–2021. It counts a player's average match, so a shortened or interrupted year is judged on what he did in the games he played, not on the games he missed. And it does not know why anyone improved — a new role, a new coach, a body that finally held together and a genuine step up in ability all look identical from here.
Which brings us to 2026, and a piece of context that changes how this year's improvers should be read. Through Round 22 the middle qualified player rates 79.2, against 84.6 at the same measure last season. The middle player's year-on-year move is −4.4, the lowest of any season on file, and only 42% of qualified players have improved at all. Whatever the reason — and the engine does not claim to know it — the competition as a whole is rating lower than it did.
That makes this season's risers more impressive rather than less. Karl Worner has gone from 58.6 to 101.7, a rise of 43.1 and the largest in the league. Harley Reid, at 21, has gone from 89.7 to 132.0 — up 42.3, and the second-biggest move in a year where nearly three in five players went backwards. Tom Sparrow, who owns the third-biggest single season ever recorded here, is third again on 110.8.
| The biggest climbs · consecutive rising seasons | From | To | Gain |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera STK · 3 straight | 61.7 | 151.7 | +90.0 |
| Paul Curtis NMFC · 3 straight | 25.7 | 110.3 | +84.6 |
| Jason Horne-Francis PA · 3 straight | 47.7 | 126.8 | +79.0 |
| Ed Richards WB · 3 straight | 86.5 | 163.2 | +76.7 |
| Noah Anderson GC · 4 straight | 76.9 | 153.3 | +76.4 |
| Gryan Miers GEEL · 4 straight | 56.9 | 113.4 | +56.5 |
| Matt Rowell GC · 3 straight | 82.1 | 136.1 | +54.1 |
| Isaac Heeney SYD · 3 straight | 101.5 | 153.7 | +52.2 |
The practical use of all this is that "who improved?" is really two questions, and a list only ever answers one of them.
If the question is who had the best year, the leap board answers it, and Kysaiah Pickett's 2025 is the best answer anyone has given. If the question is who is becoming a better player, the leap board is the wrong instrument, because a single season cannot separate a genuine step up from a role that flattered, a draw that opened up, or a modest previous year finding its level. Only the second season tells you which it was — and the middle answer, when it arrives, is that about a third of the leap stays.
The climb board answers the second question directly, because repetition is the thing that cannot be a coincidence. Rising once can be a lot of things. Rising three years running, against different opponents in different roles with a different body each time, is much harder to explain any other way. That is why only 25 players have done it.
Both boards are honest. They are simply answering different questions, and football has historically only bothered to publish one of them.
Kysaiah Pickett's +72.5 is the biggest single-season rise this engine has ever measured, and it should be talked about for as long as people argue about 2025. Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera's +90.0 is larger, took three years to assemble, and arrived without a single week that demanded a headline. Karl Worner and Harley Reid are doing something harder still — rising in a season where nearly three in five players are not.
What the numbers support is that the leap and the climb are different events with different odds attached. What they do not settle is which one you would rather have in your side. That part is yours.